Spurious desi ghee seized, 4 held

Balwant Garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, October 30

Arresting four persons for the offence of adulteration and cheating in the making of desi ghee, the Faridkot police claimed to have made recovery of about 15,000 kgs of spurious desi ghee, 50,000 kg of vegetable oil and about 4,000 lt of fatty chemical acid from a factory, established in about 10,000 square yards area in Kotkapura.

Faridkot SSP Raj Bachan Singh Sandhu said the police had arrested Vishal Goyal, a Ludhiana-based industrialist and owner of the factory, Sukhdev Singh, the manager, Vijay Kumar and Kulwant Rai, residents of Lehragaga, suppliers of spurious ghee.

The police and Health Department teams are conducting a joint search operation in Lduhiana, Delhi, Jakhal, Lehragaga, Rampura and other towns of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan to recover consignments of spurious ghee, the SSP said.

As the demand for desi ghee is high in the festival season for its use in rituals and cooking sweets and other eatables, it is believed that huge quantity of spurious ghee was already dumped in the market.

There is a huge margin in the sale of spurious desi ghee. While the manufacturing cost of this ghee is about Rs 100 per kg, after packing it in the name of many reputed brands, this duplicate product is supplied in the retail market from Rs 150 to Rs 200 per kg.

The retailer further sells this spurious ghee to the consumer at Rs 350 to Rs 400 per kg.

For pure desi ghee, cow and buffalo milk is used for its preparation. But in adulterated and spurious ghee, three body fats (buffalo, goat and pig) and three vegetable oils (soybean, palm and rice bran) are largely used.

Vegetable oils and animal body fats are different from each other in terms of their physico-chemical make-up.

Vegetable oils contain more of long chain unsaturated fatty acids mainly linoleic acid while body fats contain long chain fatty acids, which are comparatively less unsaturated than vegetable oils and more saturated than milk fat, said sources in the Health Department.

Several tests have been developed for detecting adulteration of milk fat with foreign fats, but the use of fatty chemical acid to make the emulsion of vegetable oils and body fats in desi ghee makes it difficult to assess the purity without any laboratory examination.

Reichert Meissl (RM value) is a significant physico-chemical constant to check purity as these short chain fatty acids are found only in milk fat and not in animal body fats and vegetable oils.

While the RM value for pure cow ghee ranges from 28.52 to 30.93, for pure buffalo ghee it ranges from 30.87 to 33.73.

However, the average RM value for buffalo body fat, goat body fat and pig body fat is from 0.25 to 0.30. The value for palm oil, rice bran oil and soybean oil is from 0.15 to 0.35.