The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducts inspections from time to time in States where it operates to ensure that Standards are being maintained as per regulations in all hotels and eateries that are licensed or registered with it.
The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 states that it is now mandatory to have a license for the food service establishments like Restaurants/Hotels having an annual turnover of more than Rs.12 lac per annum. The license fee is Rs.2000/-per year. On the other hand, food service establishments whose annual turnover is upto Rs.12 lacs do not require a license but need to get their businesses registered at a nominal fee of Rs.100. In Nashik division, there are 60,473 registered businesses while there are 17,701 licensed businesses.
The Kumbh Mela in Nashik is scheduled for 2015 and it will see a surge of devotees to the Holy City. It is for this reason that the FDA (Nashik Division) is all set to inspect the hotels and eateries from next month onwards to ensure that only good quality of food should be served to the community.
The inspection drive will cover all the five districts of Nashik i.e. Nashik, Ahmednagar, Jalgaon, Dhule and Nandurbar. The food authority says that If they find any FBO violating the norms as per Food Safety & Standards Act, 2006 on Sanitary & Hygienic Conditions like; unclean kitchens & bad handling of food OR selling the inferior quality of food to the consumers. If the inspecting team finds that hotels and eateries do not have bills for the procurement of raw materials then such FBOs are more likely to be treated with a strict action this time round.
In an earlier drive the FDA had served improvement notices to many FBOs where it had found that the standards had not been maintained and bills had not been procured from suppliers of raw materials.
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