Bid to make street food hygienic

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, March 4, 2007
Street food gives cities its particular colour and flavour. Can anyone imagine Kolkata without its roll shops or phuchkawallahs? But the common grouse among many residents is the cleanliness of the food. To tackle this problem, students and teachers of Smt. JD Birla Institute is busy sensitising street food vendors of Kolkata about nutrition and hygiene.
The awareness drive is part of a World Bank project, which is being implemented by the government of India. The project aims to ensure the safety and quality of food for Indians. Sixteen institutes in the country are working on the project and Smt. J. D. Birla Institute has been chosen as the nodal institute for eastern India.
“We will be documenting the present condition of street food vendors, their hygiene levels and will also train them to overcome their draw backs,” said Dipali Singhee, principal of the institute.
The institute has chosen vendors from Theatre Road, Park Circus, Victoria Memorial, Tangra, Vardan Market and Park Street to start off the programme.
“Street food vendors are an important part of Kolkata. They serve almost half the office-going population every day, which also includes a large number, who travel to the city from adjacent districts. Thus, it is extremely important to make the vendors quality conscious. This would include personal hygiene and checking the nutritional value of the food on offer,” said Singhee.
The institute has got Rs 2 crore for the 2-year project, which has been divided, into 3 phases. In the first phase of the Project, the objective will be to identify indicators on the awareness, attitude and practices related to food hygiene and safety through an extensive survey. The next parts of the project include talking to the steet vendors and classify and categorise their problems.
“We have found five main problems among the street food vendors of the city – lack of food hygiene, unit hygiene, personal hygiene, environmental hygiene (including fuel and nutrition) and health practices,” said Lilu Mancha, principal investigator of the project.
To begin with, there will be 26 intervention programmes, held over 15 days, 2 hours per day. Each batch will train 25 street food vendors. Lectures on nutrition, health and hygiene practices followed by demonstrations will be given to the vendors. “Surprisingly we got good response from the street food vendors. Most of them felt strongly about improving their food quality and presentation skill to increase sales,” Mancha said.
There are plans to give the vendors separate training specialising on the kind of food they sell like jhal muri, puri – aloo, ghoogni, chowmein, roll and dosa. “Often we see that they use bad quality chicken, use two tubs for washing utensils and cook the food in an unclean kadhai or tawa. We are trying to change their mentality. However different vendors have different problems, so we will have to give them individual attention,” added Mancha.
But the task is huge as there are over 1-lakh vendors in Kolkata who need to be sensitised. “We will not be able to sensitise all of them. But those coming to us are being encouraged to wear aprons, cap and gloves to maintain personal hygiene. We are also teaching them to maintain food quality. With the state government refusing to recognise them they have become desperate to improve themselves to maintain their existence,” said Mancha.
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