Picture this: with winter around the corner, there is a slight chill in the air. Coupled with the alarming levels of pollution which have forced everyone indoors, it’s the ideal time to curl up on your couch and binge watch your favourite web-series, which has eight short episodes of 30 minutes each.

However, even before the first episode begins, there’s a 30-second ad in which Mukesh, a young man in his prime years, lying on a hospital bed, talks about his ordeal with cancer. This is coupled with a 20-second audio-visual disclaimer on the ills of smoking. You sit through it and proceed with the episode. At the halfway mark, Mukesh interrupts the episode to remind you about the ill-effects of smoking/consuming tobacco followed by another 20 second warning (which you’ve already seen once before).

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If the show is about a chainsmoking drug lord, a static message will accompany the hapless Mukesh, in every scene where tobacco is visible, telling you how horrible smoking is (which it is, undoubtedly). If this was not disruptive enough, this message will often overlap with the subtitles you rely on to help you understand the show better.

What’s worse is that these warnings show up repeatedly, for the entirety of the eight episodes. In effect, out of the 1800 seconds you spent watching an episode, at least 100 comprised the same anti-tobacco imagery and messaging. Sounds torturous, doesn’t it? But this is what the recently amended Cigarettes and other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Amendment (COTPA) Rules, 2023 will do to your OTT-watching experience. On 31 May 2023, India became the first country to extend its tobacco regulation norms to over-the-top (OTT) content or streaming services. By doing so, the State has followed its time-tested template to resolve pressing public interest issues – pass the buck on to the private sector or on to individual citizens and abdicate all responsibility. It has happened in every sphere of life and is true of all governments, irrespective of the political parties that run them. Can’t supply clean, drinking water?

Just get citizens to invest in RO filtering machines. Inability to curb air pollution? Leave residents of urban metropolises to buy air purifiers. Can’t put in place reliable public transport? Leave people to buy private cars. In all of these instances, the State hasn’t encouraged citizens to, effectively, do what they think is best. This is “privatisation” of the public sector’s core responsibilities

. The truth is this: smoking in India is rampant and no matter how many disclaimers/warnings streamers are forced to run, it won’t reduce smoking. Smokers are not influenced by cinema to walk on the tobaccoinfused path that they do. A survey from May 2023 indicates that it is actually peer pressure from friends and others that significantly influences one’s decision to take up smoking. Mental stress is another key factor for persons who become smokers, while depiction of smoking on TV, streaming services, and cinema is insignificant. Moreover, cinema and now streaming shows only reflect the times we live in.

And these days, the times they are a smokin’ (sorry, Bob Marley). World Health Organization (WHO) data indicates that approximately 267 million Indians over the age of 15, are smokers. That’s roughly one-fifth of the country’s population. Little surprise then that this sobering reality is reflected on celluloid. If the State is serious about curbing the menace of smoking, it must regulate the sale and distribution of cigarettes, rather than crafting policies have no impact on people’s smoking habits, distort their viewing experience and jeopardise the growth of a flourishing media and entertainment sector. India’s media and entertainment industry is the world’s fifth largest such market and is growing by nearly 20 per cent annually. Online streaming services are one of the engines that powers this growth. In 2022, they produced almost 3,000 hours of fresh, original content – almost double of what they did in 2019.

However, the implementation of these COTPA rules is onerous for this industry and we’ll tell you why. For one, these Rules apply to all content on a streaming service, be it old or new. Most services have vast content libraries, combining both Indian and foreign movies and shows, making it impossible to insert 100- second disclaimers retrospectively. Another one of the Rules’ mandates is the insertion of 50-second disclaimers in total in the middle of the content piece. Now, there’s a range of curated content online, from 10-minute-long short films to shows that go into 10 seasons and everything in between.

Services will end up scouring through hours of content, deciding when a cut can be introduced in the middle to include the warnings. They will also be running from pillar to post, asking for permissions to make changes from licensers and filmmakers. Big players might grudgingly bear these costs but this requirement threatens to push smaller players out of business. The biggest loser is ultimately the consumer. Content diversity and seamless viewing on streaming services will be lost to repeated graphic reminders of lung cancer.

The onerous nature of the Rules also has potential to drive away foreign producers. We have seen this happen earlier with Blue Jasmine, when a TV-centred version of the Rules made ace director Woody Allen pull out from India, rather than censoring his content. If at all the government enforces what it believes is an important public interest mandate, the goal of audience sensitisation can also be achieved through content descriptors that are already mandated under the Information Technology Rules, 2021.

Furthering the self-regulatory mechanism envisaged in these Rules, streaming services must be permitted to devise their own mechanisms that suit their operations and their customer satisfaction related goals. The newly notified COTPA Rules can be amended, and making such changes will not be a sign of weakness, but of agility in digital governance.

(The writers work on media policy at Koan Advisory, New Delhi. The views expressed are personal.)