This festival season if you unfortunately consumed any adulterated food items purchased from any sweetshops then one would have to wait long to get it proved to be spurious.
The reason is that Jharkhand has only one labouratory having license of National Accreditation Board for testing and certification of Laboratories (NABL). Long pending of samples collected for tests causes delay in testing of samples of eatables from sweet shops collected by food safety officers posted at different districts during festival season.
Giving details Abhishek Anand food safety officer of Dhanbad admitted that there happens to delay in tests of collected food items .
Anand said, the Ranchi based state Food and Drugs Laboratory located at Namkum till recently was not accredidated by NABL thus we used to send samples to Kolkata based NABL Accriedatates lab for test. This was main reason of delay as there used to long queue for tests.
The Namkoom lab now has received accreditation but as its only approved lab in state for testing food items here too there happens to be some delay, he said.
Anand informed that during Durga puja samples collected from different shops were sent to Kolkata and results still are awaited. After that now we are sending samples to Ranchi since it got approval.
The on the spot food testing facility through mobile van based labouratory that was made available for Deoghar and Dhanbad is inoperative since long in absence of a trained food testing lab technician, told Anand.