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.