50,000 Delhiites Have Been Fined For Smoking In Public. Are You One Of Them?

If public smoking is a crime, then all Delhiites are criminals.

Pic Credits: Instagram@kalpajit_paul_official

You know how we every once in a while we come across a law that doesn’t make any practical sense at all but still dominates our legal system. Delhiites found themselves at the mercy of one such law last year when around 50000 people in the city were penalised for public smoking under the provision made under Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA). This is the highest number of people charged under the law ever since it was first introduced in 2003 and left the violators dumbfounded as the pollution level in the city is so high that practically anybody living here must be considered a smoker.

Pic Credits: Commons.wikimedia

Delhi Police has been pushing for more stringent execution of anti-smoking laws in Delhi ever since last year. As part of this campaign, one police station in the city is tasked with conducting an anti-smoking drive where cops patrol prominent public spaces in their beat to penalise public smokers. The data collected from the drive shows that out of the 50,000 people penalised for public smoking, most violators were aged between 20 to 30 years; and south-east Delhi topped the area distribution of challans with over 10,000 violators. Women constituted 30 percent of the total violators.

While Delhi police is actively fining people for public smoking, recent pollution reports indicate that even breathing Delhi’s hazardous air amounts to involuntarily smoking about ten cigarettes a day. This basically means that everybody living in Delhi is wittingly or unwittingly a chain smoker and when everybody is smoking, what harm can public smoking really do to people’s health that is already not being done?