New Delhi, July 16: Five of the six laboratories whose findings of lead in Maggi noodles were cited by India's food safety agency to ban the product were not accredited to test for lead in cereals, government officials and documents have suggested.
The absence of accreditation does not imply there was no lead in the samples tested, but food safety and accreditation experts said that it put a question mark on the competence of the laboratories to perform the tests to look for lead.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) had on June 5 ordered the recall and ban on Maggi noodles, citing test results from laboratories in Calcutta, Delhi, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu that had shown excessive lead levels in samples of the noodles.
The FSSAI rulebook requires food safety tests to be done in accredited testing laboratories. But interviews with laboratory officials and documents from the government agency that certifies the competence of testing laboratories suggest that only the laboratory that tested samples in Delhi had appropriate accreditation to look for lead in cereals. Noodles are made from cereals.
A 13-page document called the "scope of accreditation" from the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) has revealed that Calcutta's Central Food Laboratory (CFL) had the accreditation to look for lead in turmeric and water but not in cereals.
The document, which covers the period from December 17, 2013, to March 18, 2015, confirms the questions raised by Nestle, the manufacturer of the noodles, about the CFL's accreditation. The laboratory claims to have done the tests before March 18.
Experts familiar with quality assurance processes say the revelations from the NABL, an agency under the Union science and technology ministry, suggest that the FSSAI had failed to perform due diligence before sounding the nationwide alert and imposing the ban.
"Accreditation is a stamp of quality - lack of accreditation puts a question mark on competence, on accuracy, and on the authenticity of test results," said Giridhar Gyani, former chief of the Quality Council of India, an agency that certifies testing laboratories.
CFL director Amitava Adhikari, who had last month told The Telegraph that his laboratory had the appropriate accreditation when it tested the noodles samples, has now indicated that he believes the lab did not require accreditation to perform the test.
"There are thousands of tests and thousands of chemicals," Adhikari told this newspaper over the phone on Tuesday.
Adhikari said he believed the CFL did not require accreditation for every test on every food substance.
The FSSAI had asked all the state food commissioners to pick up samples of the noodles after receiving a report from the CFL that it had detected 17 parts per million of lead, nearly seven times the maximum permissible limit of 2.5ppm.
State food safety officials in Gujarat said the Maggi noodles samples had been tested in laboratories in Bhuj, Rajkot and Vadodara. Food analysts from each of these laboratories told this newspaper their labs were not accredited to detect lead in cereals.
"We followed a testing methodology prescribed by accredited labs, but we don't have accreditation for lead," said Vinodray Vishwanath Rajyaguru, the analyst in charge at the Food and Drugs Laboratory in Vadodara.
"It is difficult for every lab to ask for accreditation for all tests on all food substances."
In Tamil Nadu, the samples were tested at the Food Analyst Laboratory, Chennai, sources in the state food commissioner's office said.
D.K. Jawaharlal, the analyst there, said the laboratory was not accredited but possessed the expertise and equipment to perform the tests.
Only Delhi state officials appeared to have adhered to the FSSAI rulebook.
"Our laboratory is not accredited, so we sent samples to a laboratory that has accreditation for lead in cereals," a state official said.
A senior NABL official said accreditation was voluntary. "Accreditation is a demonstration of competence," said N. Venkateswaran, head of accreditation for testing laboratories at the NABL.
"It is up to each laboratory to decide which test it wants covered in accreditation to demonstrate its competence."
Email queries from this newspaper to three senior FSSAI officials asking whether the agency was aware of the scope of accreditation of each of these laboratories remained unanswered.
But an official at the agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the FSSAI had relied on test results sent by the state food commissioners.
"When a food analyst from a state laboratory sends us a report, we cannot ignore it," the official said.
"It is unfortunate that the FSSAI appears to have overlooked this issue," Gyani, the former Quality Council chief, said.
"There is a misconception among some people, including some government officials, that a government laboratory does not need accreditation. This is wrong."
Food testing specialists said that a scrutiny of the raw laboratory data and the experimental results could help determine whether the test results from the five unaccredited laboratories were accurate .
"The accuracy of any analytical data could be ascertained from the raw data captured by the chemist," said Deepa Bhajekar, a food science analyst in Mumbai.
"Transparency in sharing raw data would help understand the testing methods by various laboratories and possibly the reason for varying results."
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