Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh): The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) in association with the Smart Cities Mission under the aegis of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) announced the winners of Eat Smart Cities Challenge in an online event on Wednesday.
The 11 winning cities include Chandigarh, Indore, Jabalpur, Jammu, Panaji, Rajkot, Rourkela, Surat, Sagar, Tumkuru and Ujjain. These cities will now enter into the scale up stage of the challenge wherein the projects undertaken at the pilot stage will now be scaled up in a sustainable manner.
Launched in April 2021, the Eat Smart Cities Challenge aims at motivating Smart Cities to develop and execute a plan that supports a healthy, safe and sustainable food environment through the adoption of various Eat Right India initiatives. A total of 108 cities had registered in the challenge out of which 20 cities were shortlisted for evaluation by an external jury panel comprising of national and international experts. These 11 cities have been selected as winners for the next phase of scale up and will be awarded Rs 50 lakh each by MoHUA.
In the scale up stage, cities will adopt an aggressive food systems approach in the implementation of various Eat Right India programmes on a larger scale. To support the cities, FSSAI along with Food Foundation, UK will organise a series of activities and deliberation sessions to provide technical assistance and showcase their efforts at international forums.
The parameters set for the competition included food licensing and monitoring campaigns, benchmarking and certification, developing healthy, safe eating styles in schools and campuses, creating a sustainable food environment and behaviour change campaigns. These criteria of the competition were to be fulfilled between January 2, 2021, and October 31, 2021.
For this, a hygiene rating of 25 food establishments of the city was done by the food security administration, which includes laddu prasad of Mahakaleshwar Temple, free food area and mess of district hospital. “Bhog” certification of Shri Mahakaleshwar Temple was done. Six campuses of the district have been developed as Eat Right Campus, which includes Police Officers' Mess. An increase of 3725 food licenses was achieved and 721 food samples were taken by running 09 surveillance drives.
Seventy-one government schools were registered by the department to develop them as eat right schools, and 95 food establishments were registered under the Roko scheme and motivated to stop the repeated use of burnt oil. In collaboration with Robin Hood Army, work was done to deliver safe food to the needy under the No Food Waste scheme. Anganwadi workers, ASHA workers and ANMs of the district were trained on healthy, safe food. Through social media such as Facebook, Instagram and the digital screen of Smart City, Eat Right that is right food and drink was widely promoted.
Collector Asheesh Singh, Ujjain Municipal Corporation commissioner Anshul Gupta, CEO of Ujjain Smart City Limited Ashish Pathak and designated officer food safety Jagdish Mehra congratulated the departmental employees and residents on this achievement.
