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Goa body hails Kerala's anti-smoke move, to launch national drive

Sandesh Prabhudesai in Panaji

The beedi (leaf-rolled country cigarettes) workers as well as tobacco growers should find alternate avenues of earnings, feels the National Organisation for Tobacco Eradication in Goa. NOTE has welcomed the Kerala high court's landmark judgement banning smoking in public places.

In fact, NOTE is planning to file similar kind of public interest petitions in all the high courts as well as the Supreme Court. The Kerala high court has banned smoking in public places, ranging from educational institutes and hospitals to shops, restaurants and commercial establishments.

Dr Sharad Vaidya, Goa-based national chairman of NOTE, feels very little for the thousands of workers who may lose their job in beedi factories since the production would reduce tremendously. "Let them starve or readjust to changes taking place in the world thanks to growing health consciousness," he says.

Citing his own example as a medical practitioner, Dr Vaidya argues that he cannot demand non-eradication of deadly diseases like plague or malaria because it could make him jobless. He seems concerned about 2,500 people dying every day in India on an average due to unprecedented epidemic of tobacco-related diseases.

NOTE has strongly protested the stand taken by the Confederation of Human Rights Organisation, requesting the Kerala government to put in abeyance the ban and give smokers time to quit the habit. "They are free to smoke in privacy without being fined," he points out.

Dr Vaidya appears pained at the inhuman stand adopted by the CHRO when it should have kept in mind the plight of non-smokers whose rights have been clamped upon due to smoking in public places. "The world has changed, but we have not," he quips.

Though he totally disagrees that beedi workers in Kerala are uneducated and would have no place to shift over if made jobless, the NOTE chairman says the Kerala government should take responsibility of supporting them till they are provided with alternative earning.

The government is one third partner in cigarette industry while it also gives subsidy to the tobacco growers, in order to promote use of tobacco.

"Does not it become their responsibility now to rehabilitate the farmers and beedi workers?" he asks.

Such bans would also not put the tobacco farmers in trouble, says Dr Vaidya, since they could very well shift to other crop. In justification, he says the land under tobacco cultivation has reduced from 500,000 hectares to 400,000 hectares in a decade from 1984 to 1994 as research increased the yield. "No farmer died due to this," he says.

Dr Vaidya had managed to get a revolutionary legislation passed in the Goa Assembly two years ago, banning use of any tobacco product in public places. But it is still lying with the Union home ministry, travelling between Delhi and Goa seeking clarifications on minor queries.

Besides planning to file PIL in the Goa bench of Bombay high court, he has also announced that NOTE will launch countrywide awareness campaign in support of the Kerala high court judgement, and encourage citizens to file such PIL in all the states.

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