Food Safety Department to Tighten Grip on Erring Eateries

THRISSUR: Tightening its grip on food joints operating in highly unhygienic conditions, the State Food Safety Department has decided to pursue with its intra-district raids.In the flash raids conducted by the department in three districts from July 14 to 17, covering a total of 216 hotels, as many as 66 per cent of hotels were found violating the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSA) norms. Food Safety officials have slapped a fine to the tune of `8.64 lakh on various hotels till date.

Surprisingly, the Bharath Hotel here, which the Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association (KHRA) claims as one of the best hotels in terms of cleanliness, was fined around `1 lakh for not following the 30-point guidelines, which was put in place in July 2012 by the then state Food Safety Commissioner Biju Prabhaker.

These guidelines were announced after a person died on July 10, 2012, after eating ‘shavarma’ from a hotel in Thiruvananthapuram.

State Food Safety Commissioner T V Anupama told ‘Express’ that for the last four months the department had not been conducting raids in the hotels as the commissioner’s post was lying vacant.“After I took charge recently, we resumed raids by colleting inputs from the Food Safety Department’s intelligence officers posted in Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam and Kozhikode. In the intra-district raids, assistant food commissioners of other districts were given a list of hotels where the raids need to be conducted in Thrissur, Kottayam and Kannur, and the raids yielded good results,” she added.

As such flash raids will continue in future, the department would not divulge any further matters in this regard, she added.“According to the information I received from the officers who initiated the raids recently, most of the violations were with regard to cleanliness in the kitchen,” she said.

Joseph Shaji George, the Assistant Food Safety Commissioner in Malappuram, who conducted raids at Bharath Hotels here as a part of the intra-district raids, said that a hefty fine of `1 lakh was compounded considering the daily turnover at the hotel. Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association state secretary G K Prakash said they would be filing an appeal before the Food Safety Commissioner seeking withdrawal of the `1 lakh fine imposed on the hotel as the violations found out were not serious.