Where you can smoke
Homes, inside housing complexes, municipal parks, streets and open spaces. In parked cars, restaurants and hotels with designated smoking areas.
Where you cannot smoke
In public places including offices, court buildings, hospitals, airports, railway stations, bus stops, educational institutions, restaurants, pubs, discos, theatres.
Fine for violation: Rs 200 up to Rs 1000. Office supervisors/managers/ proprietors will be fined Rs 200 for every employee violating the ban.
Can The Ban Work?
After the high court ban on smoking in public places in 1999, Kerala became the first state to implement the court order rigorously. Here’s how it worked:
- Initially the court monitored the implementation of its order
- The ban was imposed strictly for the first three months
- This sent a strong message to offenders
- Despite the initial scepticism, there was public acceptance of the ban.
- According to the state DGP Jacob Punnose, only one per cent of smokers today light up in public places.
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Victor's smile: Monamma Kokkad
But what led this affable teacher to take up the cudgels? It was while commuting by train between Kochi and Kottayam that she was exposed to "insensitive" smokers. Recalls Monamma: "The up and down journeys used to be a torture. Men would puff away as if it was their birthright. Some of them couldn't care less and swirled the smoke at us. There would be just me and three other ladies in the mixed coach. Working women were themselves rare in the '70s, let alone their trying to take on smokers."
But what really made her determined to take up the fight later was an incident involving her colleague, an asthma patient, who fainted in the train unable to suffer the smoke. "The people smoking would not stub their cigarettes even after I requested them. That's when I raised my voice.... Don't non-smokers have a right to inhale pure air?" she asks.
When she approached the Kerala High Court in 1998, she had little to go by other than research in the West. The local input, which proved vital, was a survey by the Chavara Cultural Centre at Kochi, linking many lung cancer deaths to smoking. She recalls it was the centre's president, T.A. Varkey, who backed up her with data. Of course, the medical profession worldwide had already recognised smoking as a health hazard.
The judgement came as a surprise to many. The court not only ordered a ban but also kept a tab on how the state government was enforcing it. Not all were happy with this. The then chief minister, E.K. Nayanar, argued that a worker was right in lighting up after a day's hard labour and his policemen "had more serious things to do than chase smokers".
Such bluster didn't detract Monamma from taking her campaign to schools and colleges to campaign against smoking. "Now no one here lights up in public because the long arm of the law might extend to him," says Monamma. Indeed, according to the police, only one per cent of smokers in Kerala now light up in public places. Even that figure, it seems, would dip further now.
