Hygiene ratings for eateries

Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: health

Why in News?

  • The FSSAI will soon require restaurants and hotels to display hygiene ratings on their doors

Hygiene ratings for eateries

  • The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) will soon require restaurants and hotels to display hygiene ratings on their doors, says a news report.
  • There will also be food supervisors to check the safety of what is served, for which the regulator intends to train around 170,000 people.
  • The FSSAI is in the process of forming guidelines to implement the rating system.

What are the Key benefis

  • If implemented diligently, the programme would be in the interest of the customer and could raise the quality of food served.
  • Ratings will give restaurant owners an incentive to improve their standards and will likely filter out food joints that pose a health risk.
  • That extra costs borne to maintain quality may raise menu prices, too, is another matter. In general, few can object to such an idea.

Way forward

  • However, any system that requires an external assessment of quality could be abused.
  • As those in the hospitality business would testify, state-directed scrutiny tends to descend all too easily into an “inspector raj”, with officials determined to give them a hard time, unless given some reason—pecuniary or otherwise—not to.
  • As a way to guard against this, the criteria for hygiene ratings will need to be clear-cut and uniformly applicable, with no scope for subjectivity.
  • A lot of well-intended initiatives end up hurting a market simply because their execution is faulty.

 

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