Food inspectors: More teeth please

It is difficult to locate the Department of Food and Safety inside the women’s police station complex in Sector 29, Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Two tables, five chairs and a few almirahs make up the office of a department that has to ensure that over 650,000 people do not suffer on account of poor- quality food and drink and its associated health hazards. As the clock inches closer to 5 pm, Shiv Nath Singh, the food safety officer here, hurries through his remaining paperwork. In ten minutes, he is all set for a raid-cum-inspection at a hospital cafeteria in nearby Sector 26. The owner has not been forewarned. Parking his Wagon R outside of the hospital, Singh heads straight to the cafeteria, swiftly slipping on gloves and a hygiene cap. Before anyone in the cafeteria can react, he walks straight into the kitchen. “I am from the Food Safety Department and have come here for an inspection,” he announces, “Ask your manager and chef to come out.”

For the next one-and-a-half hours, Singh questions the staff about their ingredients, instructs them to put expiry dates on all raw material, tastes all the prepared food, and orders unattended food to be binned. He misses nothing— from the changing room for workers to the water supply. Finally, he pulls out a three-page form and fills it with all the details. He hands a copy to the manager with the instruction that all the improvements be done in two days. “I will have to come here one more time to check whether they have improved or not. Lack of knowledge also leads to wrong practices. That’s why I always give offenders some time to implement the recommended changes,” he says. At around 6.30 pm, he leaves the premises. “I am not finished yet, as I have to upload the renewed licence on the website. There was no electricity in our office. I will do it from home now,” he smiles.

Before the Maggi noodles controversy and ban (in several states), few had heard of food inspectors as they went about their jobs. But now, these employees of the state government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) know that what they do could make news headlines. As a result, food inspectors across the country are now scrambling to collect samples of anything and everything. In Mumbai, samples are being collected even as the city is inundated with rain,and laboratories have been instructed that all testing has to be done on a war footing. “This is not something our department has done for the first time. We keep doing things like this. It is just that this time, the product [under the scanner] was a popular item such as Maggi,” says Vineet Kumar, the designated officer (DO) in charge of Noida and Ghaziabad.

Their hero of the moment is Sanjay Singh, a food safety officer of Barabanki district in UP who first raised the Maggi alarm. “Lots of queries are now coming in after the Maggi revelation, especially about noodles,” says Kumar, “Those who consume packaged noodles are mostly of the educated class and they are more demanding of quality. We have also sent noodles samples from both Noida and Ghaziabad to the laboratory.” A Chemistry graduate with a BTech in food technology, Kumar was always interested in the production of edibles. After working for almost five years in the private sector, he joined government service in his home state of UP in 1988. “A lot has changed since then,” Kumar observes. Before the Food Safety and Standard Act, 2006, was passed in 2011, all that regulated food was the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, and food inspectors were supposed to collect five samples a month and send these for lab tests; if something was awry, they needed clearance from the district chief medical officer to take action. The new law gave them some teeth. For offences where a penalty can be imposed, the case is dealt with at the Sub-Divisional Magistrate court with the DO’s okay. Also, only a DO can instruct that a criminal case be filed for offences punishable under the Indian Penal Code. The 2011 law also created new posts in the FDA: the ‘food inspector’ was now the ‘food safety officer’, and the DO’s post—reporting to the district magistrate (DM)—was instituted to supervise work. The Act of 2011 also set up the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), a Central entity whose norms all safety officers must follow.

The controversy over exercise Maggi has revealed shortcomings in the system. Many state governments, under which FDAs operate, do not have good enough food testing labs; most are poorly equipped and have to rely on the Centre’s FSSAI-run and approved ones.

Test results are delayed more often than not, complains S Partha, a food safety officer in Maharashtra who has been trying for two days to nail a well-known hotelier. The government lab, he has been told, will take another two days to deliver its results. “This is where the system is all wrong,” he mutters, “Why can’t they give us results quickly?”

Cooperation between various arms of of food safety governance can be an issue too. When the recent brouhaha broke, the Karnataka government swung into action seizing samples of the Nestle- made product, but it soon had egg on its face; the state Health Minister UT Khader declared that the seized packets would be tested at the Central Food and Technological Research Institute in Mysore, but its director refused to test the samples citing ‘jurisdictional’ problems.

Adding to the confusion, many state departments’ turfs tend to overlap, and almost all lack manpower and basic infrastructure. While the Commercial Taxes Department comes into the picture if a bill is not furnished by a food seller, the Weights and Measures Department checks pack quantities, expiry dates and whether products are being sold at or under MRPs. However, the quality of food products is the issue here, and while state health department officials do check samples, their time is taken up in random-testing the state’s mid-day meal scheme, monitoring the trade of illegal meat, investigating petty complaints, stamping out milk adulteration and so on. It’s a lot of work, without adequate staff to do it.

“Right from issuing food licences to vendors, collecting samples from the market, inspecting food joints and mid-day meals to preparing reports, we have to do everything,” says Kumar.“I divide my work days between both the districts I am in charge of.” Their work is hampered by problems like erratic electricity, and work sometimes comes to a standstill. “We can’t take a printout and upload licences online,” says Singh. “We do file-entries to utilise time.” Every officer is usually assigned an area and looks after roughly 3,000-4,000 vendors. “It is simply not possible to inspect all vendors in a month,” says Kumar. “We need more manpower, but we can’t ask the government. We have to somehow make do with the existing strength.”

When it comes to conducting raids and inspections, things don’t get any easier. “We don’t have a vehicle. The local police do not cooperate with us. At times it is very risky,” says Kumar. He recalls how angry traders surrounded him once when he entered a local mandi to collect samples. “If we are out for work, we will do it come what may,” he adds. Currently, one officer in UP collects around 15-20 samples every month and inspects 50 odd premises. The workload spikes during festive seasons, when reports of adulterated milk products used in sweets make news in various parts of the country. “That’s the only time in a year that people come to hear of a food safety officer,” laments Kumar. In his 16 years of service as one, he has witnessed several cases of adulteration. “It is difficult to say which food fraud is the gravest. Right from synthetic milk to fake spice products, I have seen it all,” he says. His only regret is that the law could have harsher punishments for offenders. In his opinion, “They are more dangerous than gangsters or robbers as they play with life itself and people blindly trust them.” The earlier Adulteration law had a provision for a minimum punishment. Under the new law, there is no such provision. According to Kumar, this lets offenders off so lightly that they are not deterred.

Since business interests are at stake, food safety officers must also worry about their own personal safety. “The job of a food inspector is never successful without a public outcry,” says Ganesh, a food inspector from Maharasthra, “But I can’t be too gung-ho over taking on multinationals. I am the only breadwinner in my family with many loans to repay. I have to understand my limitations. The government has many holy cows and I am not keen on losing my job.” He adds that most of his colleagues earn rather little, and most are wary of most of the food available for sale. “My family does not eat out at all,” he says, “No vada pav, no bhel, no pizza, no sweets… My children have grown up on roti, sabzi, dal and salad. Whatever they want to eat is made at home.” Having acquired these traits after he joined the department, it is now difficult for him to eat food even at the homes of his rural relatives. On the job, he restricts himself to eating bananas, since these cannot be ‘adulterated’.

Most commercially available food in India sells in the so-called ‘unorganised sector’, which also sees its share of food mafia wars. Says a Karnataka food safety officer: “Milk in Tamil Nadu’s Salem is adulterated with a mix of skimmed milk powder, caustic soda, water and very little fresh milk. Fat is removed from fresh milk illegally and the chilled milk is then mixed with adulterated milk; as a result, the SNF and fat content is way below prescribed standards. It is then transported in milk tins overnight and costs 50 per cent less than fresh milk. Hotels in Bengaluru use this for their roaring coffee and tea business, and it is a health hazard. Despite crackdowns both in Salem and Bangalore by police and health officials, the mafia uses innovative means like changing routes, transporting it on bus roof tops, or even on two wheelers across the border.”

The officer speaks of a thriving trade in dead chicken. He says that 10-15 per cent of broilers do not survive to be sold live at local stalls. A mafia collects these dead chicken and sells them at a much lower cost to eateries that sell chicken biryani and fried chicken. While a live bird is sold at Rs 160-180 per kg at fresh retail stalls, the dead birds are sold for as little as Rs 30 per bird.

As it happens, the public attention surrounding Maggi has not only highlighted the perils of bad food, it has translated into a handful of positive results for some states’ FDAs. In UP, for example, Kumar and his team have already sent samples of Mother Dairy milk with some confirmed reports of adulteration. Two samples, one of Popcorn Candy flavour and another of Nestle Cerelac, have also been sent to an FSSAI-authorised lab for further testing. “I suspected that some colour is being mixed in the popcorn,” says Singh, who picked up the sample.

However, kirana store owners paint a different picture. “Overzealous inspectors take away samples of loose grain and lentils for adulteration. They also check on whether the packaged sunflower oil that is being sold is indeed sunflower oil. It is a packed item sourced from distributors. If it is of inferior quality, they should raid the wholesaler and manufacturer instead of fining me,” says Madhu P, a grocer in Bengaluru who recently had to pay a fine of Rs 500 for stocking ‘low grade stuff’. “All this new awareness has become harassment. I also paid Rs 2,000 in fines to the Commercial Taxes Department for not furnishing bills to customers and a Rs 200 fine to the civic body for allegedly stocking plastic bags below 40 microns. These were old plastic bags that I no longer use but had kept in a rack and had forgotten to dispose of,” adds Madhu.

Supermarkets too are up in arms against Karnataka’s FDA. A few months ago, after a Reliance Fresh outlet in Bengaluru was fined for stocking expired products, the staff have gone on protest. “Inspectors come regularly and expect some products as gifts to file a compliance report. It could be a pack of razor blades or a cheap perfume,” complains one manager.

Such ‘sob stories’ are common, says a Weights and Measures officer in Bengaluru. “We regularly get two to three cases of wrong labelling every week, but the companies always challenge them and get away. The flaw is that if an expired product is being sold, we impose a fine, but if there is wrong labelling, the companies simply claim it was defective labelling or old labels. The only way to check is to cook samples. But by the time lab reports come in, the product would have already sold to thousands.”

Some FDA officers say that all the fervour over food safety will soon die a natural death once inspectors realise how rare cases like Maggi are. In Mumbai, for example, despite finding that 70 per cent of street food tests positive for e-coli, they have no hope of ever banning it. “There will be such a public outcry if we ban street food in Mumbai. It is the lifeline of the city. They might be fined for unsafe practices, but a complete ban cannot hold,” says an official of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corp. In the post-Maggi scenario, this is where food inspectors begin to lose their enthusiasm—and bite.

About The Author

Haima Deshpande in Mumbai and Anil Budur Lulla in Bengaluru