Practice of using metanil yellow as food colour to process food in unorganized sector of West Bengal - A case study

We report here about the practice of using metanil yellow, a non permitted synthetic dye, in the adulteration of some food items produced by the organized and unorganized sectors located in different districts in West Bengal, India. We considered three food itemsturmeric powder, ladoo and besan for the detection of the presence of metanil yellow. We observed that 58 of the 253 samples i.e. 20.94% of total samples contain metanil yellow in which 36.21% of the positive samples contained the metanil yellow below the maximum permissible limit i.e., below the 100 mg kg-1 food samples and 63.79% of the positive samples contained above the maximum permissible limit i.e., above the 100 mg kg-1 food samples as specified in the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of India (PFA, 2008). We observed insignificant presence of metanil yellow in besan samples. We did not observe significant presence of metanil yellow in the same food samples collected from the organized sectors. We also found that all the positive samples i.e., the samples containing significant amount of metanil yellow were prepared from the food items collected from the unorganized sectors. From the study it is concluded that the unorganized sectors practice to use metanil yellow indiscriminately to adulterate the food items. We suggest strict governmental vigilance to prevent food adulteration with metanil yellow to avoid human health hazards.