CAG: Quality of food testing laboratories suspect

India's food certification process came under the scanner on Tuesday with the Comptroller and Auditor General showing that as many as 65 of the 72 testing laboratories are functioning without an accreditation from the official agency.

The same is true for eight of the 16 referral laboratories that operate without a certificate from the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration.

"The quality of testing by 65 out of 72 state food laboratories and 8 of the 16 referral laboratories can't be assured," the CAG said in its report tabled in Parliament. Most of these laboratories are state-level units.

The government auditor also pulled up the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India for its failure to stop import of unsafe food.

The CAG said it found licences were issued on the basis of incomplete documents in more than 50% of cases.

A test check of five state licensing authorities and three central licensing authorities found that in 3,119 out of 5,915 test checked cases, licences had been issued to the food business operators on the basis of incomplete documents. As many as 15 out of the 16 test checked food laboratories did not have qualified food analysts.

The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 came nearly a decade ago in order to consolidate multiple laws related to food safety and to put in place an effective regulator.

But even after a decade of enactment of the legislation, the Union Health Ministry and FSSAI failed to finalise the recruitment rules, leading to acute shortage of regular staff at various levels because of which the FSSAI made unauthorised appointments on contract.

The ministry sanctioned 356 posts for FSSAI at various levels, out of which there are only 115 regular staff as on December 2016. FSSAI appointed 261 contractual staff who run the lion's share of the food regulator's regular work.

To test whether the penalty is collected from violators, the auditor test checked 10 cases between 2011 and 2016 in which nearly Rs 13 crore penalty was imposed on the food business operators. Around Rs 7 crore was deposited by the operators to the FSSAI, but the agency failed to retrieve the balance Rs 6 crore.