Not another JPC

BS OPINION

However, the pesticide levels are well below what had been reported earlier by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), and also within the current norms for bottled water (no norms exist for soft drinks). These are mixed results, yet the government has gone out on a limb with an unqualified declaration that the drinks are safe.

Sushma Swaraj, the health minister, is technically correct of course, but safety standards are always relative and if the norms themselves are to be changed in a few months, and the companies may have to upgrade their plants to ensure that they meet the new norms, a more qualified statement would have been in order.

This is especially so since tests seem to yield highly varying findings. States like Kerala and Rajasthan have found nothing wrong with the drinks when they have done tests, but Maharashtra has, as did CSE of course.

Naturally, questions have been raised about testing equipment, procedures and sensitivity levels. Clearly, this is not the end of the story.

This much is understandable. What is not is the business of setting up a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). What a JPC will find that laboratory tests couldn't, is a mystery. Specifying the right kind of standards and ensuring compliance is the government's job, not that of a parliamentary panel.

Parliamentarians will benefit from sundry meetings at suitably salubrious locations, but surely this is reducing JPCs to a farce. Why not a JPC on unsafe drinking water everywhere, or the larger problem of setting proper standards and ensuring that they are adhered to? Perhaps they won't be as much fun as soft drinks.

The original protagonists, the Centre for Science and Environment as well as Pepsi Foods and Coca-Cola India, are both claiming victory. The companies are mightily relieved that they have enough to go into the market with, since they have an official certificate that their drinks are indeed safe.

But CSE has scored an important point on the larger issue of pesticide content in food, and focused attention on the quality standards that should be set for soft drinks, as it managed to do in the case of bottled water.

Perhaps the real winner then is the consuming public. If there is proper follow-up action, Indian foods and drinks will improve in quality and safety.

Some interesting discoveries have been made in the course of the fight. Quality standards do not exist for manufactured foods in most countries, and not just for soft drinks; they exist only for ingredients "" like water in the drinks, or sugarcane, not sugar.

And the levels of pesticides permitted in different foods (milk, tea, etc "" all many multiples more than water) are so divergent as to seem nonsensical.

The European Union (EU) (whose standards have been in the eye of the storm) seems to even distinguish between different fruits when it comes to stipulating pesticide content, with the tighter standards being for fruits, like mangoes, that the EU countries do not grow and are therefore imported from countries like India!

Indeed, the EU seems to have found that its farmers fail to meet the stipulated standards on food products 40 per cent of the time "" while EU bodies demand 100 per cent certification of compliance for imports!

Clearly, these technical standards are being used in many cases as trade barriers, and this is something that the commerce ministry should look at very carefully.