The culprits are not the Maggi and Yupee producers alone, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the nodal governmental agency responsible to ensure the quality awareness as well as assurance in the country, has much to deserve for their negligence. They were required to sensitise both the people through media and the producers about the issues involved in the nutriments’ ingredient declaration.

A brief scan of the official website of the FSSAI shows it does not update media connection after 2012 notifications. Nor are there enough case-to-case report documents prepared for general scanners such as consumers, researchers, media, judicial activists, social workers, and the diaspora in various countries, who use these products. In food products for mass consumption, a slight amount of carelessness may cause irreparable loss of life and health.

But this is India. Everything here is governed by the “chalta hai” gang-up culture. Screening of ingredients during the processes of the production, training of the personnel responsible for production, the chemists engaged in the production houses all are required to be trained and monitored relentlessly during the processes of the production, and that is perhaps the last cry in the FSSAI. It is expected that the FSSAI should train the personnel on their job at their shop-floors and monitor them relentlessly when it matters public health due to mass consumption.

For over two decades, these products have been marketed as healthy diets for the children. In most households in the country, mothers till recently stocked these products as quick healthy foods to meet their dear ones’ hunger and happy feelings. Sadly they are now made to suffer the mortification of having been the handle to cater the healthcare hazards to them, which today is irreparable.

Healthcare quality is the one of the most neglected aspects in Indian standards. The government’s agencies over the decades had finished their jobs by just affixing their rubber stamps on the food packets, and depended on what had been claimed by the manufacturers. The children’s choice fast foods, packed snacks like Kurkurey, Lay etc., are just other danger-foods lurking to cause national health hazard for a long term basis.

The question that stalks us every day, is why, and just why, this country systematically fails to the vested interests in trade and marketing, who meticulously palm wrong things off to the masses for quick monies? These profits are filthy, soaked in helpless children’s blood. Just how long, the governments of this country would remain callous and helpless onlookers?

There lurk a number of issues about milk and dairy products, which are another group of staple foods for the masses. Doubts often arise in many parts of the country over originality of loose mustard oil, coconut oil, spices, atta, maida, soda, and the healthcare quality thereof supplied by grocers in the open market, and even their packed units. The monitoring agencies function natural connivers to the evil manufacturers just as much as the city-based drug inspectors behave by looking other way when spurious drugs are found to have caused deaths.

Recent alert in Chandigarh about the use of spurious drugs in pregnancy has caused a new ripple in the mind of the consumers. The application of spurious hydroxyprogesterone caproate is just another glaring case that makes good citizens sit up. The medication through hydroxyprogestrone caproate is used in the prenatal care of a woman pregnant with a single baby, and who delivered a pre-term baby. The drug is used to help in lowering the risk of having a pre-term baby again. At higher dosage it is administered to help animals to breed.

But the drug is produced from female hormone (progestin) through man-made processes. Physiologically it is never known yet as how it works to prevent the pre-term births.

In recent raids, thanks this time to some alert in the government agencies, in Patiala, Amritsar and Sangrur, the hydroxyprogesterone caproate was found being used for humans in doses prescribed for animals. Apparently, the blunders had occurred while producing the drug through human processes.

You cannot control sales of spurious drugs if the manufacturers and the drug inspectors function hand-in-glove. What is required is the awareness of quality norms, and rigid surveillance of the style of functioning of the drug inspectors.

In all these, India suffers from over democratisation at work places. There are either more or less number of handlers of a process for production, and seldom the just required. Negligence creep in the work style as a natural process in both cases, if there is not innate tendency to corrupt.

The government today seems to have larger share of responsibilities. First it is necessary that the entire processes for production be made transparent, ignoring what the producers often clamour as trade secret. There cannot be any trade secret guarantee when it matters the condition of the mass public health.

It is also necessary that medicines be sold in generic terms and strength just as in most advanced nations. This would ensure the doctors to decide easily about the efficacy of the dosage of a drug. Multiple branding under arguments of trade secrecy and sophistication are indeed the easiest road to corruption. Soon this develops a nexus of the producers, suppliers, doctors, and chemists.

For food stuff targeting mass consumption – such as Maggi and Yupee noodles, groceries, packed items – it is necessary that the ingredients be printed with adequate details including the types of minerals, the solvents, proteins used for production. For non-beef and non-pork eaters protein content in a mass food items is a constant worry, as production is often guided by vested political interests.

In fact quality in healthcare comes from basics in processes. (IPA Service)