No safe limit for trans fats

India’s food regulator has been asked to pay a compensation of Rs 2,000 to a RTI for failing to admit that the country does not have safety standards for trans fats in ghee and edible oil. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 10, 2012, 21:40:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s food regulator has been asked to pay a compensation of Rs 2,000 to a RTI for failing to admit that the country does not have safety standards for trans fats in ghee and edible oil.

Right To Information activist KS Swami wanted to know whether the National Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has prescribed any safe percentage of trans fats in ghee and edible oil.

Some western nations such as Denmark have prescribed 2% of trans fats in products as a safe limit. A study conducted by Centre for Science and Environment had showed that most of trusted edible oil brands contain unhealthy levels of trans fat and it is 12 times higher than which is permissible in Netherlands in Vanaspati ghee.

Swami filed an RTI application in July 2011 asking the authority whether they have instructed the manufacturers of ghee and edible oils to exhibit the safe percentage of trans fats on the packets along with its actual percentage.

Instead of giving a direct reply to the questions, the authority provided a few paras of its labeling regulation which said to claim that a product was trans fats fee may be used only if it was less than 0.2 gram per serving of food.

Unhappy with the reply, Swami filed an appeal with CIC which found the authority deliberately avoiding admission of no safety standard for trans fats. “If the authority has taken no steps about specifying the safe level of trans fats percentages in ghee and edible oils they should at least admit this,” Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi said in his order.

Noting that harassment of a common man was “socially abhorring” and “legally impermissible”, Gandhi said awarding a compensation (of Rs 2,000) to an individual satisfies him personally and helps in improving work culture.

The CIC has also issued a notice to authority’s public information officer of imposing penalty blaming him for not furnishing complete information.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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