In order to further beef-up the food safety domain of the country, India’s food regulators, Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has urged and encouraged both public and private investment in food testing infrastructure. On the eve of completion of 11 years of Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, five key initiatives to push food testing system in the country.
Food Safety on Wheels is one among the five initiatives of food regulators in which mobile units called ‘Food Safety on Wheels’ will be installed in eight states. In its first phase, a total number of nine mobile food testing labs will be installed in states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Kerala, Manipur, Meghalaya, and Nagaland. These mobile units are fully functional laboratory equipped with basic infrastructure for a quick qualitative testing for deduction of common adulteration in various food commodities. In addition, these units would help the functionaries in the states to enhance their outreach and conduct surveillance activities even in far-flung areas.
Ashish Bahuguna, Chairperson, FSSAI said, “This holistic effort towards using digital solutions, strengthening food safety infrastructure, enhancing capabilities and creating a large pool of trained specialists would go a long way in ensuring that the food safety and hygiene ecosystem becomes more robust.”
In its another initiative, FSSAI launched Food Laboratory Network (InFoLNet) a digital solution to connect all food labs in the country to a centralized Lab Management System (LMS). This system would provide an end to end solution, where samples collected by the field units would be coded and tested in FSSAI notified labs and the results would be available in a central database. This data would be available for enforcement and food import controls in a seamless manner.
FSSAI is also strengthening 45 State food labs by providing state-of-art high-end food testing equipment including microbiology labs. This initiative has been rolled out with an exchange of MoU with eight States/UTs. In order to address the issue of acute shortage of food analysts in the country, FSSAI has decided to hold Junior Analyst Examination along with Food Analyst Examination in late September/ early October this year. This would help to attract young talent for food analysis in the country and over time, build a large pool of such analysts both for the food industry and the regulatory system.