Kathmandu Post

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Sweet and foul

SEP 08 -
Urbanisation and demands of modern life means that most people are compelled to eat outside our kitchens on a regular basis.  Besides food, we also consume many goods whose quality and safety we assume are being monitored by the agencies entrusted with doing so.  Recent revelations about prominent sweet producers in Kathmandu show that we need to be more vigilant. The Gudpak stores in New Road, we have seen, used utterly foul ingredients, including rotten sweets and sewage water, to produce the famous Gudpak of Kathmandu. The abominable acts of greedy businessmen who played with the health of hundreds of thousands of people must be punished as severely as allowed by the law. Gudpak from New Road, it must be added, was not merely a Kathmandu thing. People travelling to Kathmandu often took it back home with them as a gift to family and relatives. It was supposed to be a sweet treat from Kathmandu. Not this year — the revelation have succeeded in giving sweets in general a bad reputation. 

Every year, at the beginning of the festival season, the government performed perfunctory quality checks on some shops, hotels and restaurant.  This year was slightly different. Pressure was mounting from consumer rights advocates, as well as the parliamentary committee on finance and labor relations, to crackdown on sub-standard practices.  Some parliamentarians themselves went to check production facilities and advised the government to increase monitoring. As a result a joint monitoring team that included the police, officials from the Department of Commerce, consumer rights activists and the CDO office caught the sweet vendor (Corner Taaja Gudpak Bhandar, Sri Krishna Gudpak, Anmol Catering & Sweets) and a ghee supplier (Kanhaiya Ghee) who were using foul and rotten substances to make sweets. Lab reports on the ghee have already shown that it contained only animal fat. The CDO office is taking them businesses to its office and charging them under the Black Marketing  and Social Offence Act.

This kind of monitoring should happen round the year. Besides food, there are other areas which are in need of heightened monitoring. The costs of neglecting quality control in health and medicines, for examples, are extremely high. Consumer protection goes beyond cracking down on sweet producers. Poor construction materials endanger lives of people for years. Public transport is another area that would benefit from monitoring, and so are petroleum products and telecom services. But the Department of Commerce office in charge of quality control complains of insufficient workforce and inadequate laws to take immediate action. There is also the question of security, there are high chances of confrontations during inspections. It is essential that the relevant agencies, which also includes the Department of Food Technology and Quality Control under the Ministry of Commerce and supplies, are fully equipped to protect the consumers. Otherwise, dishonest businesses will continue to cheat their customers and play with health and safety of the masses. 

Posted on: 2011-09-09 09:23

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