THE drive against adulteration and sale of substandard foods appears to have lost its momentum as not much has been done in the last couple of years. The result is that the unscrupulous elements thriving on consumers' miseries are back in business.

So, it is good news that a team of the BSTI officials and the police visited some shops and food outlets in the city on Tuesday and fined eight of them for selling substandard and stale foods in violation of BSTI rules.

The problem of adulteration and production and marketing of all kinds of low quality foodstuff is a major area of concern today as it has a direct bearing on public health. Things are going awfully wrong for the consumers whose right to have safe food has never received due attention.

The BSTI officials have said that such crackdown on the dishonest producers and sellers will no longer be a seasonal affair only. The point is highly relevant since adulteration and production of substandard foods is not a problem that can be resolved through making occasional forays on shops and restaurants. Examples will definitely show that very few food items are now safe enough to consume. Vegetables are extremely unsafe as an overdose of pesticides is often used by the producers and toxic preservatives finally make them unfit for human consumption. Fish preserved with formalin are equally harmful and so are the fruits that look overly fresh and juicy. So much for the food items that were never on the adulteration list in the past. Now one can easily imagine what is happening in restaurants where hygiene rules do not really mean much and supervision is virtually non-existent.

Doctors and health experts have been telling us for a pretty long time that we are exposed to grave health hazards as the food producers and sellers are marketing anything and everything for human consumption. The response to all these warnings has so far been very inadequate. Obviously, the rich owners of food outlets are seldom unsettled when they are made to pay a nominal amount imposed as fine. The archaic laws need to be revised in order to keep the situation under control. Without question, adulteration, which amounts to slow poisoning, has to he treated as a culpable crime.

We believe the anti-adulteration drive will be reinforced with the objective of reining in the traders and businessmen who pose a grave threat to public health.