Bhubaneswar: The state seems to be faltering on food testing exercise meant to detect adulteration, contamination and misbranding in consumable food and beverages used by the public.
Latest available data from the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), New Delhi claim that Odisha is among the worst performers in the country when it comes to testing food samples.
FSSAI records of all India-food testing statistics claim that while several states were able to test more than 10,000 food samples in a year, Odisha was not able to test even 1000 samples in a year, hinting at the apathy of the government on food safety.
The central food safety monitoring agency, formed after the Food Safety Standards Act 2006, claims that Odisha was also one of the states with the least number of penal cases against adulterators. This comes at a time when states like Madhya Pradesh has made food adulteration a crime eligible for punishments like life imprisonment.
The last published FSSAI data of 2018-19 claimed that Uttar Pradesh proved to be the best performing state in terms of testing. It examined 13,567 samples in a year and found 5663 samples adulterated. The state also filed 5101 civil cases and 375 cases against erring units. It also saw convictions in 1273 such cases.
Gujarat analysed 11,329 samples and found 839 cases of adulteration/misbranding and filed cases against 559 persons. Similarly Maharashtra was able to test 10,003 samples and found 2529 samples adulterated/misbranded and it filed cases against 1256 persons.
Several other states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Haryana and others tested samples between 5000 and 1300.
Manish Kumar, OP
