GOALPARA, Feb 4 - Nestle India in association with the National Association Street Vendors of India (NASVI) and supported by Food Safety, Assam organised a day-long training programme here at the District Agriculture Training Centre recently with the objective to educate and assist the street food vendors of Goalpara on issues related to health and hygiene aspects of handling street food.
Inaugurating the programme, Deputy Commissioner Varnali Deka while praising the novel efforts of Nestle India and all the stakeholders as part of CSR activities, said that there are many food safety challenges towards providing nutritious and healthy street food in the district. She also said that the street food provides an inexpensive nutritious food that meets the requirement of middle and lower income people and at the same time plays an important socio-economic role by providing jobs and livelihood to many people. However, if their enterprises are not handled correctly, it may have an adverse affect on health and hygiene of consumers. It has been observed that street vendors are often illiterate, poor and lack the knowledge of handling safe and hygienic food.
She mentioned that the training programme will provide proper guidance to all the street food vendors of the district on health and hygiene aspects of handling food and customer care and indirectly improve their business and income.
Meanwhile talking to this correspondent, Manager, Corporate Affairs Surojit Mukherjee said that the project started way back in 2016 and the company has been training street vendors across the country with the objective of providing hygienic and nutritious street food to people. He also informed that the training programme focuses on issues relating to health, hygiene, food handling, food safety concepts , personal & cart hygiene, environmental hygiene, pest control and garbage disposal.
He added that Goalpara is the 3rd district after Guwahati and Jorhat where the programme has been initiated, paying particular attention to educating the street food vendors on handling safe food, customer care, entrepreneurship and environmental hygiene which deals in proper refuse disposal facilities. Mukherjee also informed that a total of 73 street food vendors have participated in the programme where each of them were provided an apron, a cap and 100 pairs of gloves free of cost for ensuing personal hygiene and for preventing diseases. The resource person for the programme was NASVI trainer Md Zubair.