During the festive season, the decreasing quality of food products and beverages is a matter of serious concern adding to the woes of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) department.
The issue of food adulteration continues to remain in discussions every year in Haryana as every year around 30 per cent of the food samples fail to meet the required criteria in terms of food quality requiring the state government to come up necessary steps in a bid to tighten to noose the around the neck of violators breaching the norms. It is learnt that a string of factors, especially the staff crunch do emerge as the main reason responsible for the decreasing food quality.
In wake of this, the FDA has come up with a plan to deal with the shortage of staff and in this bid, the veterinary surgeons of the Animal Husbandry and Dairying department were permitted to check the food samples. After getting the approval of the government, the way to overcome the shortage of staff was cleared to some extent, but now the problem is that the veterinary doctors approved by the concerned department and to be deputed in FDA are not being relieved by the mother department. The issue continues to prevail and things remain unchanged.
Following the approval by the Chief Minister and the Chief Secretary, the FDA has not allotted the quota of veterinary surgeons so far which raises questions over the functioning of the concerned department.
The list of the veterinary surgeons which will be deployed on deputation in FDA includes the names of Dr. Ramesh Chandra , Dr. Pankaj Sharma, Dr. Pradeep Kumar, Dr. Pawan Chahal, Dr. Birender Singh, Dr. Azad Singh, Dr. Surendra Singh Juneja, Dr. Rajesh Verma, Dr. Rajeev Nagar, Dr. Yogesh Kumar, Amit Kumar and Dr. Gaurav. Out of the above, Dr. Azad Singh and Dr. Surendra Verma are currently deployed in the Directorate of Panchkula, while the duty of the other 10 veterinarians is in the Animal Husbandry Department in different districts.
Pertaining to the matter, Avneet P Kumar, an IAS who holds portfolio of Commissioner, Animal Husbandry and Dairying Department was contacted but could not be reached. In view of the shortage of posts in the department, applications were invited for 26 posts of Drug Controllers Officials around two years ago and the issue got stuck in high court due to legal aspects resulting in cancellation of the recruitment then.
Following this, an advertisement was sought for the fresh recruitment of Food Safety Officials to fill 41 posts lying vacant last year.
Amid this, what came to fore is that a lot of objections have been lodged and received by the department regarding the eligibility criteria of Food and Drug Safety officers.
Although, the officials of the department out rightly rejected such allegations saying that the rules of the Food Safety Standards Authority of India have been followed regarding the qualification.