The New Food Safety and Standards Act will kill the hawker, but not the bug
There are two kinds of Indians-those who eat and drink everything on offer, and those who don't. I'm not talking about religious taboos here but street food. I belong to the latter category. I was brought up to be cautious about what I ate off the street and continue to be so. And for good reason. I don't want to be knocked down by jaundice, typhoid, colitis or a new strain of stomach bug.
The brave ones who eat everything look down on us lily-livered types. They hold us in the highest contempt. What's the point of living in India if you don't sample the delights of street food? Why behave like a faux firang, constantly rubbing your hands with hand sanitiser? Eat. Live!
Well, I'm alive, even though I might have 'lived' a tad less than most. I've never had chuski-that crushed ice concoction dunked in fluorescent liquid. I've admired the pushcarts neatly lined with colourful bottles of syrup - red, yellow and green, but from a safe distance. I've never stood over a garbage bin and shoved paani-puri into my mouth. I've never had an orange bar from a dodgy ice-cream cart. I've never had a glass of the tenpaisa 'machine-ka-thanda paani'. I've never had freshly squeezed sugarcane juice from a thela. I've stayed away from buying 'open cut fruit' off the pavement. I don't eat street pork because I'm terrified of tapeworm. Remember the one who snaked its way all the way to Leander Paes' brain?
Legislation
There are those among us who bravely try everything but inevitably land up at the doctor's. There are those who eat indiscriminately and survive. In 1995, a friend of mine and I were headed back from Trivandrum to Delhi on the Kerala Express. It was a hot afternoon. The train made an unscheduled stop at a dusty nondescript station in Madhya Pradesh. A woman in rags with stringy brown hair appeared on the platform, carrying a pail of water and a mug. I watched on in horror and disbelief as my friend drank five glasses, at two rupees a pop. He lived to tell the tale. A few years later, I wasn't so lucky. On a trip back home from Oxford, I ate kebabs from the old part of town. Everyone else who ate it was fine. I had to be hospitalised.
Nowadays, though, I take my chances. Impending middle age has made me reckless. Just the other day, I was at my favourite nihari and brain curry place in Nizamuddin. I took a friend along for the experience. It's a working class joint, packed with Muslim men in skullcaps. It's the kind of place that always smells like a wet unwashed rag. Everything was going well until a train of cockroaches decided to walk across the Formica top. It looked like a family - big fat Father Cockroach leading the way, with missus and the little ones scurrying along behind. My friend stopped eating and went for a walk. I ordered another nihari. I was okay the next day. Just about.
We should be able to eat what we want without the fear of falling sick. That we live in Norflox Nation is hardly a matter of pride. This is an incontrovertible point. When guests come visiting from abroad, we shouldn't have to send them out with lists of culinary do's and don'ts. Our working class too, which practically lives off cheap dhaba food, deserves better.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has come up with a new legislation that aims to fix just this - the levels of hygiene in eateries. The tough Food Safety and Standards Act (which applies to five stars and roadside stalls alike, and even includes temples serving 'prashad') will invite penalty and prosecution if, say, rats are found at restaurants, or if impure water is served. The deadline for compliance, which was August 4 earlier, has been extended by six months. A food safety licence is now a must for those dealing in any form of food business. This licence is in addition to existing licensing requirements from various government agencies.
On paper, tighter food safety regulations don't seem like a bad idea. For the moment, let's keep aside five star restaurants and fancy establishments. Let's presume that they are self-regulating and maintain high hygiene levels of their own accord. The scope of the bill is huge and encompasses much of the food chain. Let's keep that aside too. Let us concentrate only on how it affects the roadside vendor. In states like Kerala and Maharashtra, where local governments have already begun enforcing the law, it's the street vendor who has been affected the most. Hundreds of small restaurants have been ordered shut.
Reality
How fair and feasible is it to expect the street vendor to match the levels of hygiene achieved by bigger establishments? For one, there is the problem of location. Hawkers can control the quality of their food, but only to the extent their environment allows them. And who is responsible for the filthy environment they operate in? The MCD and other state actors. How fair is it then for these same MCD officials to come around and prosecute the hapless hawker?
The average Indian street is dirty. It has cows, bulls, buffaloes, dogs, pigs and horses. There are mounds of dung everywhere, and piles of unswept, stinking garbage. Even one shower leads to water logging; there are stagnant pools of water. If you've ever been to the old ISBT, you'd have noticed the sheets of flies billowing in and out of the bus shelters and waiting rooms. This is the environment in which the hawker peddles his wares. How hygienic can he be?
And how evenhanded is it to expect the hawker to serve clean water when often the drinking water supplied by the municipality has traces of sewage in it, especially during the monsoon?
The hawker has to be close to the people he serves. You'd be destroying his livelihood if you move him out of the street into a sanitised 'designated zone'. He needs to be in a street where it's convenient for his customers.
Enforcement
Then there's the issue of harassment by the authorities. Every new law gives them a stick to beat the poor with. Some years ago, I was in a Bombay Irani restaurant owned by a wellknown film critic. Two dour-looking men arrived and the owner went into a huddle with them at the back of the café. They left soon after. When I asked the owner what'd happened, he said that they were food inspectors come for their monthly bribe. The new law will encourage more of it.
In his piece 'On Washing Hands', the New Yorker writer Atul Gawande writes that most illnesses can be prevented by the simple act of washing one's hands. Bacterial counts on the hands range from 5,000 to 5 million colony-forming units per square centimetre. Deep skin crevices trap 10 to 20 per cent of the flora, making removal difficult, even with scrubbing. How will the enforcers of this law ensure that the hawker washes his hand regularly? Will they carry gadgets capable of measuring the bacterial count on a palm in an instant?
We'd all like to eat out without worrying about the state of our stomachs the next day. I doubt though that the answer to this lies in overregulation, and expanding the existing legal and bureaucratic framework. This will kill the hawker, but not the bug.
The brave ones who eat everything look down on us lily-livered types. They hold us in the highest contempt. What's the point of living in India if you don't sample the delights of street food? Why behave like a faux firang, constantly rubbing your hands with hand sanitiser? Eat. Live!
Well, I'm alive, even though I might have 'lived' a tad less than most. I've never had chuski-that crushed ice concoction dunked in fluorescent liquid. I've admired the pushcarts neatly lined with colourful bottles of syrup - red, yellow and green, but from a safe distance. I've never stood over a garbage bin and shoved paani-puri into my mouth. I've never had an orange bar from a dodgy ice-cream cart. I've never had a glass of the tenpaisa 'machine-ka-thanda paani'. I've never had freshly squeezed sugarcane juice from a thela. I've stayed away from buying 'open cut fruit' off the pavement. I don't eat street pork because I'm terrified of tapeworm. Remember the one who snaked its way all the way to Leander Paes' brain?
Legislation
There are those among us who bravely try everything but inevitably land up at the doctor's. There are those who eat indiscriminately and survive. In 1995, a friend of mine and I were headed back from Trivandrum to Delhi on the Kerala Express. It was a hot afternoon. The train made an unscheduled stop at a dusty nondescript station in Madhya Pradesh. A woman in rags with stringy brown hair appeared on the platform, carrying a pail of water and a mug. I watched on in horror and disbelief as my friend drank five glasses, at two rupees a pop. He lived to tell the tale. A few years later, I wasn't so lucky. On a trip back home from Oxford, I ate kebabs from the old part of town. Everyone else who ate it was fine. I had to be hospitalised.
Nowadays, though, I take my chances. Impending middle age has made me reckless. Just the other day, I was at my favourite nihari and brain curry place in Nizamuddin. I took a friend along for the experience. It's a working class joint, packed with Muslim men in skullcaps. It's the kind of place that always smells like a wet unwashed rag. Everything was going well until a train of cockroaches decided to walk across the Formica top. It looked like a family - big fat Father Cockroach leading the way, with missus and the little ones scurrying along behind. My friend stopped eating and went for a walk. I ordered another nihari. I was okay the next day. Just about.
We should be able to eat what we want without the fear of falling sick. That we live in Norflox Nation is hardly a matter of pride. This is an incontrovertible point. When guests come visiting from abroad, we shouldn't have to send them out with lists of culinary do's and don'ts. Our working class too, which practically lives off cheap dhaba food, deserves better.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has come up with a new legislation that aims to fix just this - the levels of hygiene in eateries. The tough Food Safety and Standards Act (which applies to five stars and roadside stalls alike, and even includes temples serving 'prashad') will invite penalty and prosecution if, say, rats are found at restaurants, or if impure water is served. The deadline for compliance, which was August 4 earlier, has been extended by six months. A food safety licence is now a must for those dealing in any form of food business. This licence is in addition to existing licensing requirements from various government agencies.
On paper, tighter food safety regulations don't seem like a bad idea. For the moment, let's keep aside five star restaurants and fancy establishments. Let's presume that they are self-regulating and maintain high hygiene levels of their own accord. The scope of the bill is huge and encompasses much of the food chain. Let's keep that aside too. Let us concentrate only on how it affects the roadside vendor. In states like Kerala and Maharashtra, where local governments have already begun enforcing the law, it's the street vendor who has been affected the most. Hundreds of small restaurants have been ordered shut.
Reality
How fair and feasible is it to expect the street vendor to match the levels of hygiene achieved by bigger establishments? For one, there is the problem of location. Hawkers can control the quality of their food, but only to the extent their environment allows them. And who is responsible for the filthy environment they operate in? The MCD and other state actors. How fair is it then for these same MCD officials to come around and prosecute the hapless hawker?
The average Indian street is dirty. It has cows, bulls, buffaloes, dogs, pigs and horses. There are mounds of dung everywhere, and piles of unswept, stinking garbage. Even one shower leads to water logging; there are stagnant pools of water. If you've ever been to the old ISBT, you'd have noticed the sheets of flies billowing in and out of the bus shelters and waiting rooms. This is the environment in which the hawker peddles his wares. How hygienic can he be?
And how evenhanded is it to expect the hawker to serve clean water when often the drinking water supplied by the municipality has traces of sewage in it, especially during the monsoon?
The hawker has to be close to the people he serves. You'd be destroying his livelihood if you move him out of the street into a sanitised 'designated zone'. He needs to be in a street where it's convenient for his customers.
Enforcement
Then there's the issue of harassment by the authorities. Every new law gives them a stick to beat the poor with. Some years ago, I was in a Bombay Irani restaurant owned by a wellknown film critic. Two dour-looking men arrived and the owner went into a huddle with them at the back of the café. They left soon after. When I asked the owner what'd happened, he said that they were food inspectors come for their monthly bribe. The new law will encourage more of it.
In his piece 'On Washing Hands', the New Yorker writer Atul Gawande writes that most illnesses can be prevented by the simple act of washing one's hands. Bacterial counts on the hands range from 5,000 to 5 million colony-forming units per square centimetre. Deep skin crevices trap 10 to 20 per cent of the flora, making removal difficult, even with scrubbing. How will the enforcers of this law ensure that the hawker washes his hand regularly? Will they carry gadgets capable of measuring the bacterial count on a palm in an instant?
We'd all like to eat out without worrying about the state of our stomachs the next day. I doubt though that the answer to this lies in overregulation, and expanding the existing legal and bureaucratic framework. This will kill the hawker, but not the bug.
