The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) on Monday conducted lightning inspections at food safety offices across the State, flagging the peril to public health caused by the department’s “graft-induced willful neglect” in enforcing nutrition safety standards.
Under the title ‘Operation Health-Wealth’, anti-corruption investigators descended on food safety commissioner’s offices in 14 districts almost simultaneously, including the State headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, following a spate of public complaints and in the wake of several food poisoning incidents that resulted in scores of hospitalisations and, in a few cases, death.
The officers found that the enforcers took bribes to paper over damning food safety laboratory findings against hoteliers serving “unsafe, substandard and misbranded” fare. Some corrupt officials supplanted stale food samples collected from hotels with standard fare to insulate the erring establishments from the law.
The VACB’s preliminary findings seemed to confirm the perception that entrenched corruption had blunted bold food safety enforcement.
Several regional food testing laboratories lacked mandatory National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration (NABL) accreditation for their testimonies to have legal traction in court. The glaring loophole has helped those serving low-quality food prepared in unsanitary conditions repeatedly evade the law.
The court threw out hundreds of spoiled food cases because safety inspectors did not “deliberately collect” proper samples for testing, including in a high-profile case relating to contaminated packaged protein supplied to primary-school children.
By some estimates, only 24% of hotels in Kerala had a food safety licence or registration, and an estimated 70% of hotels operated outside the State’s food safety surveillance net.
Only a small per cent of wayside eateries and mobile food carts possessed government permits. The Comptroller and Audit General (CAG)‘s audit found that most GST-registered hotels lacked food safety licences.
The government had come under fire from the Opposition for poor enforcement, stating that Kerala had slipped the national food safety ranking from first to seventh.
Manoj Abraham, Director, VACB; Harshitha Attaluri, IG, VACB; and E. S. Biju Mon, SP, VACB-Intelligence, led the operation.
