Mawa in your mithai: Are you getting the real stuff?

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SOUR TRUTH: To make maximum profits, 'mawa' — an essential component of any north Indian sweet — is adulterated by mixing it with anything from diesel to chalk powder

 

 

New Delhi: Be prepared to spend a fortune when you go out to buy mithais this Diwali. And even then, chances are, you may not get the

real stuff. Even as mawa and khoya prices have hit the roof ahead of Diwali, traders and farmers coming to the mandi say, with very few raids by food inspectors, the prices and monitoring of product quality are almost solely in the hands of the Khoya and Mawa Marketing Committee — set up by the Delhi government but largely an independent body — so that for a farmer who is in the association's ''good books'', it is not difficult to pass off the spurious stuff. From diesel to chalk powder — just about anything can end up in mawa, which is an essential ingredient for north Indian sweets. Says a food inspector: ''The most common ingredient of spurious mawa is chalk powder. Suspending mawa in a glass of water makes the powder settle down. There is no dearth of ingredients that are used in the spurious product, from diesel to make it shiny to just about anything.'' Hygiene is another major issue at the mandi, something that the committee says is not their responsibility, so flies on mawa and khoya being kneaded with bare hands just beside a drain are sights that surprise nobody in the wholesale market at Bagh Diwar, just overlooking Old Delhi Railway Station. With food inspectors allegedly giving the market a miss for their own special reasons, hygiene here is nobody's baby. From Rs 128-130 per kg just a week back, the wholesale price of good quali

ty mawa has hit Rs 152 a kg. A result, claims the committee chairman Hari Chand Verma, of the recent prosecution undertaken by them of nine commission agents for allegedly trying to procure spurious mawa. But both he and other wholesalers are quick to point out that more than the Delhi government — ''I have not seen food inspectors since Rakshabandhan'' is what Verma says — it is the efforts of the Mayawati government that have really worked in stemming the tide of spurious products. On Sunday night, Ghaziabad police raided three places in Modinagar and Bhojpur areas and recovered about 25 quintal of synthetic milk and khoya and sweets prepared with it. Fourteen persons have been detained, awaiting the district administration's permission to arrest them under the Food Adulteration Act. According to food inspector Jugal Kishore, who was taken along to do the sampling, ''Four men making synthetic milk, khoya and sweets were nabbed. Many workers and the owner escaped. About 10 quintal of synthetic khoya, and 5 quintal of doda and milk cake were seized. So were what appeared to be dalda, vanaspati, oil, milk powder, suji and some chemicals. We have sent the samples for lab tests. We have also taken six samples of sweets from some shops.'' In Delhi, meanwhile, any adulteration in the mawa after it reaches the retailer is not monitored at all. Despite the provisions of Section 104, 57 and 58 of the Agricultural Produce Marketing Board Act, which empowers the Committee to seize or/and slap penalty of around Rs 5,000 on those selling khoya or mawa in the open market other than the mandi, no defaulter has been penalised or punished till date, Verma says. His take on the questions of hygiene, ''That's not our lookout.'' A senior health official said that with just 31 food inspectors for the 27 administrative districts, the department has its ''own limitations. But during the pre-festive season the number of samples lifted increases. Only problem is that not all markets may get covered''. Bulk of Delhi's mawa demand is met by Uttar Pradesh towns like Baghpat, Mewat, Aligarh and Shamli where crackdown by the UP government has made a ''lot of difference'', farmers say. The monitoring of product quality in the Delhi mandi is based purely on human expertise. ''I taste a mawa and know if it's the real thing,'' Verma boasts. But the real test of its purity, he admits, has to be carried out in the laboratory