PANJIM: The National Organisation for Tobacco Eradication (NOTE) has urged Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to ban all kinds of tobacco products in phases citing its negative impact on the health of the consumer as well as families.
“While we appreciate this news to ban e-cigarettes, we urge you to go a little further and ban all forms of tobacco itself since tobacco is harmful and injurious to health leading to the dreaded disease of cancer leading to thousands of deaths and impacting negatively thousands of families,” NOTE General Secretary Dr Shekhar Salkar said in a letter to the minister.
He also stated that tobacco has become an industry which employs thousands of people and thousands of families are fed by the income generated, hence it should be banned in phase manner.
“It’s not possible at one go as thousands of farmers are dependent on this cash crop and lots of employment is generated by this industry. Therefore it is not easy to ban it immediately but it can be done in a phased manner and we strongly feel that it should be and can be completely banned by the year 2050,” he said.
