-Business Standard Recent data on the FSSAI show its commendable performance. But there is an urgent need to address certain issues related to the way it functions and its infrastructure The recent controversy over reports of higher than permissible levels of lead and monosodium glutamate in some brands of instant noodles has brought into sharp focus the functioning of the government body that regulates food safety and standards in the country. How...

-The Hindu The National Nutrition Monitoring Board (NNMB), set up in 1972, has been doing silent, and remarkable service to the nation. We tend to look at a nation’s progress increasingly, and almost exclusively, in terms of its economic and business statistics. India is now invited to the high table as a growing economy, with its annual financial growth rate of over 4 per cent. Internally too, we have setup many mechanisms,...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Faced with complaints of overpricing of medical devices like cardiac stents and implants, the government seems to be finally getting its act together. According to a government official, in a string of measures to regulate the industry under the Draft National Medical Device Policy, it has recommended creating an autonomous body — the National Medical Devices Authority (NDMA) — pricing control for medical devices by including them...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Successive Indian governments have ignored repeated alerts and done little to introduce laws to curb practices that could explain how lead could slip into noodles and other raw and processed food, analysts say. India introduced unleaded petrol in March 2000 but the governments since then have not moved enough to impose mandatory limits for lead in paints which remain a key source of environmental lead pollution in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Biochemist Thuppil Venkatesh says he is not surprised by claims of food safety regulators in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi that they have detected lead, a potential toxin to humans, in Maggi noodles. For over a decade, Venkatesh, professor emeritus at St John's Medical College, Bangalore, has been trying to warn the country about what he says are dangerous levels of lead in the environment that may slip into...