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Form B blunders: FSSAI in urgent need of legal advisor
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Friday, 16 December, 2011, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Irum Khan, Mumbai
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Form B issued by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) for obtaining the state and the Central licenses have a number of technical lapses which has made issuing of the licence a Herculean task for the licensing authorities.
While speaking to Food & Beverage News, a designated officer, in-charge of state licenses, spoke in-depth about the problems his team had been facing post-implementation of the new law.
“There are some serious technical errors in Form B which is mandated to be filled for obtaining a state and the central license.”
As per the new norm, all food business operators (FBOs), with an annual turnover not exceeding Rs 12 lakh, will have to obtain a registration by filling Form A and submitting the same to the food safety officer who is in-charge of the registration process.
And those with a turnover of above Rs 12 lakh will have to seek a state licence. Also, sectors which have high potential for food contamination and hazard and have different units in different states would need to have a Central license. For the state and Central license Form B is mandatory. The form has to be submitted to the concerned DO who is appointed as the licensing authority.
The DO informed that there was no clear method defined for calculating a company's annual turnover in FormB. “How do we calculate a company's turnover, is there a clear way defined,” asked the DO.
Understandably, as the term turnover is sometimes a synonym for revenue (or in certain contexts, sales). Sometimes it is the name for a measure of how quickly inventory is sold (inventory turnover). Also, there are different types of turnovers like the asset turnover, employment turnover or customer turnover.
“The Authority needs to come clear on its correct usage in the context of food items,” the DO said. Another difficulty in calculating the turnover was that many a time bills were not produced by the shop-owners, particularly the petty shop-owners.
In the case of bills not being submitted by the FBO it's only the affidavit filed by them which is taken into consideration for calculating the turnover.
“Is that a reliable method to validate the authenticity of the figures,” the DO questioned.
Installed capacity
Just like turnover, “installed capacity” is another ambiguous term with no clear definition.
For example, the law requires vegetable oil processing units and units producing vegetable oil by the process of solvent extraction and refineries including oil expeller unit having installed capacity more than two tonnes per day to obtain a Central license.
The term installed capacity could be misleading. Units with installed capacity of two tonnes may not necessarily process food equivalent to that amount for any good reason.
While some units with an installed capacity of less than two tonnes may process food more than two tonnes per day and store it in the available storing facilities. With these technical difficulties, F&B News approached the FSSAI helpline but in vain.
Name of proprietor
Another error, which can conveniently be termed as a blunder is that the name of the proprietor is missing in the Form B.
All that the form demands is:
--The name and/or designation, qualification and address of technically qualified person in-charge of operations as required under regulation and, The name and/or designation address and contact details of the person responsible for complying with conditions of license (if different from above).
“Where is the name of the proprietor here and why should disclosing any name be given as an option, i.e. name/and or,” asked the DO.
Similarly, there is no provision to add the name of the shop, renewal date, registration office from where the license is obtained in the Form B, clear indication of the haphazard work done by the FSSAI before introducing the form.
Manufacturing details
The form also creates a huge difficulty for the inspecting agencies as it mandates naming each and every food item with quantity in kg or tonnes proposed to be manufactured per annum. First, is it possible for any one to anticipate the production one year in advance? These estimates fluctuate as per market demand.
“Also, small kirana shop-owners have hundreds of items which are difficult to be listed. We can simply have their categories instead of naming them singularly,” suggested the DO. A qualified person with appropriate legal background is urgently needed on board to avoid these technical lapses.
Another question which is being raised is whether a Central license is at all needed. As unit owners operating in two or more states have to obtain a Central license, it is practically impossible to authenticate that the owner does not have a second unit elsewhere. “We only have to go by his words and the information provided by him,” the DO shrugged.
Besides, there are other issues particularly with the BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) regulation coinciding with the FSSA 2006. For packaged drinking water, milk powder, lactose-free milk, companies are still mandated to seek a license under the BIS regulation which has not been revised for years together. As of now there is no clear notification by the FSSAI on FSSA 2006 overriding the BIS in the case of coinciding of the two laws.
The DO informed that there was a grave inadequacy of licensing authorities and more recruitments were urgently needed. “There is only a single licensing authority appointed for the region. Earlier the licenses were issued by 24 different wards in Mumbai and each ward had a separate licensing authority along with three staff members. Though eight new posts are sanctioned, however, these are not yet filled,” said a designated officer of the Mumbai branch of Food and Drug Administration, Maharashtra.
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