<p>The Supreme Court<br></p>

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday surprised many by asking whether there was conclusive proof to say that smoking cigarettes caused cancer.

Hearing a petition seeking to make cigarette packets colourless to render them visually unattractive, a bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and U U Lalit asked counsel Aishwarya Bhati whether it was possible to say with certainty that cigarette smoking caused cancer.

"How do you prove it? There are people who are non-smokers who have contracted cancer. And there are people who are smokers yet have lived healthy till the end," the bench said before seeking the Centre's response to the petition filed by an Allahabad-based advocate addicted to 'gutka' and smoking, who is battling tongue and mouth cancer in a Mumbai hospital.

The advocate, 66-year-old Umesh Narain Sharma, said Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project estimated that by 2020, smoking and tobacco use could cause 1.5 million deaths.

"There is high prevalence of tobacco use among children and youth in India. As per Global Adult Tobacco Survey-India conducted in the age group of 15 years and above, over 35% (almost 28 crore) of adult population consumes tobacco in some form or the other and majority of them are illiterate or semi-literate," he said. " Total cost attributable to tobacco use, among all diseases in India in the year 2011, amounted to Rs 104,500 crore, which was 1.16% of the GDP. This was 12% more than the combined state and central governments' expenditures on health in 2011-12," he said.

The petitioner added, "At present, tobacco products are packed in very attractive packaging to entice youth to take up tobacco consumption. Such packaging also makes a person ignore the pictorial health warnings. To counter this, the industry must be asked to resort to plain packaging prohibiting brand colours, logos, graphics on tobacco packets. Plain packaging with prominent pictorial and statutory health warnings would go a long way in deterring people from buying tobacco products," he said.

