A hookah may have water in its base, tobacco in its bowl and charcoal on top, but restaurants and cafes cannot legally offer it as a service, even inside a designated smoking area, the Allahabad high court’s Lucknow bench ruled on Tuesday.
The establishment cannot prepare or serve hookah there, or send a waiter inside to provide food or even water. The court rejected the contention, holding that hookah smoking inherently involves preparation, assistance and commercial supply of hookah, flavour and coal. In a judgment dismissing 80 petitions filed by restaurant and hookah bar owners, the court held that a designated smoking area (DSA) is only a separate enclosure where customers can smoke on their own. The court completed the hearing on August 18 and reserved its order. These activities are prohibited under amended Rule 4(3) of the Prohibition of Smoking in Public Places Rules, 2008, the court said.
The petitioners argued that they had created separate DSAs in accordance with the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 (COTPA), and could therefore offer hookah smoking.
A novice patron, the court said, cannot be expected to perform these tasks, making hookah service fundamentally different from smoking tobacco independently inside a DSA. “Operation of hookah bars and rendering of hookah services by restaurants constitutes flagrant violation of Rule 4(3) as amended in 2017 and direct contravention of the scheme and object of COTPA,” the court held. The judgment was uploaded on the high court website on Tuesday.
Regarding local regulation, advocate Siddharth Shanker Dubey, who represented the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) in the case, said the civic body has no existing framework to regulate hookah parlours in the city. He said the high court’s ruling relied on the existing legal framework governing hookah services.
