By IANS,
New Delhi : Congress MP Rajiv Shukla Tuesday said he has urged the government to amend the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act to provide for stricter punishment for offenders as adulteration was affecting the health of the people.
Shukla said he will write to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanding amendments in the law.
“The present provisions entail only six months imprisonment and Rs.1,000 fine to adulterators. The penalty should be raised to Rs.10 lakh with provision of life imprisonment,” Shukla told IANS.
He said the problem of food adulteration should be taken seriously.
“There have been reports of vegetables being injected with oxytocin (a mammalian hormone) and fruits being ripened using dangerous chemicals. It will lead to diseases,” he said.
The Congress MP said a massive awareness campaign should be launched among people so that shopkeepers are compelled to regularly send samples to testing labs and offenders are caught.
Union Minister of State for Health Dinesh Trivedi had last week written to the health secretary saying that farmers were using hormone shots to expedite the growth of vegetables and it may cause irreparable damage to people’s health. He said the implementation of the ban on use of oxytocin on animals was also very lax.