Compliance with the provisions related to higher educational institutes of anti-tobacco/smoking law by institutes of national importance in India.

Abstract

India formulated an anti-tobacco and anti-smoking law in 2003 in response to its resolutions in the United Nations bodies. This law has been detailed subsequently to make it focussed on educational institutions, which are supposed to perform on-ground action. The first is to put up signboards prohibiting the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products within 100 yards, the second is prohibiting smoking within the campus, and the third is implementing the law and collecting fines from the offenders. The focus of this paper is on Indias premier educational institutions called the Institutions of National Importance by the Indian legislature. These are Indias public institutions which have a focus of the government in making them high quality. The paper checked for the compliance of the Indian anti-smoking and anti-tobacco laws in 79 of these institutions. The Right to Information Act, 2005, Indias transparency law, was used to file applications for information, and certified information from the institutions was collected and reported. The results show an overall weak compliance with the law. Indias health regulators and educational watchdogs must implement anti-smoking and anti-tobacco laws strictly in Indian educational institutions.

Decentralisation of the Compliance of Anti-tobacco Law in India: The Case of Higher Educational Institutions in New Delhi, India

“…But covering four universities, all Delhi government-run colleges of the Delhi University provide a fairly good representation of higher educational institutions in New Delhi. The author has performed a separate study for the colleges run by the Central Government in India, which also includes the centrally run colleges in New Delhi like the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi [ 9 ].…”

“…The aim of this study is to find the decentralised implementation of the COTPA Act 2003 and its rules by educational institutions in New Delhi. This compliance has been checked for national-level institutes by the same author [9], but the compliance on the level of Delhi, with respect to fine collection and placement of indoor posters, has not been covered fully by any other study from India or from the world for that matter. The author, in an earlier study, has looked for the checking of the signboard compliance prohibiting the sale of tobacco products within 100 yards of the vicinity but has found non-universal compliance with the signboard requirement [10].…”