'Parliamentary panel members should declare conflict of interest'

Amid a controversy over the presence of a beedi baron on a parliamentary panel on tobacco, Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu on Monday said members of such groupings should always declare their conflicts of interest.

"Anybody who has got a conflict of interest, as per parliament rules is supposed to declare the conflict of interest, if any. And then the committee and the parliament takes care of it," Naidu told media persons here.

The union minister, however, remained silent on whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi had directed him to ensure that MPs with conflict of interest are not there in parliamentary panels on their respective subjects.

"Parliamentary issues cannot be discussed here like this. The committees will do their work as per rules and regulations and they will submit the report to parliament, and parliament will take a view. From outside, I do not want to say anything," he said.

A controversy had broken out when beedi baron Shyam Charan Gupta, a BJP MP from Allahabad, claimed that there was no evidence to prove that tobacco caused cancer.

Gupta is a member of the parliamentary panel on subordinate legislation, which was discussing 85 percent pictorial warning on tobacco products.

The health minister has kept in abeyance the decision to increase the size of pictorial warnings from 40 percent to 85 percent of the area of a packet of tobacco product.

Meanwhile, the committee on subordinate legislation, met here on Monday afternoon at the Parliament House.

However, sources said that tobacco was not discussed and Gupta was not present in the meeting.

Opposition Congress party also slammed the government saying it was pursuing a policy of propagating and promoting the tobacco lobby in India.

"The Congress party is forced to wonder, if public health was a negotiable instrument where Prime Minister Narender Modi could strike a deal of 20 percent by indulging in give and take," Congress's chairperson of the media cell Randeep Singh Surjewala said.

He said the move by the committee on subordinate legislation to examine the decision of increasing the size of pictorial warnings was highly unusual because the committee ordinarily examines rules after they have been implemented and not as a preemptive step.