The Union Cabinet is likely to take a decision on the tobacco industry’s request to push the deadline for display of a set of pictorial warnings on packets of cigarettes and other tobacco products.
The health ministry approached the Cabinet for a direction to seek clarity about the demands being made by other ministries, who were facing the brunt of decrease in tobacco production in the country, official sources said today.
There are two existing pictorial warnings, scorpion and damaged lungs, while a new and stricter one — a cancer patient’s mouth — was to be depicted from December 1.
Tobacco companies had made representations to the health ministry, requesting to push the deadline for the implementation of ‘mouth cancer’ warnings to at least two-three years.
