New Delhi, May 31 :     Health minister C.P. Thakur declared India's intention to ban tobacco advertising and promotion as a hard-hitting worldwide campaign against smoking was launched in Bangkok today. Thakur, somewhat naively, announced that the government was considering such a prohibition without mentioning, or possibly not knowing, a Bill with a similar intention is being drafted and redrafted in the health ministry over the past three years. The volume of tobacco advertisements has slumped in recent years but subtle promotion like sponsorship of the Indian cricket team or funding of concerts going live on TV has continued without too much resistance from either the government or the anti-tobacco lobby. Old hands in the health ministry admit that 'powerful pro-tobacco lobbies are at work', forcing efforts at banning tobacco promotion to be dumped midway. Thakur is not the first minister to conceive this plan. Saleem Sherwani, as minister of state for health in both the Gowda and Gujral governments, had started a serious exercise to prepare a Bill. Banning promotion or advertising of tobacco will require the sanction of a legislation passed in Parliament. Either Sherwani lost interest or the tobacco lobby had their way with the mandarins in Nirman Bhavan and the draft Bill was buried. The same process was repeated with Dalit Ezhilmalai, the health minister in the 13-month Vajpayee government. His successor, N. Shanmugham, did not even ask for the file, though there were bureaucrats who wanted him to have a look at it. Thakur is expected to make sincere effort, given the manner in which he is trying to reorient the health ministry's activities immediately on assumption of office last week. But the task will not be easy. He will have to coordinate with a number of ministries, like agriculture, labour, home, finance and information and broadcasting, and the tobacco lobby can create stumbling blocks in any of these. If he clears these obstacles, the Bill might run into resistance from many MPs. Legislators had argued with the government a year ago against any move to ban production and sale of tobacco products, keeping the interests of farmers and workers in mind. The health minister said that without generating alternative employment opportunities, it was impossible to enforce an outright ban on sale. The Indian Medical Association said in a statement that successive governments had done nothing to impose a ban on advertising. It released figures on the occasion of 'world no-tobacco day' that put the number of tobacco-related deaths in the country every year at 6 lakh. The association said 55,000 children get addicted to tobacco every year with every third tobacco-user in the developing world being an Indian. Opening the campaign against tobacco advertising, Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said the industry 'seeks 11,000 new smokers every day to replace those that die... and they succeed'. The WHO would make a global ban on advertising a priority in in a framework convention on tobacco control that would be negotiated by its 191 member states. India is one of them. The UN agency has issued a Marlboro-style poster that shows two cowboys on horseback with caption: 'Bob, I've got cancer'.