The report of the public accounts committee (PAC), which was submitted to the state legislature during the recently concluded budget session, noted that while slaughterhouses had been closed down due to lack of effluent treatment plants (ETPs), meat continued to be sold on the road.
While the Yogi Adityanath regime in Uttar Pradesh is cracking down on illegal abattoirs, a state legislature committee has pointed to how it is business as usual for the meat industry in Maharashtra despite slaughterhouses being shut for violations.
The report of the public accounts committee (PAC), which was submitted to the state legislature during the recently concluded budget session, noted that while slaughterhouses had been closed down due to lack of effluent treatment plants (ETPs), meat continued to be sold on the road.
"Abattoirs have been shut down for not conforming to the rules of the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) in municipal councils which do not have ETPs. Meat is sold on the road because of the slaughterhouses being closed," said the PAC, which is headed by senior Congress legislator Gopaldas Agarwal, calling for firm action against this sale of meat on the roadside.
The report said the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had pointed to how 16 of the 36 municipal councils audited by it had slaughterhouses, of which just seven had taken the MPCB's consents.
However, the MPCB had withdrawn its permission for four of these seven civic bodies and just one of these four municipal councils had applied for renewal, which was to be granted on October 2014. Thus, abattoirs were illegally operational in 13 municipal bodies.
These slaughterhouses discharged their effluents into open drains, which in turn, emptied into water bodies and polluted them.
"The businesses which were being conducted in abattoirs are now being done in illegal places. Consumption (of meat) has also not stopped," the committee observed.
Abattoirs which cull more that 10 animals are under the MPCB's control while those which kill less than 10 are handled by the municipal councils. The committee pointed to the need for ETPs to be established for slaughterhouses.
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