But before that, an inter-ministerial meeting has been called. Slated for next week, the meeting, to be chaired by Health Secretary K B Saxena, will seek the opinion of the Agriculture, Commerce, and Finance Ministries.

This is being done in view of the far-reaching consequences the proposed ban will have - affecting the livelihood of millions of farmers as well as paan and Gutkha sellers, and countless consumers across the country.

The decision also threatens to pose a political fallout given that most of the estimated 1,000 tobacco and Gutkha companies operate from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan - all BJP-ruled states. The basis of the Health Ministry's move is a report of an expert committee set up in 1994during the tenure of then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. This committee which is now headed by Director General of Health Services (DGHS), S P Aggarwal, recently submitted the report to the government recommending a blanket ban on all chewing tobacco products. Incidentally, this committee has met only four times in the last four years.

The committee, ironically, has admitted it doesn't have conclusive evidence to link chewing tobacco with oral cancer.

According to the minutes of its last meeting in September '97 made available to The Indian Express: ``It was brought out that epidemiological studies linking oral cancer with the use of paan masala containing tobacco are currently not available...since the habit of chewing paan masala containing tobacco is of recent origin and the suspected oral cancer has a long incubation period, of 15 to 20 years, any epidemiological study carried out at this time would not be useful.''

The chewing tobacco lobby -- it recently formed an umbrella association calledZafrani Zarda Manufacturers Association -- debunks this. Tobacco chewing, points out association secretary Ashok Aggarwal, is not of recent origin but has been ``on since the Mughal times, and even before. Certainly, tests could have been carried out long ago.''

Aggarwal alleges that the government's move is at the behest of the cigarette manufacturers' lobby who want to capture new markets. ``There is evidence to show that cigarettes cause cancer. But the cigarette lobby is more powerful, they are untouched.''

The committee's report has drawn its conclusions on the adverse affects of consumption of chewing tobacco and Gutkha based on studies conducted by three institutions : National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad; Regional Cancer Institute, Trivandrum in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, USA; Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Calcutta. The committee, constituted to go into the `use of chewing tobacco in paan masala and Gutkha and its effect on public health', reports there has beena ``tremendous growth'' in the chewing tobacco industry from Rs 200 crore revenue in 1992 to well over Rs 1,000 crore in 1997.