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Soft drink industry needs proper regulation, says expert

Staff Reporter

"Use of captive and protected water supply must be a commitment"

Chennai: Once the proposed Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is set up, safety aspects of food and beverages will be comprehensively taken care of and offenders severely dealt with, G. Thyagarajan, full time consultant to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on soft drinks, said on Friday.

Unity among stakeholders

Delivering a lecture on `pesticide residues in soft drinks,' organised by the Central Leather Research Institute's Science Club here, he said when there was a crisis with regard to a consumer product, it was important that all the stakeholders should unite for one cause - public safety. The components of the soft drinks consisted of 86 to 92 per cent water, four to five per cent sugar and two to three per cent of a concentration whose contents were not known.

``In London or New York, water is purchased. But in India, permission is granted to the companies to draw water from the soil," he said pointing out that as it was basically agricultural land, the pesticide residues might have found its way through the water.

Though the companies had bottling plants, 50 per cent of them were franchisees and the sourcing of water from agricultural wells was the source for pesticides, he said. With a Rs.6,000-crore turnover, the soft drink industry needs proper regulation. ``To clean up the act, use of captive and protected water supply must be a commitment," he said.

Not through sugar

In the case of the sugar component, the farmers were very progressive and they employed selective use of pesticides. So pesticides through sugar could not be a source.

The water norms for packaged drinking water should also be the criteria for input water in soft drinks, he said.

About 200 parts per billion of caffeine and of phosphoric acid, which are banned in certain countries, were present in the soft drinks.

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