The recent concern over the safety of food and drinking water is justified, but misdirected. The food and drinking water in India may be the most unsafe and contaminated in the modern civilised world but the products of the multinationals, even if they do not conform to US or European standards, are surely the safest products available in this country.The right to life guaranteed by the Constitution and the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 impose on the Ministry of Health, Government of India, the obligation of protecting the health of the citizens of this country by enforcing scientifically determined standards of safety in all products of food and drinking water. Not just in colas or packaged drinking water.However, the government has not implemented provisions in the Act necessary to enable producers over the entire food chain to comply with such standards. The provisions require it to notify in the official gazette the methods of analysis to be used, for instance, and to establish a nationwide network of accredited laboratories in which samples can be tested. Nor does government use the powers conferred on it by the Act to license all producers, processors, distributors and vendors, and to prescribe conditions in such licenses to ensure safety, hygiene and sanitation.The government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the health of its citizens by removing the water used for drinking and cooking from the purview of the Act. By making compliance mandatory with arbitrarily selected commercial standards, the Act prescribes, for example, the minimum content of oil in pickles, the maximum content of crude fibre in curry powder. These mandatory commercial standards are arbitrary, they are not formulated on the basis of scientific investigations. They are formulated so that they are impossible for all but a minority of favoured producers to comply with. A classic example is the commercial standard that imposes a mandatory minimum six month jail sentence for the sale of wholesome fresh milk containing less than 3.5 per cent fat and 8.5 per cent non fat solids — a commercial standard formulated so that it is near impossible for small producers of fresh milk to comply with. The net effect is to restrict the flow of fresh milk into the market and to enable the state-sponsored cooperatives to establish monopolies for the ambiguous mixture of powdered milk, water and chemicals they sell as ‘toned milk’.The Act, as implemented, causes suffering and injustice to citizens who are denied safe food and drinking water, and to thousands of small producers and vendors who are prosecuted on the basis of the arbitrary analysis of samples by public analysts, for ‘‘contravention’’ of commercial standards. Commercial standards are intended to facilitate trade, the contravention of such standards may be treated as commercial fraud. India is the only country which treats the contravention of commercial standards as criminal offences.
