The proposed bill will boost the illegal cigarette trade in India and will severely impact the demand for homegrown tobacco
Federation of All India Farmer Associations (FAIFA), a non-profit organization representing the cause of millions of farmers and farmworkers of commercial crops across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Gujarat, etc., has appealed to PM Narendra Modi to recall the COTPA Amendment Bill as it will be a death knell for Indian FCV tobacco farmers.
The proposed Amendment Bill, 2020 will provide huge boost to the ever-growing illicit cigarette business in India and will adversely impact the legal cigarette trade. As a result, there will be a drastic drop of demand for tobacco grown by Indian farmers and they will lose their only source of livelihood. FAIFA has submitted its appeal to various concerned Ministries such as the PMO, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Ministry of Labour etc.
In the last few years, the Government has imposed harsh tobacco regulations such as increasing the size of pictorial warnings, imposing punitive taxation on Cigarettes with the tax burden more than trebling since 2012- 13, and has even withdrawn export benefits. Presently, India has become the 4th largest and fastest-growing illicit cigarette market in the world with illicit cigarettes representing 1/4th of the cigarette market.
In the last one-and-a-half-decade illicit cigarette market in India has doubled from a level of 13.5 billion sticks in 2006 to 28 billion sticks in 2019. Illegal cigarettes do not use locally grown tobaccos and hence, an increase in illegal trade impacts the livelihood of tobacco farmers in the country as demand for domestic tobaccos reduces further.
