MUMBAI: Nestle India on Friday informed the Bombay high court that it has to destroy 45 crore packets of Maggi noodles in India post a ban imposed on its sale by the food safety regulator FSSAI, whose validity is suspect since it was based on tests done in non-accredited laboratories.
Senior counsel Iqbal Chagla, who appeared for Nestle, made a pointed case of the lack of reliability on the test results that show high lead content since he said the FSSAI did not follow its own Act that requires labs to be notified and accredited by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL).
Chagla, who made almost day-long submissions, said the company has lost 25% revenue already since June 5 when the FSSAI banned the sale of its 2-minute Maggi noodles, a popular snack "enjoyed by all age groups" for the last 30 years with no untoward incident. He said the goodwill of three decades was lost and has led to destruction of 25,000 tonnes of food. So far, 25% of its turnover of Rs 2,500 crore had been destroyed, he added.
The matter was being heard by a bench of Justices V M Kanade and B P Colabawalla, who will now continue hearing it on Monday.
Chagla said, "Due to the ban which needs to be set aside as it is arbitrary, mothers now feel that children are being poisoned. The ban is not acceptable. We have 2,700 reports of independent labs in India and abroad which show that the level of lead is less than 0.5 ppm while the government claims it is more than 2.5 ppm."
Labs in Delhi, Tamil Nadu and other places are not even certified to test for lead in cereals and spices. The labs have to be very specifically fit to carry out such tests and, as such, the lab reports are "flawed", he insisted. "The labs also gave contradictory results for the same samples tested twice. Besides, while samples in seven states were found to have lead in excessive limits, 20 states found it within limits, and hence the ban should not be pan-India. It could at best have been on those batches," he argued.
Chagla challenged the capability of the analysts at the labs in Gujarat, Delhi, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and Assam, as well as the West Bengal referral lab whose notification had ended in March and the results were declared on April 6. Despite this, the government relied on the lab results to ban all nine variants of Maggi though only three were tested.
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