New Delhi, March 15: Health experts are angry at a parliamentary panel's recommendation to the government not to expand the size of pictorial warnings on tobacco packets to 85 per cent on both sides from April 1 from the current 40 per cent on one side.

The experts campaigning for larger pictorial warnings are urging the health ministry to ignore the recommendation of the committee on subordinate legislation whose members had last year questioned links between tobacco and cancer.

The committee, in a report tabled in Parliament today, has cited employment and revenues provided by the tobacco sector to argue that the size of pictorial health warnings should be increased to 50 per cent on both sides of tobacco packets.

It said representatives of the tobacco and bidi industry fear that 85 per cent size warnings would "hammer a death knell for the bidi industry and millions of people would become jobless."

"This would lead to social unrest," the committee has said, adding that the cigarette industry had expressed fears that the proposed larger pictorial warning would adversely affect trade and would lead to a rise in illicit sales.

The report has left health experts angry but not surprised.

"This committee just does not want effective health warnings to reach the public - we saw this last year when it blocked the implementation, we see it again in this report," said Prakash Gupta, an epidemiologist in Navi Mumbai who has studied tobacco-cancer links for over three decades.

The health ministry had announced its intention to introduce the 85 per cent pictorial warnings on both sides of tobacco packets from April 2015, but deferred it after the interim observations by the parliamentary committee last year.

The Voluntary Health Association of India, a non-government organisation that has been campaigning against tobacco, said in a statement today that the recommendations of the parliamentary committee are not binding on the health ministry.

Public health experts have also challenged the claim made by the cigarette industry and cited by the committee that 85 per cent warnings will increase illicit sales of cigarettes.

"Contrary to claims that illicit trade will increase, the 85 per cent pack warnings will make tobacco packets without warnings easily distinguishable for law-enforcers to catch," an expert at the Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, said.

"The report from the committee on subordinate legislation tilts in favour of the tobacco industry and its depositions while it is the duty of Parliament and its members to make laws for the health and well-being of Indian citizens," the expert said.

Hriday-Shan, another non-government organisation, has also questioned a claim by the committee that anti-tobacco measures have had little impact on consumption of such items.

"New data from the latest national family health survey show that tobacco consumption has reduced," Hriday-Shan said.