Siddhartha Mishra |The News Minute| December 24, 2014| 3.15 pm IST
Cigarettes are slowly turning into a luxury with taxes on the tobacco industry increased year after year in the Union Budget.
A packet of the regular Gold Flake Kings’ or Classic costs Rs 200 (for 20 cigarettes) and prices of loose sticks vary between Rs 10 and 12 depending on where you buy them.
So when a smoker comes across a cigarette packet worth Rs 50, that looks the part, and doesn’t carry any of the graphic statutory warnings on the cover, his eyes light up.
‘Win’ cigarettes, manufactured by the Hongyunhonghe Tobacco Company from China, as stated on the box, fulfill all of the above criteria.
First spotted in Goa close to three years ago by this reporter, they were soon seen in Pune and Mumbai and are now readily available in Bengaluru. ‘Win’ cigarettes are not available loose either.
The Indian cigarette market is dominated by ITC and Godfrey Phillips. ITC, which manufactures the Gold Flake, Classic and Navy Cut among a slew of other cigarette products, dominates.
On being asked if they were aware of ‘Win’ cigarettes, they said they weren’t, also declining to further speak about the issue.
Questions that first come to mind are of the paltry pricing, the lack of warning messages on the pack, and finally, regarding the quality of cigarettes produced.
According to an official from the Tobacco Board, “There are fake cigarettes, contraband and also cheap cigarettes available in the market”. “There are factories which manufacture these cigarettes and are set up under the IDRA Act 1951, which is a state government law”, he adds. “The Central government is planning on changing that”, he says while adding that “under the OGL (Open General Licence) anyone can import cigarettes”.
Local factories are known to thus manufacture cigarettes without many handicaps and are also known to make ‘fake cigarettes’ of products that have a hold on the market.
“Cigarette companies also face problems when fake cigarettes are manufactured under their name but are of inferior quality”, he says while citing problems of credibility then faced by such companies. “Since VAT on cigarettes varies with states, a black market develops”, he says while also saying that provisions in the GST bill introduced will tackle the problem.
Uniform VAT though, will not aid in contraband that comes from outside the country and there also isn’t an agency which monitors quality of cigarettes. Government orders regarding having messages citing hazards of smoking are also supposed to exist on packets in a certain format.
According to government directives to be in place by April 2015, cigarette packets are required to have warnings on packets which cover 60 per cent of the space in pictorial messages and 25 per cent with textual warnings. Cigarettes in the market currently follow the 2008 guidelines and are required to have 40 per cent pictorial warnings on the front of the packet.
A packet of ‘Win’ though, has a note on the side which simply says “Smoking is harmful to your health”.
Another note on the packet mentions the 1.0mg of nicotine and 12mg of Virginia tar, considered to be in line with the Gold Flake’s and the Navy Cut’s sold in the country.
Hongyunhonghe Tobacco from China is one of the largest tobacco companies in the world and possibly the largest in Asia. The ‘Win’ brand is not listed on their website.
For those purchasing the cigarettes, it may not be a ‘win win’ situation after all.