Production halt after warning chaos

The Tobacco Institute of India (TII), which represents India’s major cigarette manufacturers, said on Friday that its members had decided to halt their manufacturing operations because of a government requirement to include graphic warnings covering 85 percent of the front and back surfaces of packs, according to a DNA India story.

While the manufacturers are angry about the size of the warnings, the factory shut downs, which will effect ITC, Godfrey Philips and VST, were probably inevitable given the lack of clarity surrounding the introduction of the new warnings and the impracticality of introducing the warnings in the timeframe given.

A proposal to increase the size of warnings from 40 percent to 85 percent was put before a parliamentary committee which recommended last month that, instead, the warnings should be set at 50 percent.

The government, however, decided at the end of March to go ahead with its requirement for 85 percent warnings to be included as from April 1.

ITC, India’s dominant cigarette manufacturer, said on Saturday that it was halting production at its cigarette factories because it was not ready to print the bigger, graphic warnings on its cigarette packs. The company said that its factories would be shut till clarity emerged on the matter.

ITC said that because the question of the legality of the new warnings had been and continued to be pending before the courts, it had not committed to investing substantial resources in creating the large number of printing cylinders and other tools necessary for a change to the warnings. The implementation of health-warning changes was an elaborate process entailing months of preparation and involving substantial costs.

‘Since the matter of new health warning was under the Parliamentary Committee’s consideration, and the government had itself held out that it would await the committee’s report, the industry was led to believe that the government would re-notify new health warnings after considering the committee’s recommendations,’ the company said.