Indian Express: Indore: Monday,
April 17, 2017.
A query under
the Right to Information has revealed that only 1,707 slaughterhouses in the
country are registered under the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA), 2006.
There are no
abattoirs registered under the 2006 Act in Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra
and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
Further, these states/Union Territories do not have a single slaughterhouse
which has a license issued by either the state or the Central authority.
Uttar
Pradesh, where the BJP government is clamping down on illegal slaughterhouses,
is not in the top three states where the highest number of slaughterhouses
registered under FSSA are located.
These top
three states are Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Chandrashekhar
Gaud, an RTI activist, obtained this information under RTI from the Food Safety
and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).
“These
figures show that there are large number of illegal slaughterhouses in the
country,” he said.
FSSAI data
showed that Tamil Nadu has the highest number of slaughterhouses registered
under the Act (425), followed by Madhya Pradesh (262) and Maharashtra (249).
In other
words, 55 per cent of abattoirs registered under FSSA are located in these
three states.
Uttar
Pradesh, in news recently over closure of illegal slaughterhouses, has only 58
which are registered under the Act.
Meanwhile,
People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a press release here has said
that there are an estimated 30,000 unlicensed slaughterhouses in the country.
Leather
industry has no system in place to ensure that the skins used as raw material
are not sourced from illegal slaughterhouses, it said, and appealed for closure
of all unlicensed slaughterhouses.
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