Abstract: “Raising taxes is one of our strongest weapons to fight out tobacco,” said Arun Thapa, Acting WHO Representative to India. Hiking tobacco taxes by 320% between 1996 and 2013 helped the US reduce its per capita annual consumption of cigarettes from 1820 to 893 cigarettes, and cut the number of adults who smoke by about a third. In India, central-excise duty has increased 1606% on the shortest non-filter cigarettes available and 198% on the shortest filter cigarettes since 1996. Taxes constitute about 60% of the price of a best-selling pack of 20 cigarettes, against about 43% in the US. But India was not able to reduce its capita annual consumption of cigarettes in the same proportion. Cigarette smokers in India increased from 25 million to 46.4 million over 14 years (1996 to 2010), and per capita annual consumption of cigarettes declined marginally, from 101 to 96 cigarettes over the same period. With some assumptions, it can be shown that the tax on bidis can be increased to Rs. 100 per 1000 sticks compared with the current Rs. 14 and the tax on an average cigarette can be increased to Rs. 3.5 per stick without any fear of losing revenue. The government though has been taking rigorous initiatives to try and reduce the consumption of tobacco products it has not been able to achieve the results which it wanted to have. There have been many reasons for this to happen and we will look into it in this report.

Introduction:-
In India, tobacco consumption is responsible for half of all the cancers in men and a quarter of all cancers in women,1 in addition to being a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases.2,3 India also has one of the highest rates of oral cancer in the world, partly attributed to high prevalence of tobacco chewing.4–7 Forms of tobacco chewing include pan (piper betel leaf