Mumbai Central: India’s First Eat Right Station Declared by FSSAI
One of the oldest railway stations of our country, Mumbai Central of the Western Railways has been certified as the India’s first “Eat Right Station” with a four star rating, prestigious awarded by the FSSAI. This honor came on the basis of food safety, maintenance of hygiene, availability of healthy diet,trans-shipment and retail/serving point, food waste management, food handling at preparation, promotion of local and seasonal foods, creating awareness on food safety and a healthy diet. With a view to provide healthy food of passengers, Western Railways improve its food quality and maintain the hygiene to provide healthy food in train and also on railway stations.
“Eat Right Eat Healthy” is the Motive of FSSAI
Eat right is the most important for every living beings. It reduces the chances of diseases and maintains an ideal body weight. There are so many chronic diseases (like heart disease and cancer) that are caused by eating unhealthy food. The food quality regulator, FSSAI has trained food caterers to maintain the hygiene and improve the standard of food served in trains. An inspected team of FSSAI is established on stations to certify and rate the standard of food to check time to time the quality of food. The Indian Railways launched the ‘Eat Right Station’ as part of ‘Eat Right India’ initiative by FSSAI in 2018, and help passengers to make healthy and right food choice. Eat Right Station focuses on improving the health and well-being of the people by ensuring that they eat healthy food in train.
FSSAI, (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India), is a sovereign body of India, established by Health & Family Welfare of India under the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006. FSSAI is developed to improve public health and help the mass to combat negative nutritional trends to fight with major health diseases. They launched “Eat Right India” to make the public aware about their food and food related disease and also the right use the leftover foods. All the public health professionals, civil society and consumer organizations, food industries, and many more came to a common platform and pledge to step out for the “Eat Right Movement” in the country. The Eat Right Movement focuses on empowering citizens to make the right food choices and provide better nutritional information to consumers and make investment in healthy food. To support such preppy healthy movement, Indian Railways launches its program ‘Eat Right Station’ and the main goal of launching this program is to provide better food in train and on railway stations. This program has two basic pillars, Eat Healthy and Eat Safe.
Food Waste Management by FSSAI:
About 20 per cent of total population sleep hungry every night and on another side most of the people discard their leftover food. To save food and reuse the leftover food for needy, FSSAI is about to extend its services on railway stations of India. Recently, there’s a public fridge installed at Hubli railway station and KSR Bengaluru junction in which the passengers can put their leftover food that will be used for feeding homeless people under a CSR initiative of Indian Railways.