Jul 20, 2016

பாரில் 'ரெய்டு' நடத்த அதிகாரமில்லை: உணவு பாதுகாப்பு அலுவலர்கள் ஓட்டம்

கரூர்: 'டாஸ்மாக் மதுபான பாரில், உணவின் தரம் குறித்து சோதனை நடத்த அதிகாரம் இல்லை' எனக, கூறி, கரூரில் உணவு பாதுகாப்பு அலுவலர்கள் ஓட்டம் பிடித்தனர்.
கரூர் மாவட்ட உணவு பாதுகாப்பு துறை சார்பில், நேற்று, கரூர் பஸ் ஸ்டாண்ட் கடைகளில், உணவு பாதுகாப்பு நியமன அலுவலர் மீனாட்சிசுந்தரம் தலைமையில் சோதனை நடந்தது. அப்போது, காலாவதியான உணவு பொருட்கள், கூல்டிரிங்ஸ் பாட்டில்கள், தண்ணீர் பாட்டில்கள் சிலவற்றை, குழுவினர் பறிமுதல் செய்தனர். இதுகுறித்து, மீனாட்சிசுந்தரத்திடம் கேட்டபோது, முதலில் பதில் கூற மறுத்துவிட்டார். பின், அலுவல ஊழியர்கள், 'ஏதாவது சொல்லுங்க சார்; இல்லைன்னா நிருபர்கள் விடமாட்டார்கள்' என்றனர். அதன்பின் பதிலளித்த மீனாட்சிசுந்தரம், ''தரமான பொருட்களை விற்க வேண்டும்; காலாவதியான பொருட்களை விற்க கூடாது. மீறினால் நடவடிக்கை எடுக்கப்படும்,'' என்றார். அப்போது, குறுக்கிட்ட நிருபர்கள், 'டாஸ்மாக் மதுபான பாரில், தரம் குறைந்த உணவு பொருட்கள் விற்பனை செய்யப்படுகிறது. அவர்கள் மீது நடவடிக்கை எடுப்பீர்களா' என, கேட்டனர். அதிர்ச்சியடைந்த அவர், ''டாஸ்மாக் மதுபான பாரில் சோதனை நடத்தவும், நடவடிக்கை எடுக்கவும் அதிகாரம் இல்லை; இருந்தாலும் ஆய்வு செய்வோம்,'' என, கூறிவிட்டு, அங்கிருந்து தன் சகாக்களுடன் ஓட்டம் பிடித்தார்.

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Disease scare: FDA to conduct special checks of eateries

Nashik: The Food and the Drug Administration (FDA) in Nashik has decided to check hotels, restaurants and other eateries on the road side to ensure that hygienic conditions are being maintained during the monsoon, when chances of various diseases spreading increases.
U S Vanjari, Joint Commissioner, FDA (Food), Nashik Division said, "The rains bring a host of diseases. Unhygienic conditions, contaminated water etc. can lead to spreading of lot of diseases. Considering this, we would be conducting a drive to check as many restaurants and hotels during the monsoon."
If hotels and restaurants are seen not following hygienic conditions, their licences would either be cancelled or suspended. Further, such establishments would have to pay a fine up to Rs 25,000.
Meanwhile, we would be collecting food samples from restaurants if the concerned food safety official suspects they are unhygienic and would be sent to our government laboratory in Pune for further investigation.
There are a large number of hotels and restaurants spread all across the city. Apart from hotels and restaurants, there are a large number of food joints donning the city roads.
Vanjari said that they have five food safety officers for the district and if need arises, more officers from different parts of Nashik division would be called to take up the campaign.
Recently, food safety officers from different parts of Nashik division had been called to conduct raids on pan stalls for checking if they were selling gutkha and other banned tobacco products.
"We can definitely call food safety officers from other parts of Nashik division for such drives. Nashik has only five food safety officers, due to which the action is limited. The check on the eateries would be all through the rains," Vanjari added.

Delhi: Online payment system for licensing of food businesses

New Delhi, Jul 20 (PTI) Continuing with its reform initiatives, the Delhi government has introduced online payment system for licensing and registration of food business operators in the national capital, a move aimed at ensuring transparency in the system.
A senior government official said applicants can now make payments through credit and debit card and net banking which will eliminate delay in collection of fees and simplify processes for applicants as well.
The Drug Control and Food Safety Department has also introduced a credit note system in dealings between the food safety officers and the food business operators (FBOs) which used to be in cash.
"In the new practice, no cash dealings will be done. Instead, payment to FBOs will be made by the department through a crossed account payee cheque. Such measures will ensure transparency and also check corruption," the official said.
The department has also taken steps to end "Inspector Raj" by ending the practice of posting food safety officers to specific areas for long duration.
"To check growth of any nexus between inspecting offers and the trading community, the officers are now assigned areas on a daily basis, without prior information," official also said.
Last year, the Arvind Kejriwal government had made various licenses issued by the Excise Department online which include excise, luxury and among others to ensure transparent system.
Apart from that, government has directed all its departments to set up its e-offices under which files would be sent through emails in order to curb the practice of corruption.

Patna HC quashes ban on ‘gutka, pan masala’


The Patna high court on Tuesday quashed the state government’s notification prohibiting manufacture, storage, distribution, transportation and sale of ‘gutkha’ and ‘pan masala’ containing tobacco or nicotine.
A division bench of acting chief justice Iqbal Ahmed Ansari and justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh delivered the judgment after hearing petitions challenging the validity of notification issued by the food safety commissioner on November 6, 2015.
M/s Prabhat Zarda Factory India Private Ltd and others had challenged the notification banning manufacture, storage, distribution, transportation and sale of any type of tobacco and areca nut (supari) in the form of pan masala, zarda, scented supari and other incidental activities for a period of one year from November 11, 2015.
Counsels for the petitioners contended that the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 (COTPA) was a special and comprehensive legislation for tobacco products which could not override a general law like Food Safety and Standards Act 2006.
Stating that executive power of the state should not extend to central legislations, they said sale of pan masala mixed with tobacco was regulated by COTPA Act, enacted by the Union government. They claimed that the state order banning these products was beyond its jurisdiction and fit to be set aside.

HC quashes Bihar notification banning gutka and pan masala

Patna, Jul 19: The Patna High Court today quashed the Bihar government's notification banning manufacture, storage, distribution, transportation, sale of any type of gutka and pan masala which contain tobacco or nicotine.
A bench of Acting Chief Justice Iqbal Ahmad Ansari and Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh delivered the judgement after hearing a batch petitions challenging the notification issued by state food safety commissioner.
The government's November 6, 2015 notification banning manufacture, storage, distribution, transportation, sale of any type of gutka and pan masala containing tobacco or nicotine for a period of one year and its allied activities was challenged by M/s Prabhat Zarda Factory India Private Ltd and others.
Quashing the notification, the bench said the state government has no jurisdiction to ban tobacco products and, hence the decision of food safety commissioner is beyond jurisdiction.
It agreed with the contention of the petitioners' advocate Prabhat Ranjan that Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 (COTPA) is a special and comprehensive legislation for tobacco products which cannot override the general act like Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006.
Ranjan submitted that when tobacco product is being regulated by a substantive central Act, then the same cannot be overriden by way of executing instructions or administrative orders of the state government.
Additional Advocate General P N Shahi, appearing for the government, said the ban was clamped in the interest of public health. As the product mixed with tobacco is a food item, therefore food safety commissioner has powers to ban it, he said.
Additional Solicitor General S D Sanjay submitted that since the central government has delegated its powers to state government officials under Food Safety and Standards Act, so the food safety commissioner was justified in banning 'gutka' and 'pan masala' as it was in the public interest.

Why food safety should not come at cost of food security

Environmentalists, traditionalists and wellness advisers seem to believe that pesticides are dispensable. They do not see them as crop protection chemicals
During Onam last year, political parties in Kerala competed to provide pesticide-free organic vegetables. The Indian Express reported that the Communist Party had leased in more than 2,000 acres for organic farming and had set up over a thousand outlets to sell organic produce. The Congress party was reported to have engaged self-help groups for the purpose. Tamil Nadu’s health department was required to certify that vegetables being exported to the state had pesticide residues within permissible limits.
Organic has become a fetish. People see the skull and crossbones when they look at vegetables, which they think are doused with chemicals. Sikkim has become wholly organic. The Centre is promoting traditional, chemical-free farming. The area under certified organic farming has increased 17-fold—to 7.23 lakh hectares in 10 years—the agriculture ministry says (this is just 0.5% of the country’s total sown area.) It wants another 5 lakh hectares added in three years.
Environmentalists, traditionalists and wellness advisers seem to believe that pesticides are dispensable. They do not see them as crop protection chemicals. The opposition suits the ideological positions of those on the far right and far left, because all the 260 pesticides approved for use in the country have been developed by multinationals. But is pristine agriculture possible? Can we go back to the pre-Green Revolution days? More importantly, do consumers have valid reasons to be terrified?
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has been monitoring pesticide residues in food commodities since 2005. As many as nine organisations and ministries with 25 accredited laboratories are involved. They follow standardised international protocols.
Of the 1,13,744 samples of rice, wheat, pulses, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, honey and water analysed between 2008 and 2015, only 2,346 samples—or 2.06% of the total—were found to have pesticide traces above the maximum residue level (MRL).
The MRL and the safe waiting period—between the last spray and harvesting—are determined on the basis of supervised field trials done at 15 centres of an all-India ‘network’ project on pesticide residues. It was started in 1984.
It develops protocols for safe use of pesticides and recommends good agricultural practices.
When a company wants its pesticide brand to be approved for use on a particular crop, it approaches a registration body based in Faridabad, Haryana. The food standards authority fixes the MRL based on toxicological studies, the likely daily consumption of a particular food item which has been sprayed with the chemical, its acceptable daily intake (ADI) and the residue data generated during the supervised trials. The ADI is the amount of a chemical that can be ingested daily over a lifetime without harm.
The MRL for Fluopicolide on grapes, for example, is 0.02 milligrams per kg of the fruit (assuming that the safe waiting period of 32 days between harvest and the last spray has been observed). The ADI is 0.079 milligrams per kg of body weight. If a person weighing 50 kg ate 105 gm of grapes spayed with the chemical, she would ingest 0.0021 milligrams per day, which is just 0.05% of the ADI of 3.95 milligrams per day for that person.
Farmers in India do not generally care about safety. They often spray indiscriminately, and on the advice of retailers who may prescribe what they have in stock even if it is not recommended for a crop. Excessive spraying, use of inappropriate pumps, resorting to cocktails, non-observance of safe waiting periods and the use of spurious chemicals are not uncommon.
So, it is a surprise that only 2% of samples were found to have residues above safe limit. Of course, samples of chemicals not approved for a crop, and for which the MRL has not been fixed, were not counted. Even if they were, the findings may not have been alarming. The ICAR is now generating data to fix the MRL for these chemicals.
According to KK Sharma, a residue chemist and coordinator of the ICAR’s national pesticide residue monitoring project, fewer fruit and vegetable samples in India were found to have residues above the maximum limit, than in the UK and Europe. Of the 60,432 Indian samples analysed between 2008 and 2015, residues were detected in 15.5% (detection does not mean they are harmful). Only in 2.4% of the samples were they above the maximum limit. In the US, 2.2% of the samples were above the MRL, in the UK 3.4%, and in the European Union 3.4%.
Surprisingly, the ICAR found a higher percentage of the so-called pesticide-free organic vegetables with residues above the MRL. Of the 166 samples taken from Hyderabad, West Bengal, Bangalore, Lucknow, Kerala, Delhi and Chennai in 2014-15, residues were detected in 27% of the samples, and in 4.8% of the cases the traces were above the maximum permitted.
“Pesticides are like antibiotics,” says Sharma. They are required to protect plants from pests and diseases, and minimise harvest losses estimated at 20-30%. Like antibiotics, they should be taken judiciously, he says.
Currently, only half of the sown area is covered by pesticides. The coverage should be extended to the other half too, says Sharma. That will allow us to produce more from the same amount of land. He finds the current debate skewed towards food safety at the cost of food security.
The scaremongering creates business opportunities. A Kerala Agricultural University professor involved in monitoring pesticide residues has created a commercially hit vegetable scrub. On testing, the ICAR found it to be less effective than even plain water!
Sharma says that reports about Endosulfan causing physical deformities in a Kerala village, or unacceptable levels of pesticides in soft drinks, or very high levels of Organochlorines in Delhi vegetables (according to Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Laboratory) have not been found to be true.
The ICAR itself must realise that its job is not only to monitor, but also to communicate. It should be less wary of the media and should be active on platforms such as Twitter. How about reassuring the people of Kerala before Onam in September?

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