India cigarette firms stop production over health warnings

India's top two cigarette makers on Friday said they had stopped production because of a lack of clarity over printing pictorial health warnings on tobacco packs.

The government has ruled that all tobacco and cigarette manufacturing firms must carry explicit pictures of the harmful effects of smoking on their products from December 1, as part of efforts to stub out the habit.

ITC, India's leading cigarette maker, and its main rival Godfrey Philips India have halted manufacturing at all their plants, officials at both firms told AFP, because they do not know what pictures they are required to print.

"We cannot produce cigarette packets until we do know what to print on them," an ITC spokesman said from the company's Kolkata headquarters.

India's tobacco industry is 85 percent made up of cheap, rolled-up tobacco leaves (beedis) and chewing tobacco (gutka), with the rest made up of pre-packaged cigarettes.

The industry is set to discuss the issue with the health ministry in the coming days.

The stoppage is unlikely to have any immediate impact on the availability of cigarettes and other tobacco products or on prices, analysts said.

Anti-tobacco campaigners have called for explicit pictures, including photos of diseased lungs and gums, to be printed on packets, to deter people from taking up smoking or to persuade them to kick the habit.

India is the world's second-largest producer and consumer of tobacco behind China, according to the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation. An estimated 241 million people in India use tobacco in some form.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine published in February 2008 estimated that one in 10 deaths in India from 2010 onwards would be smoking-related.

Tobacco use kills a million Indians every year, according to the Cancer Foundation of India.

With concern among anti-tobacco campaigners about the increasing risks of smoking in developing countries, the Indian government has called for a raft of warning symbols to be carried, including scorpions and skulls and crossbones.

Similar pictorial warnings have been introduced in a number of countries.

In October 2008, India widened an existing, but poorly enforced ban on smoking in public places and prohibited the sale of tobacco products near schools and hospitals - but the regulations are still flouted in many places.

sal/phz/je