Milk of kindness?

Suppliers are accused of adult (Credit: T C Malhotra / cse)L N MODI, the managing trustee of the
Bharatiya Cattle Research Foundation,
Delhi, said that adulteration of milk is
on the rise. Speaking at a press confer-
ence in Delhi, he informed that in 1996,
as many as 900 cases of adulteration
were recorded in Meerut, Faizabad,
Agra, Bareilly and Varanasi. According
to the managing director of Vinal Dairy,
jodhpur, as much as 90 per cent milk in
jodhpur is adulterated.

Common adulterants include a
cocktail of caustic soda, urea,
refined oil, salt, sugar and
starch. They are blended in
such a way that even a lactometer (gadget used for
testing quality of milk) fails
to detect the adulteration.
"The more unscrupulous
milk suppliers even add detergents, poster colours, zinc
oxide, lead and organic
solvents," said Modi.
According to Soren Choksi,
an industrialist from
Vadodara, Gujarat, "Smallscale industries producing
synthetic chemicals have registered stupendous growth
in last few years as people
are using these chemicals in
milk." The National Dairy
Research Institute, Karnal,
Haryana, has designed a
new lactometer and it is
hoped that it will be sensitive
enough to detect adulteration in milk.