All is not white in your milk

Reports of milk adulteration across the city keep popping up in regular intervals. Yet, despite being a necessity in every Indian household, we can never be sure of the quality of the milk we are drinking and serving our loved ones.

On Wednesday, DNA reported that to keep in check the adulteration of milk, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is going to set up laboratories at octroi nakas, where milk samples will be checked. However, concerned citizens have asked us — how much of a difference will such action make? In conversation with experts and people, various  questions have come to light.

First, nowhere in the world is every truck or tanker checked for the quality of milk.  The conventional method is to have a random sampling check.  Checking each truck/tanker for the quality of milk it carries will create a long queue at the octroi nakas.  The driver of the vehicle  will be compelled to ‘grease’ the palm of the agent at the octroi naka, because he knows that if the truck does not get cleared soon, he will  have to either supply the milk at distress prices (the peak hour of milk  distribution ends at 7am in the city).  Alternatively, his truck will be held up at the octroi naka for so long that the milk will turn rancid.

In addition, milk has always been a soft target for scams.  Consider how, every Mahanand Dairy milk booth is now being used to peddle products of other milk vendors as well. And many Mumbaikars still remember how 15 years ago, many of the rocks at Worli Sea Face, just opposite the dairy, were white in colour because rancid milk used to get dumped over the rocks and into the sea. Even then, the modus operandi was to steal some milk outside city limits, replace the volume with water, and then allow the vehicles to be parked at Mahanand Dairy, Worli, with the lid of the tanker partially open. Exposed to the open air and heat, the milk rapidly turned rancid, and the contents were dumped, thus erasing the very trace of the existence of excess water in the trucks.

The scam continued for almost a decade before it was ‘exposed’. Citizens fear the new scheme to halt vehicles outside the city limits to test the quality of milk is just another way to dilute the quality of milk and/or to make some money.  It has nothing to do with quality. Are the higher-ups listening?