Student hostels always need food safety in a crisis but the recent incident of UIT RGPV Bhopal has stunned. The student apparently detected a lizard in his mess food and an odd and disturbing chain got started.
According to some people, the student noticed some kind of problem for his meal and recognized it as a lizard. Angered by the discovery, he immediately approached mess staff and they said yes. Instead of believing it when it was clear that everything meant that this was wrong and not one of the very issues as indicated in the report, the staff said that the student saw not a lizard (a lizard, at all) but a piece of capsicum.
The situation boiled over when the staff attempted to prove them in a shocking way. An employee picked up the likely lizard and then ate it, in an attempt to convince the student and others at attention it wasn’t a vegetable. This shocked students who were not expecting this from a child.
The students were angry and upset at that time. The issue was not just food safety but also care-free mess staff and their laxness and carelessness. Eating the lizard to demonstrate the point was part of denial rather than responsibility. The students were angry too when they realized they had nothing to do with the mess and wanted people to take better responsibility and to clean up the mess as a whole.
To the most part this event reflects larger problems in hostels across India for many students. Mess food is often accused of being unfit for eating that lacks hygiene and has poor taste in it. Finding insects or foreign things in food is to be expected, but the way it was handled was a shock to some people. Staff did not respond really well and they dismissed the complaint as too rash.
The lizard-in-food incident in UIT RGPV Bhopal is a fresh reminder of the pressing necessity to improve food safety standards in student hostels. Clean and fresh food for the future students should be delivered, and complaints have to be taken seriously. What went wrong here was not only bad for their bodies but also not just rude to them it was a way of life for students with an unhealthy food and its effect was not only unhygienic and very damaging to their health but also on not only students but other students as well, and in particular to other students.
