E-cigarette promoters' body counters health ministry's arguments

Ahead of the first meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare on Friday, an umbrella body of traders promoting electronic cigarettes and similar devices, shared with it a counter to the health ministry's key arguments to ban alternative smoking devices.

Trade Representatives of ENDS (TRENDS) sent a representation along with relevant documents to Ram Gopal Yadav, chairman of the parliamentary panel, and 30 other members.

The committee is expected to discuss the government's recent decision to bring in an ordinance to ban e-cigarettes in their meeting tomorrow, sources said.

TRENDS has urged the committee members to consider all evidence and ground realities, which, it claimed, will "sooner or later" make it difficult for the government to defend the ban.

Praveen Rikhy, convenor of TRENDS, said, "We are deeply concerned with a multitude of erroneous statements, misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Indian and global data, especially that from the US, from our health minister to justify the ban of e-cigarettes in India.

"It is unprecedented that US sales and user data are being quoted to enforce a ban on a category with negligible presence in the country, a category that is universally acknowledged to be less harmful than all other tobacco products with extremely high user base in India, through scare mongering."