50 Pct Cigarette Price Hike Can Avoid 40 Lakh Deaths in India

Bangalore: Increasing cigarette prices by 50 percent can help shun over 40 lakh tobacco related deaths in India, says a report released by multilateral funding agency Asian Development Bank.

As per the report "A 50 percent price increase in cigarettes avoids about 27 million (or 2.70 crore) tobacco-attributable deaths, most of which are in the two most populous countries in the world. China would avoid nearly 20 million tobacco deaths and India over 4 million tobacco deaths," as reported by PTI.

According to the report, China, India, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam in Asia are among the top five of the 15 tobacco using countries that account for two-third of the world tobacco consumption.

For India, it said that 50 percent rise in cigarette prices correspond to increase of 70-122 percent rise in tax increase.

While, for each of the five most tobacco consuming countries in Asia, "increasing taxes on cigarettes would result in substantially fewer long-term smokers and a reduction in premature deaths from tobacco-related diseases, while increasing tax revenues," as reported by PTI.

It was noted that in India bidi is the most common type of smoked tobacco. It remains largely untaxed and their taxation strategies differ from the established patterns of taxation of cigarettes, which are administratively easier to tax than are bidis or other types of tobacco.

The report said "Moreover, cigarette smoking is steadily displacing bidi smoking in India. Thus, it makes sense for governments to focus on taxation strategies for cigarettes while expanding efforts to tax tobacco products more broadly."  The poorest socioeconomic groups in every country bear only a relatively small part of the extra tax burdens, but reap a huge proportion of the health benefits of reduced smoking.