Indian economist questions the government’s decision to ban e-cigarettes

• Shamika Ravi, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council, said the decision didn’t have health or fiscal grounds.
• Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the total ban on e-cigarettes in India.
• However, India is not alone, globally flavoured e-cigarettes have been facing a ban.

The Indian government’s decision to ban e-cigarettes has brought out a very obvious question from others, “why not ban or tax cigarettes?”

But the surprise came when one of the members from the Prime Minister’s Economic Council Shamika Ravi too questioned the move. She took to Twitter to ask why was there a ban placed on e-cigarettes when the government could have taxed it heavily.


She even asked for new evidence on vaping versus smoking in a follow up tweet.

She’s not alone, scores of Twitter users were perplexed about why there was a ban on e-cigarettes when the tobacco products are the real problem.


Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the ban during a cabinet briefing. "Production, manufacturing, import, export, transport, sale,distribution, storage and advertisements related to e-cigarettes are all banned in India. It is banned in all these nine forms,” she said.

A large number of e-cigarette models are available in the market today, even though none of them are produced in India.

However, the ban on e-cigarettes is actually a global phenomenon. The United States of America, which is also home to one of the biggest e-cigarette companies Juul, has also been advocating ban on flavoured e-cigarettes as it is encouraging the youth to smoke.

New York became one of the first states in the US to ban flavoured e-cigarettes and was followed by Michigan.