It’s a history of tobacco control in Bangladesh because, finally, multinational cigarette company BAT Bangladesh has been bound to print Maximum Retail Price (MRP) instead of retail price after JTI. Since more than 10 years, BATB has been violating the law of Bangladesh by writing ‘Retail Price’ on cigarette packets.
But the MRP issue was fully ignored by everybody, including the National Board of Revenue (NBR) and tobacco control activists.
Sushanta Sinha, a well-known television journalist and expert on tobacco taxes, has long emphasized the economic importance of printing and implementing MRPs in place through his television reporting and research studies. According to the law of Bangladesh, he has claimed that printing MRPs is the sole choice. The government ultimately amended the MRP regulations on the first of June 2023, to have the cigarette makers follow the rules. However, until August 2023, none of the tobacco manufacturers made mention of the MRP on the cigarette packet.
After Japan Tobacco International (JTI), British American Tobacco Bangladesh( BATB) has started to print MRP, though they violate the government price by printing a higher price for cigarettes. i.e., they print 310 taka in Benson cigarettes, and the government fixed the price at 300 taka. It’s a complete violation of the law and takes extra money from the consumer, which is more than 200 million taka daily and 70 billion taka yearly, which was ground-breaking investigative news from Sushanta Sinha. The government did not get a single penny in revenue from those extra dollars.
The good news is that the MRP has been introduced belatedly, and now it is very important to monitor that the cigarette companies sell cigarettes at the fixed MRP price. Tobacco tax analyst and journalist Sushanta Sinha told publichealth24.com that it is important for other journalists, government agencies, including the government consumer protection department, and organizations working in tobacco control to take initiative.
