Lake City's crusade for rights

POKHARA: The Lake City has woken up to the adverse impact of expired, adulterated and inedible food stuffs on public health.

As part of the campaign aimed at stopping the production and sale of such stuffs, a District Monitoring Committee team comprising Nepal Police officials, quality controllers and representatives of the Consumers’ Forum Kaski raided a number of shops, businesses and industries, seizing and destroying date expired and adulterated edibles on Wednesday.

During the raid at the Ganeshtole-based Valley Foods, the team led by Acting Kaski Chief District Officer Devraj Dhakal unearthed some secrets.

It found that Valley Foods belonging to Loknath Bhandari had been mixing inedible colours with chemicals to produce ‘juicy’, a product meant for children. Subsequently, it destroyed 10 sacks of juicy.

On top of it, the team found that Valley Foods had been running the establishment without getting permission from government authorities concerned.

What’s more, it was found to have been producing sauce and squash.

In another raid, the team seized inedible rice, biscuits and spices from Binaya Kumar and Mahendra Kumar Stores at Chipledhunga and destroyed the items. The team seized over 61 sacks of rice from the stores upon finding that production and expiry dates were not written on the sacks.

In the wake of unabated production and sale of inedibles, a District Monitoring Committee meeting held under the chairmanship of Kaski Chief District Officer Shambhu Koirala has decided to monitor the market once a week to protect gullible consumers.

According to Kapil Koirala, chairman of the Consumers’ Forum Kaski, the team will be monitoring dairies and industries producing oil, rice, biscuits and noodles, chocolates. He vowed to punish all those involved in the production and sale of inedible, expired and stale foodstuffs as per the Consumers Protection Act 2054. “We must punish anyone found to be playing with consumers’ health,” said a food supervisor.