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Tuesday March 19, 2024

40 food inspectors to be hired for Karachi’s eateries

By Our Correspondent
November 21, 2018

The Sindh Food Authority (SFA) was on Tuesday ordered that it immediately hire 40 food safety officers for inspecting restaurants and other eateries across Karachi.

The directive came from Chief Secretary Mumtaz Ali Shah during a meeting held in his office to discuss how to improve the working of the new provincial food authority. The chief secretary ordered the relevant officials to launch an awareness campaign to let the people know about the hazards of consuming edible items beyond their expiry date.

CS Shah said the samples of food items collected by the SFA for analysing their quality and for seeing if they are fit for human consumption should now be sent to the laboratories at the University of Karachi instead of labs in other provinces.

The director general of the SFA informed the meeting that the authority has so far issued 5,806 warnings to manufacturers and sellers of edible items telling them to improve their services as well as the quality of their products. These notices have been issued mostly to canteens at private schools, to restaurants, confectioners, bakeries and factories.

The meeting was informed that fines having a total sum of Rs1.6 million have been charged from different restaurants while 17 companies involved in the business of bottled water have been sealed due to substandard quality of their products. The meeting was also informed that the SFA has imposed a ban on the sale of soft drinks at schools.

The provincial food authority has also initiated action against unauthorised slaughterhouses across the metropolitan city while nine eateries have been sealed for selling ghee that is unfit for human consumption.

Appreciating the efforts of the SFA, the chief secretary advised the officials concerned to coordinate with the Pakistan Standards & Quality Control Authority as regards authentication and registration of the relevant commodities and food items.

He said that legal action should be taken against the violators of law to eradicate the menace of marketing and selling of adulterated and substandard edible items across the province.

Shah stressed that the SFA should also check substandard poultry products and related food items being sold in the province. He said that a dedicated a lab for checking the quality of food items should be made functional at the earliest.

Food Secretary Muhammad Rashid also briefed the meeting about the actions taken and the raids conducted by the SFA against the manufacture and sale of substandard edible items and services.

The meeting was attended among others by the additional chief secretary for the health department, secretaries for the food and home departments, and officials of the food authority.

A day earlier, Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Justice Mian Saqib Nisar took suo motu notice of two minor brothers’ deaths due to alleged food poisoning after dining at a restaurant in Karachi on November 11. CJP Nisar asked for a report in the matter from the Sindh government within two days. Five-year-old Muhammad Ahsan, 18-month-old Ahmad Ahsan and their mother Ayesha, residents of the upmarket Defence Housing Authority neighbourhood, were taken to a hospital after they fell sick. Doctors pronounced the children dead, while their mother was hospitalised.

The initial investigations suggested that the victims had dined at a restaurant in the Zamzama locality and consumed sweets from a shop outside an amusement park the night before.