Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Monday wrote a letter to his Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar requesting him to take the necessary steps to ascertain the genuineness of the allegations that formalin was being used in the fish sent from A.P. to Bihar. He also sought the Bihar government’s cooperation and support to continue shipping of fish from the State.
Mr. Naidu, in his letter, said a team of officers from Bihar may be sent for random and surprise inspections at fish packing sheds for any type of quality check including formalin test. The State government would extend all support to such a team by providing all logistic arrangements for carrying out the inspections in a free and fair atmosphere. Also, quality checks for formalin may be taken up at the borders of Bihar. Andhra Pradesh would depute a team of officers to carry out the quality check in the presence of the Bihar technical team, he said.
Reciprocal trade
Mr. Naidu said that Andhra Pradesh had been sending fish to Bihar and having reciprocal fish trade business for long. But, there were allegations that AP fish traders, while sending fish to Bihar, were using formalin as a preservative for long shelf life which was hazardous to human health.
“The aqua farmers and merchants are strongly denying the allegations stating that it is nothing but defaming the AP fish supplies. This could disturb the good fish trade relations between two States,” he said.
“The AP State Fish Farmers Association have represented that their fish trade in Bihar State is badly affected due to some misapprehension on alleged usage of formalin in the fish supplies to Bihar State.”
Subsequently, the Department of Fisheries and Institute of Preventive Medicine (IPM) were jointly conducting surprising raids on fish packing sheds and wholesale fish outlets and tested for formalin with field test kits of ClFT, Kochi, to ascertain the genuineness of the charges, but no cases of using of formalin or ammonia in fishery products have been reported so far, he explained.