Raunak Dixit

Abstract: This piece reads India’s cigarette packaging law against the disclosure standard India itself helped negotiate. It argues that the absence of an ingredient disclosure requirement across COTPA, the Legal Metrology Act, and the Consumer Protection Act is not a drafting oversight but the outer limit each statute was framed to reach, a position confirmed by Section 7(5) of COTPA, a tar-and-nicotine clause enacted in 2003 and never notified, which two constitutional courts, in Dharmendra Kansal v. Union of India (2014) and a 2026 Kerala High Court petition, have recorded as executive default without securing enforcement. This domestic gap sits beside a distinct international one, namely twenty-two years of unimplemented obligation under Articles 9 and 10 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, ratified by India in 2004. Drawing on the European Union’s Common Entry Gate reporting system and the Law Commission’s 289th Report on trade secrets, the piece closes by identifying four concrete remedies, namely notification of Section 7(5), a mandatory content-reporting regime modelled on the EU framework, conferral of regulatory jurisdiction over cigarette contents, and reconciliation of India’s FCTC commitments with domestic law, arguing that closing this gap will determine what the country’s 267 million tobacco users can learn about the product killing 1.35 million of them annually.

The label on a packet of biscuits sets out its ingredients in descending order of weight. Food law requires this and penalises a misbranded label. No corresponding requirement exists for a cigarette, although tobacco use accounts for nearly 1.35 million deaths in India each year. No law in force requires a manufacturer to tell either the consumer or the regulator what a cigarette actually contains.

In July 2026, the Union Government told the Kerala High Court that printing nicotine and tar figures on cigarette packs could mislead the public. The provision in issue, Section 7(5) of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003, was enacted by Parliament in 2003, and the Union has, on its own account, consciously refrained from bringing it into force. Beyond that provision, none of the laws that address cigarette packs requires the contents of the product to be disclosed. They regulate warnings, identity, quantity and price instead.

This piece argues that the Union’s objection, though it has a footing in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), answers only the narrower question of what should be printed on a pack. It leaves untouched the wider question of what a manufacturer must disclose to a regulator, a duty that Articles 9 and 10 of the same treaty contemplate and that India has never enacted. The positions under pertinent Indian legislation, India’s duties under international law, and equivalent foreign law are examined in the sections that follow, before reforms are proposed.

The Statutory Framework Governing Cigarette Packaging

What must be on an Indian cigarette pack is governed by three legal regimes. Only when all three are compared does the absence become clear.

The Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 (COTPA), and its Packaging and Labelling Rules, 2008, form the primary tobacco-specific law. Section 7 requires a specified warning, including a pictorial warning, on not less than one of the largest panels of the pack. Its one further requirement, the nicotine and tar disclosure in Section 7(5), has never been brought into force. Details such as the manufacturer’s name and address, the date of manufacture and the net quantity are required by the metrology regime discussed next.

The Legal Metrology Act, 2009 and its Packaged Commodities Rules, 2011, apply to cigarettes as to any other pre-packaged commodity, requiring the retail sale price, net quantity, manufacturer or packer details, and date of manufacture on the principal display panel. This same system, which is more concerned with quantity and pricing transparency than composition, controls a bottle of shampoo or a bag of cement.

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019, acknowledges that one of the six statutory consumer rights under Section 2(9) is the right to information on the quality, quantity, potency, purity, and standard of products. This is the broadest of the three enactments and the least specific. Section 2(9) sits in the Act’s definitions clause. It states a general principle and imposes no labelling mandate for any category of goods, a task left to sector-specific law. For food, that task is performed by a separate statute. The FSSAI Labelling and Display Regulations, 2020, made under Section 92(2)(k) read with Section 23 of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, require a full list of ingredients. No equivalent instrument exists for tobacco products, and none of the three enactments above has been used to give the general right to information specific form for cigarettes. The pertinent question is why a general consumer information principle has been given effect for one category of harmful products and not for another.

When a cigarette pack is evaluated in accordance with all three legislations, it will have a name, address, date, price, quantity, and a health warning but not an ingredient. Because Section 7(5) remains unenforced, it will not state a nicotine or tar figure either. Parliament provided for the second of these disclosures, and no statute provides for the first.

A further possibility should be addressed. The Bureau of Indian Standards maintains a technical specification for cigarettes, IS 1577, covering matters of manufacture. BIS product certification is, as a general rule, voluntary unless the Central Government has issued a quality control order making it compulsory for a named product. No such order has been made for cigarettes. IS 1577 accordingly does not oblige a manufacturer to submit to certification or require the underlying composition to be filed with any authority. Its existence confirms that the State has the technical competence to specify cigarette composition, but not that the State has exercised any power to compel disclosure of what a given manufacturer’s cigarettes in fact contain. The same is true of testing. Section 11 of COTPA, in force since 1 September 2019, provides for recognised laboratories to test nicotine and tar content, and three National Tobacco Testing Laboratories have since been notified. The State can therefore measure at least part of what a cigarette contains. No law in force requires a manufacturer to disclose it.

Section 7(5) of COTPA and Its Non-Notification

One provision comes close to a disclosure requirement. Its history over the past twenty-three years shows that its non-implementation is, on the Union’s own account, a matter of policy rather than oversight.

Section 7(5) of COTPA requires that every cigarette package indicate the nicotine and tar content of each cigarette, together with the prescribed maximum permissible limits. This provision has remained on the statute book since 2003 and has never been notified. The Deputy Solicitor General confirmed as much before the Kerala High Court in March 2026. Under Indian administrative law, non-notification means the Government has not issued the formal order required to bring a passed provision into legal force. Until that order issues, the provision is unenforceable. Nor can a court supply the missing order where Parliament has left its timing to the executive, as the Supreme Court held in A.K. Roy v. Union of India.

For more than ten years, this issue has been the focus of legal action. In Dharmendra Kansal v. Union of India (2014), eleven years after Parliament passed the tar and nicotine disclosure requirement, the Uttarakhand High Court recorded that the Central Government had failed to fix the limits on which Parliament had depended (para 24). The Union’s own affidavit explained why. It cited limited testing capacity, the absence of any internationally accepted safe limit, and the FCTC guidelines against quantitative statements on packs, and it asked that Section 7(5) be deleted (para 3). Holding that it could not compel the Central Government to act (para 27), the Court instead banned the sale of cigarettes within the State from one year after its decision, unless the Central Government prescribed the limits and manufacturers complied with the disclosure requirement (para 30).

The ban does not appear to have resulted in actual notification of the limits. In a 2018 decision on a petition by the same petitioner, the Uttarakhand High Court again directed the Centre to decide the question of permissible limits, this time within six months, and criticised it for taking cover behind an FCTC recommendation against enforcing Section 7(5). The underlying question of tar and nicotine limits remained unresolved when it resurfaced before the Kerala High Court in 2026. Dharmendra Kansal is accordingly the authority for the proposition that a constitutional court can record, in a binding order, an eleven-year default by the Executive, and not for the proposition that judicial intervention has in fact secured the disclosure Section 7(5) requires.

Twelve years after the Uttarakhand decision, the position remained unaltered. In July 2026, in Sangeerthana M. v. Union of India, a public interest litigation before the Kerala High Court seeking implementation of the same Section 7(5), the Union Government submitted that mandating numerical disclosure of nicotine and tar content, absent prescribed permissible limits, carries the risk of misleading consumers as to the comparative harm of different cigarettes. At an earlier hearing in March 2026, the Chief Justice had remarked orally that smokers choose cigarettes by brand rather than by nicotine or tar content.

On the narrow question of figures on the pack, the Union’s position has support in the treaty. The FCTC Article 11 guidelines ask Parties to prohibit the display of tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yield figures on packaging, because machine-measured yields do not reflect actual exposure and have misled smokers about relative harm. The European Union, whose model this piece commends below, bars such figures from labels. The Uttarakhand High Court itself accepted that the FCTC trend runs against labelling tar and nicotine, though it held that trend irrelevant to the protection owed to Indian citizens (Kansal, para 26). The difficulty lies elsewhere. In February 2014, the Government told Parliament that displaying only nicotine and tar was “self-limiting”, because tobacco contains many other harmful chemicals and additives (Kansal, para 10). The WHO FCTC Partial Guidelines for Implementation of Articles 9 and 10 address exactly those contents, recommending that Parties require manufacturers to disclose information on contents and emissions to governmental authorities. India has yet to require any such disclosure. The treaty has thus been invoked against figures on the pack, while the disclosure it contemplates to the regulator has never been required.

India’s Obligations under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control

The position under Indian domestic law does not exist in isolation from India’s duties under international law. India ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control on 5 February 2004, the treaty having entered into force on 27 February 2005. Articles 9 and 10 of the FCTC address this subject directly. Article 9 calls upon Parties to regulate the testing, measurement, and contents of tobacco products, and Article 10 calls for disclosure of such information to governmental authorities and to the public.

India follows a broadly dualist approach to treaties. Under Article 253 of the Constitution, an international convention does not become enforceable as domestic law merely upon ratification, and Parliament is required to give effect to it by way of legislation or delegated rules. The FCTC therefore confers no directly enforceable right upon an Indian consumer to seek an ingredient list before a court.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare records that India took a sufficiently prominent part in FCTC negotiations to subsequently host the Seventh Session of the Conference of the Parties at Delhi in 2016, and the National Tobacco Control Programme lists content regulation and disclosure among the demand-reduction obligations of the treaty it has undertaken to implement. Twenty-two years after ratification, the domestic steps required to give effect to Articles 9 and 10 have been taken only in part. Testing capacity now exists under Section 11 of COTPA, but no limits on contents or emissions have been prescribed, and no law requires manufacturers to disclose the contents of their products to a governmental authority or to the public. This does not amount to a breach of treaty obligation in the strict sense. On a fair reading, it amounts to a considerable disparity between the commitment India made at the international level and the position it has since enacted into domestic law.

The Position under Comparable Foreign Law

The relevant comparison is not whether other jurisdictions require a full chemical list printed upon a cigarette pack of limited dimensions. Space is a real restriction, and most jurisdictions do not. The relevant comparison concerns what must be disclosed to the regulator, independent of what appears upon the pack itself.

Under the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (2014/40/EU), manufacturers must report the full list of ingredients for every tobacco product, together with toxicological data, to a centralised reporting system known as the EU Common Entry Gate, prior to the product being placed on the market. Additives on a designated priority list, those most associated with addictiveness or with masking the harshness of smoke, are subject to enhanced reporting obligations, including independent scientific review. Member States must publish the information submitted on a website, taking due account of the need to protect trade secrets. The Directive also caps tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields and requires them to be reported to the regulator, while keeping the figures off the pack.

No equivalent arrangement exists under Indian law at any level, whether on the pack itself, in a public database, or as a confidential filing with a regulatory authority. Although COTPA now provides for testing nicotine and tar, it confers no power on any Indian authority to call for ingredient information in the first instance. There is consequently no body of data from which a future disclosure regime might be constructed. The EU Directive shows that the risk of consumers misconstruing numerical data is a problem of design. The figures go to the regulator and are capped by law, and the pack carries none of them.

The Trade Secret Objection

A manufacturer resisting such a regime would be expected to raise the protection of trade secrets. India has no standalone statute dedicated to trade secret protection. Confidential business information is protected instead through contract and the equitable doctrine of breach of confidence, as commentary on the proposed legislation records. The 289th Report of the Law Commission of India, which proposes India’s first dedicated trade secrets statute, itself contemplates compelled disclosure of a trade secret to the government where the matter concerns a public health emergency or a substantial public interest, subject to a continuing duty of confidentiality on the recipient. If Indian law already accepts, at the level of proposed legislation, that a trade secret can be required to be disclosed to a regulator in the interest of public health, the objection cannot be that ingredient disclosure to the Ministry of Health is incompatible with trade secret protection as a matter of principle. In practice, the EU model responds to the same criticism. Manufacturers file complete formulations with the regulator in confidence, and only the subset of information not amounting to a genuine trade secret, principally the presence or absence of additives, is placed before the public. A regime built on that model would require an Indian manufacturer to file its formula with a regulator in confidence, which is a very different proposition from surrendering it to a competitor.

The Practical Significance of the Omission

India records close to 1.35 million tobacco-attributable deaths annually and is home to approximately 267 million adult tobacco users, according to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey. A 2025 mortality analysis published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research found tobacco use associated with nearly 46 per cent of all deaths among Indian men during 2019 to 2021, with smoking alone accounting for 28 per cent.

In addition to tobacco and nicotine, additives like humectants, flavourings, combustion modifiers, and casing agents that are added during production contribute to the toxicity of cigarette smoke. Many of these additives have independent health effects about which no law currently entitles consumers to learn. Even the disclosures that existing labelling law mandates are not reliably complied with. Compliance studies published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention and the Journal of Cancer Research and Therapeutics found significant deficiencies in compliance with health-warning and manufacturing-date requirements across the products sampled.

Proposed Measures for Reform

The reform required does not call for new legal concepts. It requires the completion, and in one respect the correction, of measures already begun under Indian law and already tested in comparable jurisdictions.

1. Prescription of limits and correction of Section 7(5). The Central Government should prescribe maximum permissible limits under the proviso to Section 7(5), measured by standardised protocols in the laboratories already recognised under Section 11, and should prohibit comparative descriptors such as light and mild. Parliament should then amend Section 7(5), which the Union itself told the Uttarakhand High Court should be deleted, so that the measured figures are reported to the regulator rather than printed on the pack, in line with the FCTC Article 11 guidelines and the EU model. Since the testing laboratories were notified in 2019, the delay can no longer be attributed to a lack of technical capacity.
2. A mandatory content-reporting regime. Such a regime, modelled upon the EU Common Entry Gate, would require manufacturers to file complete ingredient and additive lists with a designated authority, under an amended COTPA or rules framed thereunder, prior to a product being placed on the market, together with a public database of information not amounting to a genuine trade secret. Filings amounting to a genuine trade secret would be protected by an obligation of statutory confidentiality on the regulator, along the lines already contemplated in the proposed Law Commission bill on trade secrets.
3. Conferral of jurisdiction over contents upon a regulator. Since 2019, recognised laboratories have been able to test nicotine and tar, but no Indian authority has been given statutory power to require ingredient information or to restrict the additives a cigarette may contain. Disclosure unaccompanied by regulatory power to act upon it is a procedural exercise only. India requires both.
4. Reconciliation of international commitment with domestic rule-making. More than two decades of partial implementation of Articles 9 and 10 of the FCTC is sufficient for the matter to be treated as an active legislative priority. The treaty cannot be invoked against figures on the pack while its disclosure obligations remain unperformed.

Conclusion

The present position is not, strictly speaking, unlawful. Three statutes govern the contents of an Indian cigarette pack, a treaty India helped to negotiate addresses this precise question, and courts in two States have been called upon to compel executive action. On each occasion, the response has been continued inaction presented as an exercise of caution. That caution is defensible for figures printed on a pack, and it says nothing about ingredients. A regulatory framework that declines to require disclosure of what a cigarette contains, even in confidence to a regulator, cannot properly be said to protect consumers from confusing information. The effect of the present statutory position is that no manufacturer is required to tell anyone, the regulator included, what its cigarettes contain.

Raunak Dixit is a second-year law student at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow.