Steps to enforce Food Safety Act

 

The Health Department is preparing to embark on a major exercise to prepare a databank or the statistics regarding hotels and other food businesses in the State, as part of implementing the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 effectively.

Not only would the statistics on hotels and food establishments collected, each of the establishments would be graded into various categories. The Food Safety wing and the Health Department will also come out with detailed and separate guidelines on maintaining food safety and standards for food establishments in rural and urban areas.

This was decided at a high-level meeting of food safety and health officials called by Health Minister V.S. Sivakumar here on Tuesday.

Ensuring the safety of ethnic food products and maintaining fool-proof standards for food products in rural markets, enhancing the production of safe and pesticide-free food items through scientific farming methods and ensuring the safety of drinking water sources would be given priority when formulating the guidelines for food safety in the rural context.