HEALTH-INDIA: Medical Experts Want Ban on Non-Iodised Salt Back

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 7 2000 (IPS) - The Indian government’s decision to lift a ban on the sale of non-iodised salt has alarmed public health experts who warn this could lead to a large-scale recurrence of physical and mental deformities caused by iodine deficiency.

A month after the ban was lifted, health activists are preparing to petition the country’s highest court to reverse the decision, which is said to have been taken under pressure from well-connected salt traders.

However, the government argues that the two-year-old ban was hurting the poor who could not buy the high-priced iodised salt.

“The government decided to lift the ban to make salt available to each strata of society, as non-iodised salt would cost much less,” said Health Minister C.P. Thakur.

The India office of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has expressed its disapproval of the government’s decision.

“This decision to drop the ban is likely to have grave consequences for the health of India’s population — especially two of its most vulnerable groups, young children and pregnant women,” said a UNICEF press statement.

The experience of countries like Guatemala and several of the former Soviet republics, has shown that iodine deficiency diseases recur, once universal salt iodisation is abandoned, says UNICEF’s India representative, Alan Court.

Court is backed by leading Indian medical experts who say that it is the poor who are going to be hurt by non-iodised salt.

According to the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders (ICCIDD), some 200 million people in the country are at risk of iodine deficiency. Another 70 million are afflicted with the unsightly swelling of the neck, known as goitre, caused by iodine deficiency.

“India’s salt iodisation programme has rightly been regarded as one of the most successful public health interventions in this country in the past two decades,” says Court.

“Lifting the ban is a serious blow to India’s efforts to eliminate iodine deficiency disorders,” says famed Indian medical expert, V. Ramalingaswamy who is credited with discovering the link between iodine deficiency and goitre.

Health experts say that iodine deficiency results in mental impairment and reduced work capacity. “If the deficiency is corrected during pregnancy or in early infancy, brain damage is reversible,” says Court.

Thakur, himself a qualified medical practitioner, has been under pressure from the salt traders who are said to have considerable clout with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The traders have been backed by influential BJP affiliates like the All-India Sarva Seva Sangh and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. These groups champion radical economic self-reliance and conducted a media campaign suggesting that the ban was the work of trans-national corporations.

But Chandrakant Panda, the ICCID’s South Asia and Pacific Coordinator, says the amount of iodine used in salt iodisation, is negligible when compared to its industrial uses.

“The government is changing its notification within a span of two years and six months and that too with no scientific, legal, economic, socio-educational, moral or ethical justification,” says Panda.

“A lot of rubbish was being put out by the traders’ lobby to confuse the issue,” says N. Kochupillai, head of the endocrinology department at New Delhi’s prestigious All-India Institute of Medical Sciences.

For example, he points out, there was never any ban on the production and sale of common salt because this forms a basic raw material for making iodised salt by the bigger units. “Small producers will always have a market,” he says.

Apparently, the salt traders were interested in claiming the benefit of subsidised railway freight charges — a concession available to salt traders since the days of colonial British rule, but which was subsequently restricted to the movement of iodised salt.