Mother Dairy chilling centres’ licences cancelled, get new ones on same day

Agra: Agra Food Safety and Drug Administration (FSDA) initiated action against Mother Dairy after finding detergent in samples tested but is helpless in halting operations of its plants. An official said the very day the department suspended the licences to two chilling centres here, the company obtained new licences under a new name. 

Agra FSDA had suspended the licences of two Mother Dairy MCCs located in Fatehabad and Bhadrauli on June 16, 2015. On the very same day, officials were informed that the plants had obtained new licences from central food safety and standards authority department, Lucknow under the name of Sahaj Milk Producers Company Ltd. 

FSDA's designated officer Ramnaresh Yadav, who exposed the adulteration, told TOI, "It is amazing to see that the MCCs whose operations were stopped by us were up and running the same day once again. However, this will not weaken our case, and legal action will be taken against Mother Dairy for adulteration." 

Yadav added that as Mother Dairy's nominated person, who is responsible for maintaining the quality standards for the two chilling centres, machinery and other staff are the same in the "new" company. It shows that Sahaj is a sister concern of Mother Dairy. 

"Not convinced with the Meerut lab's findings, Mother Dairy sent the samples to the Central Food Laboratory in Kolkata, where further tests showed that one of the samples had detergent in it. The second sample tested positive for extraneous fat," he added. 

The official added that the permission to file against Mother Dairy, two chilling centres from where milk samples were collected and company's nominated person has been sought from the UP food safety commissioner. 

An FIR would be registered against them under section 59 (1) of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 (selling unsafe food items) in the court of additional chief judicial magistrate. 

However, Mother Dairy has denied that the milk supplied in pouches was of substandard quality. "It is very unfortunate that the samples collected at the village level are being wrongly attributed to Mother Dairy," Sandeep Ghosh, business head for milk at Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable Pvt. Ltd., had told reporters here earlier. 

"We would like to clarify that at Mother Dairy, milk undergoes four levels of thorough testing — at input, processing, dispatches and even at market level. Every tanker of milk reaching our plants passes a series of 23 stringent quality tests to check any deviation from defined parameters," the official added.