KOTTAYAM: Restaurants in the district continue with their unethical practices with minimal action being taken against eateries found violating the health codes in a series of raids conducted by the Health Department and the district administration.
In the absence of stringent regulations, the ones which were shut down and served notices reopened after a break of two to three weeks continue to function in the same manner.
Following the footsteps of the Food Safety Authority, several raids were conducted by the Health Department in the past two months as a part of the ‘Safe Kerala’ campaign to combat epidemics. Health squads of the department swung into action on the pretext of spread of food and water-borne diseases in the district, such as typhoid, diarrhoea and jaundice.
The raids revealed the flouting of rules in several places as they had unhygienic and unhealthy kitchen surroundings.Most of such establishments were shut down and the rest were given warnings.
On Friday alone, two hotels under the Kottayam municipality, one at Manimala and another at a borma at Pampady were shut down for serious health code violations.
As many as 164 eateries were also served notices. Raids were conducted in 866 food production centres by 65 teams on Friday alone.
However, the establishments have come back into action after two or three weeks after the raids as they are no provisions to shut them down permanently. According to a higher official in the Health Department, the shutdown establishments can be reopened after paying fine from the range of `500 to `5000.
The same thing happened with the KSRTC canteen in the city which was shut down by the authorities for more than once for flouting norms. The raids found that the canteen kitchen had stale food, unhealthy environment, lack of hygiene and even rats.
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