KMC to grade food vendors
Kolkata: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will award gradation to the street food vendors in a bid to improve the quality of stuff served in the informal food sector.
The KMC is the country's first civic body to have taken such an initiative.
There are about 16,000 food vendors in Kolkata. The KMC is giving training to food vendors in 104 areas. Once the training is completed the quality of food served to the people in Kolkata would go up, said senior KMC officials.
The Kolkata Module, a guideline to the food vendors was prepared by Professor Indira Chakraborty, former director of All India Hygiene and Public Health and a renowned nutritionist. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) accepted her module.
The module deals in details about the parameters that should be maintained to serve food to the people from roadside stalls. Food vendors are given training on how to preserve food and then serve it to the customers.
The personal hygiene of the person, who will serve the food, is very important along with the quality of oil used in cooking and the water that is used by the food vendor.
A senior KMC official said the personal hygiene of the person who serves the food is very important along with the quality of the cooking medium and the drinking water.
It is often found that poor quality oil is used for cooking and the quality of water used by the food vendor is below standard.
As a result, people who eat food from stalls falls sick and are suffer from chronic stomach problem.
A few lakh people eat from roadside stalls every day. Many of these people come from districts and they eat lunch from roadside stalls every day.
"As the civic authority it is our responsibility to provide quality food to them. Once the food vendors get the training, it is expected that the quality of street food will go up as the stalls will get gradation from KMC and BIS," said a senior civic official.
"You will prefer to have a chicken roll from a shop with an A grade. The shop next to it may not have A grade and will try hard to achieve it to get more customers. This healthy competition will result in improvement in the quality of food," he said.
It may be recalled that the food stalls around the Writers' Buildings used to sell quality food as the departmental secretaries and senior state government officials used to have food from the stalls.
Thus, though there was no control over the quality of the food sold, the stall owners maintained the quality because of the senior state government officials and ministers ordered food from their stalls.
