January 4, 1999
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Heroes, Villains and Zeroes '98 DROPSY Unscrupulous oil producers and a lax system take over 50 lives.
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We thought we'd seen everything ... at least as adulteration goes.
We've had pebbles in rice, water in milk and chalk in flour. But even we weren't ready for
poisonous argemone oil mixed in mustard oil. Death suddenly came packaged in tins, bottles
and polypacks. And for a brief period in September hospitals across northern India saw a
mass of swollen limbs, punctured blood vessels and a deathly pallor. It was diagnosed as
dropsy, a medieval, almost forgotten, affliction and it claimed 50 lives. But more than
those who died, dropsy also sounded the 
death-knell for the country's quality control mechanism. It was
quite clear how inefficient the system was in checking adulteration. Inspectors of the
Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) directorate were actually asked to stop drawing and
taking samples because everybody realised that the officials were habituated to taking
bribes from cooking oil manufacturers. Worse, most of their testing laboratories across
the country weren't adequately equipped to test for dropsy. So we failed to detect it, but
like any other Indian public-health disaster we also failed to check further adulteration.
Within months all the banned brands were back, some being sold at double the price.
