Why are we making such a fuss about colas and chocolates, when even the dals and rice we eat are not free of contamination? I think what we should worry about are more important issues like spurious medicines!

Pesticides in colas; worms crawling out of chocolates; medicines that could maim. With a hunter as deadly and insidious as adulteration, everyone is a loser. But, whose life is it anyway, asks Jayashree Menon.

Out of the blue, my 13-year-old son announced he was lactose intolerant and was never ever going to touch the damn stuff again in his life. When instead of hysterics and ultimatums, all he got was a disinterested shrug, he threw me a long, perplexed look. Had the nag turned cool or what?

Honestly, it didn’t matter a whit to me whether he gulped his daily glass of milk or not. Because I’d been reading about slum dwellers being caught pilfering milk bags from reputed dairies, topping them with water and what not, and selling them to unsuspecting consumers. The milk samples tested had widespread and excessive residues of DDT and HCH. Surely, no milk was better than toxic milk!

Even as I remained nonchalant about the milk business, started the cola controversy. The Pollution Monitoring Laboratory (PML) of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) went and tested the cold drink samples for 16 organochlorine pesticides, 12 organophosphorus pesticides and four synthetic pyrethroides — all commonly used in India as insecticides.

And, both Pepsi and Coke seemed to share a penchant for pesticide residues in their products. Total pesticides in all PepsiCo brands averaged 0.0180 mg/l, 36 times higher than the EEC limit for total pesticides while total pesticides in all Coca-Cola brands was 0.0150 mg/l, 30 times more than the same EEC limit.

Then through screaming headlines, the CEOs/MDs of both Pepsi and Coke went blue in the face asserting that nothing, but nothing, was wrong with their colas; it was a conspiracy; hadn’t their own children been weaned on the aerated stuff?

As claims and counterclaims were hurled back and forth, some households (not mine) witnessed a discernible change. "Yuck, Pesticola," pronounced eight-year-old Tanay whenever he was offered a cola, and Jyoti Verma was one happy mom because her son had finally understood why he should not drink cola when all his friends were guzzling with glee.

Just as I got set to celebrate Diwali, cola and all, worms wriggled out of Cadbury chocolates. The festival turned bitter for the MNC who went on the back foot defending its products through full page advertisements, even as it contended with irate consumers and rampaging politicians. Happily, mithai and dry fruit merchants reported a 20 per cent increase in sales, as wary consumers opted for tried and tested ghee-laden sweets instead of happening chocolate hampers.

How do you keep kids away from chocolates, I wondered aloud to Neepa Joshipura, homeopath and mother of two young daughters. "Well, as long as they’re not eating too many chocolates, it’s all right," she said. "I would prefer they eat Indian products as sometimes what’s written on the imported packaging seems Greek or Russian and cannot be read. And tell me," she continued, "Why are we making such a fuss about colas and chocolates, when even the dals and rice we eat are not free of contamination? I think what we should worry about is more important issues like spurious medicines!"

As if on cue, the next day the stents (used for clearing artery blockages) story hit the headlines. Though expensive, more than 5,000 stents have been used to date in India as a substitute for bypass surgery and angioplasty. Such a delicate life-saving mechanism would be manufactured in surgically sterile units, right? Wrong. Stents were being fashioned in unhygienic, grubby garages, as part of a spurious and thriving cottage industry. And that poor sucker of a patient was shucking up almost Rs 50,000 for the uncoated stent and over a lakh for the drug coated one!

But, then what’s a stent or two, when the ‘pure’ bottled mineral water we drink has impurities, the fruit and vegetables we eat are laden with pesticides, the fuel that drives our cars is full of dry cleaning solvents, even the gold we wear is not quite ‘sona’…in fact, every facet of our life is contaminated.

Comments Suma Varughese, managing editor of Life Positive magazine, "I feel totally helpless…I know organic food is an option, but it’s so expensive. Fortunately, farmers have finally understood the benefits of giving up pesticides and chemical fertilisers. I often feel we are doomed, but I try not to worry too much and hope for the best."

So, if so many of us are falling prey, often fatally, to spurious, adulterated products, why isn’t the government doing something? Where are the consumer activists? Don’t we have any King of Torts of our own as glorified by Grisham?

Mumbai-based lawyer, Raju Z. Moray, who has gained a reputation for fighting and winning PILs, has this to say: "The Prevention of Drug Adulteration Act was formulated decades ago and is largely irrelevant today. Finally, it’s in a process of being revamped, but even then it’s a given that there will be loopholes in it!"

Compared to the general shoddy, indifferent approach in India, the USA has far stricter quality control measures, so why are more consumer-related law suits being filed there than here? "That’s because we in India lack the basic evidence-gathering mechanism," explains Moray. "We have no means of receiving and storing adulterated samples that will form the backbone of the evidence in a consumer case. Then again in the USA, you have the concept of contingency fees — which means that you do not have to pay the lawyer any legal fees; he fights the case on a commission basis. This is banned in India, which means to take on any company, you first have to shell out a couple of lakhs from your own pocket for the lawyer and court fees, which would be 20 per cent of your claim. And if you lose, you’ve lost it all!"

So that’s why, consumers in the USA take a company to court on as flimsy grounds as hot coffee spilt due to a faulty seal or chips served cold or whatever outrageous stuff they and their lawyer can concoct. And, here in India, children are stricken because of adulterated vaccines; wrong limbs get amputated; people choke to death on toxic fumes; or live to fall prey to pesticides in fruits and vegetables. Even your morning cuppa could be less tea and more iron filings and salt — the universal seasoning — may contain powdered chalk pieces. The list is endless.

No wonder, Sunita Narain, director, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), was angry enough to say at a conference on mercury pollution, "We are rapidly becoming the toxic dumping ground of the world’s mercury. Is this the eight per cent growth that Indian industry is promising us? India will become the world’s dirt capital." Narain’s outburst was justified by a recent nation-wide survey of food contaminants, conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). It revealed excessive levels of a cancer-causing fungal product in cereals, and toxic metals in other food products of India. It also detected high levels of pesticide residues in cows’ milk and metals like arsenic, cadmium and lead in infant canned products and in turmeric.

Not to be left behind, another study conducted by the Consumer Guidance Society of India (CGSI), indicated that Mumbaiites were consuming a cocktail of contaminants — high quantities of toxins like aflatoxins, antibiotics, agro-chemical residues, pus, spore-forming bacteria and chemicals like sodium carbonate and urea — which cause illnesses like liver cancer, gastro-enteritis, viral fever, body ache and weight loss!

Scary stuff, a nightmarish scenario…. but does anyone really care? After all, what’s a few hundreds dead or dying to a nation of a few billions?

Nothing really, because after all there’s safety in numbers and India has enough guinea pigs for this ongoing version of the survival-of-the-fittest game. But there’s one catch. With a hunter as deadly and insidious as adulteration, everyone is a loser. It’s only a matter of time.