Health activists say they will also oppose cigarette manufacturers’ plans to introduce smaller packets.The union health ministry on Tuesday recommended a ban on the sale of unpackaged cigarettes to deter smokers from graduating to buying full packs. Although the sale of unpacked or loose cigarettes is customary at pavement paan shops and small roadside outlets, the anti-tobacco lobby stressed that the government making its stance explicit will help curb the practice.More than 70 percent of cigarettes sold in India are loose.Meanwhile, it appeared the country’s tobacco majors had contingency plans in place. Several paan shop vendors told Mumbai Mirror that their suppliers had informed them of the impending announcement and assured them that “new cigarette packets containing fewer sticks would become available soon”.This strategy could be stymied by plans by the anti-tobacco contingent, who said they were in the process of pressuring the government to amend the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 2003 or COTPA act to deter tobacco companies from manufacturing smaller packs.Activists included a clause in the draft amendment which makes it compulsory for tobacco companies to manufacture packs of 10 and 20 sticks. “Our recommendation already says that size of packet cannot be reduced,” said Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi, head and neck surgeon at the country’s premier cancer treatment facility, Tata Memorial Hospital, who was part of a government-appointed seven-member committee constituted to plug loopholes in the COPTA act. The amendment however will take more than a year to be implemented, he added.The surgeon said Section 7 of the COTPA act states that tobacco and tobacco products cannot be sold without appropriate warning. “A loose cigarette obviously does not carry a pictorial or a written warning. Therefore, sale of loose cigarettes was always banned but never implemented anywhere in the country,” said Dr Chaturvedi.In July, former health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan created the committee to examine holes in the act. “One of the loopholes that we observed was the lack of implementation of ban on sale of loose cigarettes and we recommended that it needs to be spelt out better,” said Chaturvedi.As word of the government’s recommendation became public, street side vendors said an alternative course of action was being pursued by tobacco companies. “People from the company had informed us long ago that new cigarette packets containing fewer sticks would be launched soon,” said vendor Dharma Soni, who has had a shop at Fort for 19 years. According to Soni, he had panicked when he first learnt that loose cigarettes would be banned. “In a day, Rs 900 out of every Rs 1,000 I earn is from selling loose sticks. A majority of youngsters who smoke are college goers or newly employed. They cannot afford to buy whole packs,” said Soni.Another vendor, Ajit Kumar, who operates a stall near CST said that his business would be crippled by the ban. “But there is no way to implement this. We can simply open the packets and sell like we do now,” he said.The country’s largest cigarette manufacturer, Indian Tobacco Company (ITC), declined to offer a reaction. “We do not comment on market speculation,” a spokesperson said.The financial services corporation Morgan Stanley told Reuters that the proposed ban was a “clear sentiment negative” for ITC, although implementing it would be difficult. Cigarette companies could introduce smaller pack sizes to cushion the impact of the proposed policy change, it said.On Tuesday, the new health minister J P Nadda replied to a question from Rajya Sabha stating that the ministry had accepted the recommendations of the committee called for “prohibition on sale of loose or single stick of cigarette, increasing the minimum legal age for sale of tobacco products, increasing the fine or penalty amounts for violation of certain provisions of the Act as well as making such offences cognizable”.