Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Have you been to Bengaluru? Or Mumbai? The multitude of tea/paan shops lining the roads, and people smoking behind/around them, were an inescapable sight, I’m sure. 

But did you know that the sale of loose cigarettes is banned in these cities? 

No? 

Well, I don’t blame you. Because I didn’t either, and I live in one of them and have spent a lot of time in the other. In fact, I did not know this until a few days ago, when news broke that a standing committee of Parliament has recommended that the Union government impose a nation-wide ban on loose cigarette sales. If the government acts on it, such a ban could be announced as early as the next Budget session in February. 

The reason is self-evident, of course. Cigarettes are a lot more affordable when they are sold in single sticks (loose) than when sold only in packs. And this is affecting the tobacco control campaign being run by the government. 

In fact, a large majority of cigarettes sold in India—upwards of 70%—are sold in loose, a few sticks at a time. So you’d think that news of such a ban would result in an immediate reaction in the stock prices of the largest cigarette sellers in the country. 

But you’d be wrong. Here’s a chart of ITC Ltd’s stock prices over the past week:

Investors, it seems, don’t find such a ban a very alarming prospect, and analysts remain pretty bullish on the cigarette-maker’s prospects. That’s because except for the nation-wide nature of this fresh proposal, it’s hardly a new thing. Multiple states such as Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka have already done this—the latter as far back as 2017. 

And their bans have proven as ineffective in the long-term as the government’s ban on public smoking way back in 2004. (A walk down pretty much any street in India will show you how well that is working.)

So I spoke to a few people in the industry and academia to get a sense of what they think a nation-wide ban would bring, and its effectiveness (or lack thereof). 

A bridge too far?

First things first, I may have made such bans sound completely pointless so far, but that’s not the case. Especially for a nation-wide programme pushed out and promoted by the Union government. It will likely result in a short and intense increase in awareness and will serve as an essential cog in building a public narrative against smoking.