KATHMANDU: The Agriculture Department of Kathmandu Metropolitan City has found date-expired butter worth nearly 160 million in the stated-owned Dairy Development Corporation(DDC) store in Balaju.
According to Hari Bahadur Bhandari, the Chief of Department, a team of experts found the 194.97 thousand kg expired DDC butter during a raid at the DDC’s Balaju Distribution Center on Tuesday.
DDC butter costs Rs 780/kg to the distributor while the public have to pay Rs 850/kg.
“During the investigation, we smelt foul on the infrastructure and packaging of DDC butter as well,” Bhandari said, adding, “We found 194.97 thousand kg butter that had been converged through Sujal Dairy in the DDC store.”
The team found the butter sans label and some with expired date in the godown.
Bhandari also revealed that most of the cartons did not have labels on them, though most of the butter is kept in the carton of 25kg each.
Some packages have the labels saying’ best before 8 months after packaging and most of the packages were packed on December 2019.
Meanwhile, Govinda Raj Joshi, the chief of Balaju Dairy Distribution Project, stated that butter actually has longer life-span. He tried to justify the stale and date-expired products circulated in the market saying it all is the result of lockdown and prohibitory orders enforced for quite long.
“Due to the lockdown we were unable to sale earlier, so , the date-expired products happended to be in the market,” Joshi tried to defend the product, “ we have written to the center and are waiting for further instruction from the Head Office.”
The Consumer’s Rights Investigation Forum has been concerned about the incident and has demanded a due action against the guilty.
“We have noticed utter negligence and irresponsibility on the part of the state-owned corporation,” a member of the Consumer’s Right forum said, adding, “The guilty should be brought to book.”
It’s ironic that the Department of Commerce and Food Technology and Quality Control Department is in the dark about this utter negligence despite their claim of monitoring the market.
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