SC notice on pesticides in soft drinks

New Delhi, Sep 15 (UNI) The Supreme Court today issued notices to the Centre and the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) on a PIL seeking directions to the respondents to produce before the court scientific data regarding presence of harmful and hazardous substances in the processed food in general and the beverages including soft drinks in particular.

A bench comprising Justices K G Balakrishnan and D K Jain, however, refused to issue notice on other prayers of the petitioner Tejinder Singh Brar.

Other prayers include directions to the government to ban the sale and use of pesticides and insecticides harmful to human health.

Senior counsel Ranjit Kumar appearing for the petitioner pleaded before the court that consumer has the right to know what he or she is consuming and that there was no official version about the contents of pesticides and other chemicals in soft drinks and the media reports were sending confusing signals to the consumer.

He also pleaded that companies prodcing processed foods and soft drinks were not displaying contents of their products.

The court, however said that some amount of pesticides may be there in drinking water also as it is necessary to use a minimum permissible quantity of pesticides or insecticides to purify the drinking water.

Referring to the Joint Parliamentary Committee(JPC) report submitted in 2004, the counsel for the petitioner contended that its recommendations had not been implemented.

The court also ordered that the petition would be tagged with the other petition already pending before this court on the issue of use of pesticides and other chemicals in soft drinks sold by soft drink majors Pepsi and Coke in India. The earlier petition is fixed for final disposal on October 9,2006.

UNI AKS/SC RP DB1838