1,707 abattoirs registered under FSSA; most in TN, MP, Maha

A query under the Right to Information has revealed that only 1,707 slaughterhouses in the country are registered under the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA), 2006.
There are no abattoirs registered under the 2006 Act in Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. Further, these states/Union Territories do not have a single slaughterhouse which has a license issued by either the state or the Central authority.
Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP government is clamping down on illegal slaughterhouses, is not in the top three states where the highest number of slaughterhouses registered under FSSA are located.

These top three states are Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Chandrashekhar Gaud, an RTI activist, obtained this information under RTI from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).
"These figures show that there are large number of illegal slaughterhouses in the country," he said.

FSSAI data showed that Tamil Nadu has the highest number of slaughterhouses registered under the Act (425), followed by Madhya Pradesh (262) and Maharashtra (249).
In other words, 55 per cent of abattoirs registered under FSSA are located in these three states.
Uttar Pradesh, in news recently over closure of illegal slaughterhouses, has only 58 which are registered under the Act.

Meanwhile, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a press release here has said that there are an estimated 30,000 unlicensed slaughterhouses in the country.
Leather industry has no system in place to ensure that the skins used as raw material are not sourced from illegal slaughterhouses, it said, and appealed for closure of all unlicensed slaughterhouses.