Food safety muddle

After dithering for nearly a year over the enforcement of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, the government had to finally yield to the Supreme Court's pressure, and commit that the statute will be notified by the end of this year. The Act has been keenly awaited by the food-processing industry, which has to cope with multiplicity of laws and regulatory authorities. After the new law comes into effect, as many as eight existing pieces of legislation concerning food adulteration, manufacturing and trade will get repealed, and some others will become defunct as they will get merged into the new integrated law.

However, the Act can be a mixed blessing for the food sector as a whole. Certain provisions may create problems for road-side food vendors and hawkers as well as some bigger players like the beverages manufacturers, which are already under intense scrutiny for pesticides residues. In fact, this may have been among the reasons for the government's reluctance to expedite the notification of the Act. This is also indicated by the fact that, instead of following the normal practice of formulating rules under the law at the ministry concerned, the government has chosen to hand over the job to a committee. And, going by the government's own statement at the apex court, this committee has met only once so far.

The potentially controversial provisions of the new legal measure are the imposition of the same standards on the organised and unorganised food sectors; excluding water supplied by the civic bodies from the purview of this law; and empowering local officials to suspend the licence or registration of any food operator "" big or small. It is obvious that the street vendors and road-side food sellers will be unable to adhere to the quality, packaging and ingredient specification standards as expected of the factory foods. Nor would they be able to fulfil norms for traceability of adulterants and toxic residues and recall of products, if found sub-standard. No doubt, such measures are desirable from the viewpoint of customers of even the unorganised food sector as they, too, have a right to good and hygienic food. But practical difficulties in ensuring this cannot be wholly disregarded. What also needs to be borne in mind is that such a situation generally tends to breed corruption, besides perpetuating the inspector raj. This apart, there seems little justification for sparing the civic water supplying agencies from the onus of supplying safe and contamination-free potable water.

In view of all this, the government seems to be in a real bind over how to go about it. Having gone through the entire legislative drill, including securing the President's approval, the new law cannot be put on hold for ever. Even the Supreme Court is unlikely to allow this to happen. The best course, therefore, would be to frame the guidelines for its enforcement in such a manner that the desired quality and hygiene standards are enforced with least harassment. And, an amendment bill can be introduced to rectify the flaws in the statute, if required.