Raids against eateries found several food junctures are flouting basic hygiene, food safety norms. Actions are needed against Big hotels where tourists stay.
Enewstime Desk
Agartala, February 28, 2020: Popular eateries of Agartala, once again, found themselves on the wrong side of maintaining minimum hygiene and food-quality. The situation is such that one canteen in Tripura main Hospital – GB Hospital was found on the wrong side of food quality.
“With State Government’s emphasis on developing tourism sector, it is essential that tourists get quality food. Supplying quality food is essential to gain tourists confidence. In this direction, such raids should continue and punitive actions should be taken against the offenders”, said one Manas Gupta.
Shockingly, despite knowledge of raids by the Administration in hotels and restaurants, owners of eateries seemed to remain defiant and continued their age-old unhygienic practices. With mushrooming of eateries every corner of the city, apprehension about quality of food available in the eateries was palpable among the people – and, at least for few popular food juncture, the apprehension proved to be correct, several Agartala citizens claimed.
The raid in eateries
The Sadar sub-divisional administration has launched a massive drive against unhygienic foods in various hotels, restaurants and roadside shops in and around the city inviting massive public support. This is for the first time in recent past that such drives are underway though there were always been allegations of most of the city food outlets where blatantly flouting the food security norms selling stale foods which could have cost serious fallout. A joint team led by SDM Sadar Asim Saha raided altogether 30 eateries including hotels, restaurants and food shops. Two popular restaurants and one canteen in GB Hospital had been shut down for violating food safety norms.
Know the wronged eateries
During the drive, five food outlets including Ramthakur Hotel in GB Bazar, two restaurants- Trinayani and Maa Kali Fast Food at Colonel Chowmuhani, one canteen in GBP hospital were closed down by the authority concerned. There were stocks of unhygienic food items and the condition of most of the kitchens was very poor, the SDM Sadar said.
“We closed down the shops after finding unhygienic food items. We also collected samples and sent them to Laboratory for quality test. If anything is found wrong in the report, action will be taken as per the food safety norms,” Saha said. In the raid, some packaged items were found without manufacturing and expiry dates in a Sherowali outlet.
On earlier occasion, similar raids were conducted in which among other hotels, city’s one of the oldest restaurant Ashoka Restaurant was asked to pull down shutters for grossly violating prescribed norms for food safety.
