India’s food safety regulator Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) on Friday pleaded the Supreme Court to continue the ban imposed on Nestle India’s Maggi noodles for containing excessive lead content.
A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C. Pant, after hearing Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi appearing for FSSAI, agreed to consider its appeal challenging the Bombay high court order lifting the ban it imposed on Maggi noodles. After issuing a notice to Nestle, the bench posted the matter for further hearing on January 13, 2016 when the question of interim stay of the judgment will be considered.
Mr Rohatgi asked the court to stay a part of the HC judgment, which said that only laboratories accredited by the National Accreditation Board for Test and Calibration Laboratories could conduct tests. He said nearly 70 government labs could not conduct tests on products because of this part of the order and hundreds of products could not be tested because of this order.
Senior counsel Harish Salve, representing Nestle, said all tests ordered by the Bombay HC had come clean and asked for a stay on the proceedings of the consumer forum, which is hearing a class action suit by the government against Nestlé India. He said that if not stayed, those orders will have to be challenged in the supreme court.
In June, the FSSAI had asked Nestle to stop manufacturing nine variants of the noodles and recall those products from the market as excess lead was found in some samples. Several states, including Maharashtra, banned the sale of Maggi and after the HC order in August, the Maggi is back in the market.
The court had allowed Nestle to go in for fresh testing of five samples of each variant of the noodles at three independent laboratories in Punjab, Hyderabad and Jaipur which were accredited with National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories.
The FSSAI had described the HC order as “erroneous” and questioned the sanctity of the samples providedfor re-test to government-approved labs.
The High Court “erred” by asking Nestle, to provide fresh samples instead of asking a neutral authority to do so. The SLP pointed out that the Bombay High Court allowed substantial changes in its order when Nestle filed a plea for correction of the original order on the ground of there being certain typographical errors. “This led to a substantial impact on the outcome of the proceeding before the High Court,” FSSAI said and prayed for quashing the impugned judgment and an interim stay of its operation.
