Where food detectives prowl

The Maggi noodles rumpus first surfaced in this Uttar Pradesh town. Why is Barabanki the bane of adulterators? Avijit Chatterjee finds out

You can't quite tell if Sanjay Singh is enjoying his "two minutes" of fame - or "infamy", as he calls it. The food safety officer, who blew the lid off Maggi noodles, triggering a nationwide alarm, doesn't want to meet the media. And when he is finally buttonholed in his office in Barabanki, some 30km from Lucknow, he emerges out of the shadows most reluctantly.

Singh looks dead tired. It is past 6.30pm and he has just returned to the Food Safety and Drug Administration (FDA) office after carrying out raids against iodine salt dealers and retailers in Barabanki villages. But he is not ready to call it a day yet.

"A lot of work remains to be done," he says.

Indeed, a lot has to be done for the campaign that Singh has been relentlessly carrying on. At this hour, when most other government departments are closed for the day, the FDA department, housed in the district magistrate's office, is buzzing with activity. The food safety officers are busy filing their day's report. Among the triumphs is a 20-litre dispenser of bottled water which was confiscated from Barabanki even before it was manufactured - if you go by the date printed on the bottle.

"We are one of the firsts to arrive and the last to leave. On most days you will find us working even at 8pm or beyond," says another food safety officer, A.D. Pandey.

Barabanki is an enigma. If there are scores of cases of food contamination reported from here, the Uttar Pradesh town also has the most active campaigners against adulterated food.

"We have strict instructions from the district magistrate as well as other senior officers to conduct inspections and raids on a daily basis and file our reports and findings at the end of the day. Moreover, after Maggi, our work has doubled as we have been instructed to carry out raids against other packaged food manufacturers too," Pandey says.

IN FOCUS: (Top) The store from which the noodles samples were taken; (above) food safety officer Sanjay Singh. Pictures by the author

How did the Maggi episode unfold? Singh, the nemesis of many an unscrupulous dealer and seller in the area, stresses that he has no personal "bias" against the product or its manufacturer. But on the eve of Holi on March 10 last year, during a routine drive to check contaminants in instant food packets and other edibles such as potato chips and spices, he collected some Maggi samples from an outlet that stocks Nestle - the manufacturers of Maggi - products at Barabanki.

The samples were sent to a government laboratory in Gorakhpur for tests. The lab highlighted the presence of MSG (monosodium glutamate) in Maggi - which can lead to health problems in some consumers. To be doubly sure, Singh collected more samples and sent them for tests to the Gorakhpur lab. The reports were the same again.

He then notified Nestle about the irregularities. The company demanded a fresh test in the Central Food Laboratory in Calcutta. The Calcutta state-run lab found, in addition to MSG, a lead concentration of 17.2 parts per million (ppm), nearly eight times the permissible limit.

"When you get such disturbing reports about a product like Maggi which is consumed by millions of children, you cannot sit idle. After all, the work that we do is directly concerned with the health and well-being of the people," Singh holds. He raised the matter with his superiors, and soon it had become a nationwide issue - leading to the government's ban on Maggi last month.

The small and shabby FDA department - with just enough space for four to five people to sit - is where the action is in the UP town. Apart from this, there is nothing particularly striking about the district. The place is not small, though - it has six tehsils and covers an area of around 4,000 sqkm.

Barabanki was once an affluent centre of opium trade. But today it looks weary. A few old temples and run-down buildings remind a visitor of its past glory. The area is mostly dotted with small hutments and shops. Occasionally, you come across one or two small departmental stores and eateries. A few multi-storeyed buildings have come up, too. A huge clock tower in the middle of the town looks out of place - for time moves at a slow pace here.

But not at the office of the FDA, which has been the bane of the food adulterators' life, as well as a beacon of hope for the residents who regularly approach the department with complaints on food and drug adulteration.

"Whenever we get any complaint from the people we carry out investigations, collect samples and send them to the laboratory for tests. We regularly carry out drives against food items in which adulteration is mostly found - such as in vanaspati ghee, edible oil, pulses, fruits, packed foods, spices, confections and send them for tests to labs in Gorakhpur or Ghaziabad," Pandey says.

If the test reports show up nothing, the officers inform the manufacturers that their products conform to standards set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).

"If the test reports are adverse, we inform the manufacturers and if they want further tests we send the products to our referral lab in Calcutta. If the test reports from there come positive, we initiate action as per the law," Pandey adds.

Following an FSSAI directive, the department's efforts are now focused on collecting samples of other noodle brands such as Yippee of ITC, Knorr of Hindustan Unilever and Foodles of GlaxoSmithKline, and of varieties of macaroni and pasta. "We have not been selective," Singh explains.

Across Barabanki, the fear of contamination is visible. The popular Easy Day store, which stocks Nestle products, opposite the district magistrate's office, is almost empty in the evenings. The racks that were once packed with the ubiquitous yellow packets of Maggi noodles are also bare.

Notices on shops seek to assure customers that their products are safe. "Yahaan par asli maal milta hai (You get genuine products here)," some hoardings in Barabanki's markets scream.

The local community, clearly, worries about adulteration, which authorities say is at its peak during festivals such as Holi or Dussehra, when the sale of edible goods shoots up. In summer, when the production of milk decreases, adulteration in milk becomes a serious issue.

In a startling admission, the Uttar Pradesh government told the Supreme Court last year that adulteration of milk was rampant in the state and confessed that it had failed to take effective steps to curb it. The contaminants in milk include white paint, caustic soda, detergent, shampoo, urea, starch and blotting paper - which can seriously harm the heart, lungs and liver.

But officials stress that adulteration is not specific to Barabanki. Ram Araj Maurya, additional commissioner, FDA, UP government, points out that it is found in all the 75 districts of the state, as it is elsewhere in India.

"It is only that things get reported from here because we undertake regular drives against adulterated foods," adds additional district magistrate of Barabanki Prem Shankar Pal.

But because Barabanki is strategically located - it lies at the heart of the Awadh region, leading to seven districts - many believe that a nexus of politicians and criminals has been using the region as a laboratory. Officials fear that the adulteration takes place at the level of middlemen and unscrupulous traders. Sometimes, contaminants are added in the manufacturing unit itself.

A popular cold drink, Pal adds, showed the presence of insecticide in samples collected by FDA officials from its bottling plant in Barabanki last year. "The matter was reported to the company and action as per the law was taken," he says.

Barabanki is vulnerable to adulteration also because the area is not far from Lucknow and is on the route to Varanasi, with National Highway 28 passing through it, points out district magistrate Yogeshwar Ram Mishra.

"It is not by chance that the Maggi thing was reported from Barabanki. Adulteration is as routinely reported from Barabanki as it is from other districts. Barabanki is an important district and is not very far from the state capital; so such things keep happening," UP Food Commissioner Praveen Kumar Singh says.

Barabanki has also been levying penalties on food companies with adulterated products. "Since January 2015, we have collected around Rs 10.32 lakh as penalty. Last year, we contributed around Rs 12.29 lakh to the state exchequer. Both punitive and legal action is taken against offenders," Pal says .

According to a recent report by FSSAI, Uttar Pradesh led the country in penalties paid for food adulteration in 2014-15. Over Rs 2.5 crore was paid in penalties last fiscal year, with 1,223 of the 5,018 samples collected found to be contaminated. As many as 161 criminal and 1,457 civil cases were registered on food contamination charges, resulting so far in 83 convictions.

In comparison, West Bengal emerges as among the worst performing states when it comes to collecting and testing food samples. According to the annual food testing report for 2012-2013 (the latest figures available for West Bengal) by FSSAI, only 91 samples were collected and tested in the state. Forty-one samples were found adulterated or misbranded, but no cases were lodged against any of the offenders.

Bengal, clearly, is no Barabanki. But the district could well teach the rest of the country a lesson.

Danger

Some common adulterated items

• Packaged foods
• Vanaspati ghee
• Edible oil 
• Milk
• Spices
• Iodine salt
• Confections
• Molasses
• Fruits