20 July 2012 Kerala Commentary
Hotels and food safety in Kerala. People and authorities on opposite sides.
P.S.Remesh Chandran.
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum.
Trivandrum paid the price for closing down all street side plank tea shops which sold good food prepared under your eyes at cheap rates. Since they sold food to mostly those people who are familiar to them, they could not possibly adulterate food items. More over these street side vendors helped control price of food articles in Trivandrum city. The whole fleet of officers in government, the food minister and district collectors thoroughly failed in controlling food prices in city hotels. Except issuing press communiqués at times to escape from the allegation that they are betraying their voters, they did nothing to control food prices. But because there are street vendors, the large hotels in cities cannot raise prices as high as they wish. The street vendors are posing tough and efficient competition. The street vendors were those who kept food prices low which infuriated officials. Street food vendors will not and cannot afford to bribe corporation health inspectors and safety authority food inspectors as liberally as large hotel owners do. In no time, city corporation and food safety authorities joined their forces and forcefully closed down almost all street vendors a few weeks back. Now they are paid handsomely by large hotel owners who certainly take their freedom as they purchased officers for a price. No one in Kerala will deny that health inspectors of local bodies and food inspectors of the authority are notoriously famous for bribes. If city hotels are running without license it is not new information to the health minister or the corporation or the safety authority. They received payments for turning their faces. Considering the horrible corruption among health inspectors and food inspectors, it is not illogical to think that some smart officer might have hatched out a plan to inject or spray a shawarma joint with poison in Trivandrum, began raiding hotels, other hoteliers paid up for sparing them and the officer escaped with 1.5 crores collected overnight, possibly. Food poisoning from a hotel usually affects dozens of people but in Trivandrum this particular poisoning affecting only two or three is strange. Shawarma never killed people in the past. It denotes possible external interference. It is inconceivable that a food merchant would wish to kill his customers. In a fast food joint there are many occasions and times when a person can come asking for a shawarma so that he can remain close to the place of preparation, wait for the right moment when the cook’s attention would change, inject, spray or drop something in the paste, take his parcel and go away, sure that the next one or two persons who purchase shawarma would get affected. The incident might also have been an attempt on the life of a particular person. It could have been an Operation Sabotage that would bring crores of rupees as bribes while limiting human death to one or two as well. Is it a new kind of crime? The story in Kozhikode and Kochi won’t be different.
23 July 2012 Kerala Commentary
The tussle between food safety authority and local bodies over the power to raid hotels is actually over the authority to accept bribes. In layman’s terms, the food safety authority claims that they alone are authorized to receive bribes and their message to hoteliers is plain: if you give bribes to health inspectors from local bodies, you would be paying double unnecessarily. Even if hoteliers pay money to local bodies for not being raided, they will have to pay again to the food safety authority officers when they come. The Food Safety Authority is not a new thing but created by bi-furcating the food administration wing of health services department. This only means that the old corrupt officials in the food administration are given new pay scales and new avenues for corruption. Do not anyone think that food safety authority is constituted with angels. If we inquire into the past of this new fleet of officers who head the authority, how many of them would be revealed to be having no blot on their scutcheons? In their previous employments, many of them were stained with major allegations of amassing huge fortunes in the form of properties and bank deposits. Even in the matter of the raids started by them in Trivandrum following the death of a fast food eater, the first thing the government ought to have looked into was how many merchants and hoteliers visited these authorities by overnight and paid up for not to be raided, during the first two or three days of these raids. Who will believe that the merchants did not pay or these officers never in their life took any bribe? Everyone employed in the food safety authority, from the top most to the bottom, should be thoroughly scrutinized to see how much of their wealth is in disproportion to their income. This is essential because unprecedented official powers are now delegated to these officers and it is only logical to safeguard people’s interests by forcing these officials to prove they are clean to be vested with this new heavy authority. They claiming that they alone are empowered to stop adulteration and uncleanliness in hotels and the one thousand local bodies are defying them is a declaration that they alone are from now onward to be paid bribes. Local bodies are more effective in verifying and ensuring that the local hotels are clean. Then why should food safety authority officials object? Corrupt officials would find out ways for corruption wherever they are posted. A former Travancore king was approached by a few villagers, complaining that the village officer is forcing them to pay up for anything and everything. The king transferred this official and moved him to Shanghummughom sea shore with the new assignment of counting the waves. Now how can he receive bribes? Within two days the fishermen of this beach came to the king, complaining that the officer asks them money to allow them to launch their boats in the sea because their boats obstructed the counting of waves.
21 Jul 2012 Kerala Commentary
Anyone travelling though Kerala will wonder at the numerous roadside shops situated on shady spots where tea, coffee, light food and even tapioca and chicken are available. Hot food prepared before our watching eyes is served in clean plates or plantain leaves. Taste is savoury and prices are inconceivably low. These shops made of single plank of wood for placing samovar, kettle, tea glasses and dishes, protected above from the sun and shower with three or four thatched coconut leaves, can be seen in almost all places, in coastal areas, in towns and villages, in remote hamlets, hilly tracts and on forest edges. They are run by women, children or very old men who live nearby, who are unable to undertake any other work. This is their only livelihood and sustenance. It is good milk they make tea with because their cows feed on the lavish forest green or grass fields and they are washed daily in the nearby streams. These shops are the virtue Kerala sees each morning while opening her eyes. They open very early in the morning and remain open late at night, catering to peasants, coolie labourers, the educated and the unemployed and all are satisfied and relished. Political leaders of Kerala when they were very poor unknown unimportant non-entities with no money in their pockets to pay were regulars in these poor shops. They even kept accounts there. These poor sisters, kids and old men sustained and fed them when they were in hunger and when they had no money to pay. Then began the great hunt by police, accusing they provide sitting places for criminals. Actually these shops served as loyal, vigilant watching posts against crime in each village and town. Thousands of shops were removed thus, to the satisfaction of helmeted, motor cycle-riding daylight robbers and gold chain-snatchers. Had these shops remained, every crime perpetrator's name would have come out in the open the very next morning. Then in due course, thousands more of roadside shops were bulldozed as part of widening roads to facilitate high-speed driving for Million Dollar Cars. Not a single voice was raised by the political parties or the three or four Youth Organizations of Kerala. We do not know where those sisters, kids and old men have gone, to life or death? No politician in Kerala likes to be reminded of those innocent eyes, bent bodies and faltering legs who fed them for years. Gradually these politicians who kept accounts in poor Thattukadas gained popularity and rose in politics as Panchayat Members, Members of the Legislative Assembly and Members of the Parliament. Now their people-funded cars won't stop at Thattukadas, but only will at the next luxury star hotel. Their loyalties changed and, sitting in their sequestered offices, they order officials to bull-doze Thattukadas away because they obstruct free car travel and are an ugly sight to see on highway sides. They are now even thinking about licensing Tea Shops only if a Master of Business Administration Graduate is employed there in their staff!