Goa, Puducherry Safest Places To Buy Your Milk; AP Too Fares Well
New Delhi: Beware, your daily glass of good health could actually be doing you harm. In the 33-state study, milk was found adulterated with detergent, fat and even urea, besides the age-old practice of diluting it with water. Across the country, 68.4% of the samples were found contaminated.
Only in Goa and Puducherry did 100% of the samples tested conform to required standards. At the other end were West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Mizoram, where not a single sample tested met the prescribed norms.
In the national capital New Delhi, as much as 70% of milk samples picked up by a government agency failed to conform to standards. Of the 71 samples randomly taken from Delhi for testing by the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), 50 were found to be contaminated with glucose and skim milk powder (SMP), which is usually added to milk in the lean season to enhance volumes.
Other prominent states fared just a shade better. Around 89% of the samples tested from Gujarat, 83% from Jammu & Kashmir, 81% from Punjab, 76% from Rajasthan, 70% from Delhi and Haryana and 65% from Maharashtra failed the test. Around half of the samples from Madhya Pradesh (48%) also meet a similar fate.
States with comparatively better results included Kerala where 28% of samples did not conform to the FSSAI standards, Karnataka (22%), Tamil Nadu (12%) and Andhra Pradesh (6.7%).
The samples for testing were collected randomly and analysed from 33 states totaling a sample size of 1,791. These were sent to government laboratories like Department of Food and Drug Testing of Puducherry, Central Food Laboratory in Pune, Food Reasearch and Standardization Laboratory in Ghaziabad, State Public Health Laboratory in Guwahati and Central Food Laboratory, Kolkata, for testing against the presence of common adulterants such as fat, neutralizers, hydrogen peroxide, sugar, starch, glucose, urea, detergent, formalin and vegetable fat.
Just around 31.5% of the total samples tested (565) conformed to the FSSAI standards while the rest 1,226 (68.4%) failed the test.
Detergent was found in 103 samples (8.4%). “This was mainly because the milk tanks were not properly washed. Detergents in milk can cause serious health problems,” FSSAI official told TOI.
The non-conforming samples in rural areas numbered 381 (31%) out of which 64 (16.7%) were packet milk and 317 (83.2%) were loose samples.
In urban areas, the number of non-confirming samples were 845 (68.9%) out of which 282 (33.3%) were packed and 563 (66.6%) were loose.
The most common adulteration was that of fat and solid not food (SNF), found in 574 (46.8%) of the non-conforming samples. This, scientists say, is because of dilution of milk with water.
The second highest parameter of non-conformity was skim milk powder (SMP) in 548 samples (44.69%) which includes presence of glucose in 477 samples. Glucose would have been added to milk probably to enhance SNF.
“The study indicates that addition of water to milk is most common adulterant,” the report on the findings said. “Addition of water not only reduces the nutritional value of milk but contaminated water may also pose health risk to consumers. It also shows that powdered milk is reconstituted to meet the demand of milk supply.”
The report asked state enforcement authorities to regularly check whether the new FSSAI rules are being complied with. “The study also indicated the presence of detergent in some cases. Consumption of milk with detergent may cause health hazards and indicates lack of hygiene and sanitation in milk handling,” it said. Times View
This only confirms that food adulteration is common in India. Even milk, consumed primarily by children, isn’t spared. What’s particularly worrying is the kind of substances used to adulterate, including toxic chemicals. This shows that the trade off between the risk of getting caught and the ‘reward’ of huge profits is skewed heavily in favour of the latter. The government must focus on raising the risks to the adulterator. One way of doing this is by hiking the penalty, including making it analogous to attempt to murder in extreme cases. It’s equally important to regularly check foodstuff for adulteration and ensure speedy trials.
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