The Bengal Government will not junk Maggi notwithstanding a ban of the instant food imposed by other States, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Friday.
Dwelling on the issue, Banerjee told the State Assembly that the tests conducted by the laboratories had found no excess content of lead and MSG in the samples taken a few days ago. “There is no point in faulting someone with no fault found” said the CM, adding that her Government had decided against banning the product for now.
The State Government had earlier collected samples of Maggi noodles after the Food and Drug Administration of India had directed all the State Government to test the amount of lead and MSG in Maggi after tests conducted by the UP Government found that MSG content in the product was far higher that the permissible limits.
Subsequently, Governments of Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Bihar, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh etc banned the product. Banerjee’s refusal to ban the product immediately led the opposition to complain “what rest of India thinks today Bengal under Mamata Banerjee thinks tomorrow.”
State Opposition leader Suryakanto Mishra said “this is a decision which in itself is a record set by the this Government,” adding “where the rest of the country takes precaution against spurious products in order to save the citizens this Government stands by defaulters.”
Incidentally environmentalist Subhas Dutta said the State Government had no proper infrastructure to check such items wondering whether the Government should have at least temporarily banned the product till further instructions coming in from the Centre.
Narrating the poor infrastructural state of food and civil supplies department sources said that a large number of posts of food inspectors were lying vacant.
“In Kolkata Corporation there are only nine such officials functioning” sources said, adding the inadequacy of infrastructure and lack of penalty can be measured by statistics available for the years 2011-12 and 2012-2015. While out of 90 samples tested in 2011-2012 41 were found spurious and between 2012 and 2015 only 110 samples were tested. In terms of penalty imposed on the erring sellers: while Gujarat and Kerala were found to have imposed fines of Rs55 lakh on erring businessmen the figure for Bengal was nil.