Killing softly with beedis

Dear Pranab Mukherjee, 

You have a big budget problem. Your fiscal deficit is huge, but you cannot easily increase taxes or cut spending during a recession. One easy way out will be to raise taxes yet again on cigarettes. Tobacco causes cancer, so every tax increase can be portrayed as a life-saving measure. 

Yet, this is rank hypocrisy. Indians consume an estimated one trillion beedis per year, against only 106 billion cigarettes. So, taxes on cigarettes leave out 90% of smokers. You must equalise taxes on beedis and cigarettes. If you equalise at the rate for non-filter micro cigarettes, you will get an additional Rs 15,000 crore per year. And if you equate at the standard filter cigarette rate, you will get an additional Rs 80,000 crore a year. A bonanza!.....

......Dr Prabhat Jha of Toronto University estimates that 930,000 Indians will die in 2010 of tobacco-related causes (respiratory, vascular and neoplastic). Deaths from these causes are increased two to three times by smoking. 

Dr Jha says that smoking even a few beedis per day is harmful. Nicotine is addictive, but mildly so: people give up smoking when high cost and social inconvenience provide proper incentives. In the US and Europe, 30% of all smokers have given up the habit. But in India only 2% of beedi smokers ever give it up, because costs and social pressures are low. 

The beedi industry employs millions. Yet, Pranab babu, can you with a straight face justify employing millions in order to kill millions of others, slowly and painfully? If indeed you regard labour-intensive killing as an industry to be encouraged with concessional taxation, please bring Dawood Ibrahim back to India and make him an adviser in the Ministry of Industrial Development. He knows a thing or two about labour-intensive ways of killing people slowly with lots of pain......

Incisive article by Swaminathan Aiyer .