These 11 tea estates now ensure better food safety and hygiene standards of food handling establishments operating in the region
In alignment with the Eat Right India vision, 11 Tea Estates from the North East region have now joined the Eat Right Campus Certification Programme.
A felicitation ceremony was organised by the FSSAI Eastern and North Eastern Region office in Dibrugarh District Planters Club, Assam yesterday, in a joint effort with Guwahati and Indian Tea Association (ITA) and GAIN, an international NGO working in the field of nutrition as an implementing partner.
Representatives from 11 tea estates namely Balijan North, Bokel, Basmatia, Chabua, Dikom, Kharjan, Namroop, Nahorkutia, Nahortoli, Nokhroy and Sealkootee were felicitated during the ceremony.
With Eat Right Campus certification, these 11 tea estates now ensure better food safety and hygiene standards of food handling establishments operating in the region, awareness amongst tea workers around safe, healthy and nourishing diets in longer run by improving behavioural aspects for creating and maintaining a safe and healthy food culture for people in these premises.
The certification process involved training and awareness session for food handlers, estates management, along with awareness sessions for the worker communities. Basis benchmarks identified by FSSAI in the form of a detailed checklist, an elaborative exercise was conducted to arrive at the implementation based on gap analysis conducted in series of pre-audits.
The estates were finally audited by a third-party auditing agency, empanelled by FSSAI for compliance of standards achieved over a protractive period of one year. The standards achieved were found to be far excellence in- spite of challenges in the region, COVID-19 pandemic, and production loss for the tea estates.
CEO FSSAI, Arun Singhal highlighted that FSSAI is gearing up to scale up its ‘Eat Right Campus’ programme over the next two years, with an aim of promoting healthy and safe food across corporate offices, hospitals, government offices and tea estates.
Singhal said that the food available in any campus should be safe and healthy, given that diet-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart diseases are rising at an alarming rate. He further mentioned that FSSAI is now engaging States/UTs to liaison with local campuses for enrolment and this will expect this initiative to grow exponentially in the coming years from a total of over 75 campuses existing currently across the country.