BENGALURU: Faced with public outrage over the delay in notifying bigger health warnings on tobacco products and statements of some BJP members, including a “beedi baron”, suggesting there is little evidence of a link between tobacco consumption and occurance of cancer, finance minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday said the Centre would take a “measured and responsible” decision on the issue.According to sources, Modi had endorsed larger pictorial warnings on tobacco products and asked Union health minister J P Nadda to appoint a committee to look into the matter . He also discussed the issue of conflict of interest in the parliamentary committee on tobacco legislation and reportedly wanted such MPs to be removed from the panel.Jaitley did not directly comment on the issue of the MPs’ ouster, but said, “There is a system in Parliament and it has also been written in the rules of procedures.”Nadda added, “As far as appointments (to the parliamentary panel) and conflict of interest is concerned, the health ministry has no role to play as they are appointed by Parliament.”Finance minister Arun Jaitley made it clear hat the central government’s decision on increasing the size of health warnings on tobacco products would not be based on opinions of individuals.Asserting that a “multi-pronged” approach to discourage tobacco use was needed, Jaitley said, “Individuals can give individual opinions, but the government takes a measured and responsible decisions.“Therefore in the last two months and in my two budgets, I have certainly reflected what is the collective thinking of the government.”“The parliamentary committee on subordinate legislation is considering the matter. We will request them to give their report at the earliest so that the decision can be implemented,” Union health minister Jagat Prakash Nadda said.The Prime Minister’s suggestion for bigger pictorial warnings on cigarette packets came after the parliamentary committee said that the deadline for implementing it should be extended as there were no credible Indian studies to correlate the consumption of tobacco with occurence of cancer.BJP MPs Shyam Charan Gupta, a beedi baron, and Dilip Gandhi — Gupta is a member of the parliamentary committee while Gandhi is the panel’s chairman — and Ram Prasad Sarmah had kicked up a controversy by saying that there was no link between cancer and smoking. Sarmah even went on to claim that it had “medicinal value”.India will record 1.5 million tobacco-related deaths annually by 2020, according to estimates by the International Tobacco Control Project.