The issue of laddus prasad at Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh is getting worse. CM Chandrababu Naidu claimed that adulteration of fish oil and animal fat was found in the ghee used to prepare laddu prasad. After this incident, people across the country are talking about the ghee scam and asking if the prasad at Tirupati temple has committed a great sin? There was a time when people lived long lives and society used to say that these people must have eaten good milk, curd and ghee in their youth. Similarly, when a person says something auspicious, people say that you have ghee and sugar in your mouth. It is said that all five fingers of successful people are dipped in ghee and our India is said to have rivers of milk and ghee flowing here.
But now it seems that a river of fake milk and fake ghee is flowing in our country and the fake ghee floating in this river has now reached the Tirupati temple prasad. Ironically, in India, action is taken against fake and adulterated ghee every 20 days on an average and this ghee has taken root in your kitchen as well, but once this ghee reaches the temple prasad, it becomes the biggest news in India and now every household is discussing this ghee scam. So the question is, if the ghee in the sweet shop is tested in a lab, does the ghee in these ghee also contain the same animal fat?
The food safety regulatory authorities will now investigate
Regarding this issue, Union Health Minister JP Nadda has spoken to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu on the phone and said that the Modi government will let the Food Safety Authority of India investigate the entire incident.
The report revealed three things
Now, the FSSAI team will investigate the report that allegedly used lard, beef fat and fish oil in ghee made for prasad at the Tirupati temple, which also came to know three major things. .
First thing – The report was based on laddus and ghee samples sent for testing in the first week of July this year. Other things – The samples were tested at a government laboratory in Gujarat called the Livestock and Food Analysis and Learning Centre. The laboratory is located in Anand district of Gujarat and is run by a government of India committee, the National Dairy Development Board.
The third thing – The samples sent for testing were sent to this government laboratory by the temple committee itself and the report was made public on July 17.
If the report was released in July, why is this question being raised now?
Now many people are asking, when this report came out on July 17, why did Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu raise this issue two months later in September? In fact, the Andhra Pradesh government had raised this issue in July and blacklisted a dairy company for supplying bad quality ghee after an investigation, but now the issue has come up because of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu. In a recent press conference, he made a statement on the matter.
Tirupati Radu gets GI tag
Tirupati Balaji Temple in Andhra Pradesh, dedicated to Lord Venkateswara, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, has been offering special ‘Laddus’ prasad to Hindu devotees who come for darshan for the past 300 years and this laddu was also given GI tag in 2014. This means that in the name of Tirupati Tirumala, this laddu can only be found in Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh and no one else can sell this laddu.
How many grams and how much is laddu?
The weight of a laddu is 175 grams and the first laddu of each batch is offered to Lord Venkateswara and later these laddus are sold among devotees as Prasad. The first laddu is given free of charge to every devotee as Prasad and if a person wants to buy more than one laddu, he has to pay Rs 50 for each laddu to the temple committee and the Tirupati temple receives these laddus. The sale of this product fetches Rs 500-600 crore every year and this is where the whole controversy started.
Every year 5.4 million kg of ghee is used to make laddus.
Around 3 lakh laddus are made for the lakh Hindu devotees who come to this temple every day, of which 15 tonnes i.e. 15,000 kgs of ghee is used. If we talk about the whole year, then the temple committee uses 54 lakh kgs of ghee to make these laddus throughout the year, which is sourced from different companies and cowsheds. A former member of the temple committee said that they bought 500 semi-special breed cows from Gujarat and Rajasthan and kept them in the cowshed of the Tirupati temple, and the temple laddus were made from the ghee of these cows, but the price for the laddus was very expensive and 15,000 kgs of ghee was required every day to make them. Therefore, this ghee was also purchased from some outside companies. The story of adulteration of Prasad laddus also begins here.
How did fake ghee reach the Tirupati temple?
Lard, beef tallow and fish oil can be found in the laddus only when fake ghee is used instead of real ghee to make these laddus. The Union Ministry of Health and all its agencies and even the courts in many decisions have admitted that animal fats are used in fake and adulterated ghee and if that is the fat and FAT found in this case then the whole thing is 100% correct that fake ghee is used because fake ghee is made from animal fat and its fats. The question in your mind is that how did this fake ghee reach the Tirupati temple? And how can the previous government be held responsible for it? So the answer to this question is that the dairy company that purchased the ghee to make these laddus got an online tender from the same committee constituted by the Andhra Pradesh government which is issued every 6 months. The contract was given to the company that supplied the ghee and the whole process was managed by a committee at the temple called “Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam”.
Jagan Reddy handed over the great responsibility to his uncle
The board was formed by the state government and when Jagan Mohan Reddy became the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister in the 2019 assembly elections, he formed the board and handed over the chairmanship to YV Subba Reddy, who is currently a member of the Andhra Pradesh state assembly. He is also a member of the Rajya Sabha. Jagan Mohan Reddy’s mother and Subba Reddy’s wife are sisters and Subba Reddy is Jagan Mohan Reddy’s maternal uncle, perhaps that is the reason why Jagan Mohan Reddy visited the Tirupati temple when he assumed office as the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister in 2019. He appointed his uncle Subba Reddy as the chairman of the board and as the chairman, Subba Reddy and other members are deciding from which dairies to buy ghee for making laddus. As per the rules, Subha Reddy’s term on this temple board was supposed to be two years, but Jagan Mohan Reddy reappointed him as the chairman in 2021. In his government, Subha Reddy and other temple board members are the only ones who keep inviting online tenders to the dairy company.
Stop buying Nandini brand ghee and bid for another company
The TDP claimed that the temple committee had stopped buying Nandini brand ghee from the Karnataka Milk Federation last year and had tendered it to other dairies, including one in Tamil Nadu, whose ghee had been sold in the state after being returned. The current government had blacklisted it and told the previous government to buy ghee from this dairy at Rs 320 per kg and that the ghee was of poor quality. A former priest of the Tirupati temple also claimed that he had complained several times about Prasad using poor quality ghee, but the previous chairperson of the temple committee never took the complaints seriously.
The country produces so much ghee and milk
India produces about 2.3 billion litres of milk per year, of which only 10% can be used to make ghee, this 10% is 23 billion litres of milk, and 30 litres of milk are needed to make 1 kg of ghee. There is demand, which means that this much milk can only produce 760 million kg of ghee in a year, and our country has a population of 1.45 billion, and if we assume that out of these 1.45 billion people, half of them also eat so they only get one kg of ghee in a year, and each person consumes at most 4 to 5 kg of ghee in a year, from this you can understand that in our country, there is not so much demand for milk. The reason for this is that adulterated ghee is made from animal fat. This ghee has made its way from your home to the sweet shop and now perhaps it is also in the offerings of the Tirupati temple, and this adulterated ghee may also be used in other temples.
These are used to make fake ghee.
At this point, you will also have a question in your mind: Why only cow fat, lard and fish oil were found in the sanctum sanctorum of Tirupati temple? So the reason could be that fake ghee is made from these things, lard is the white substance produced when lard is melted. While making adulterated ghee, animal fat is melted and added to make it granular and give it a ghee-like white layer and smoothness, which eliminates the difference between real ghee and adulterated ghee. To prepare one kilogram of ghee, 500 grams of animal fat, 300 grams of refined palm oil and fish oil, 200 grams of genuine ghee and 100 grams of chemicals are mixed in it. These chemicals make the aroma of desi ghee start to come from animal fat ghee, when you go to the market to buy ghee, all you see is its aroma, its color, its smoothness and its granularity. That ghee? FSSAI and the Union Consumer Ministry in their respective reports admitted that pure Indian ghee does not contain animal fat and fat, while adulterated ghee is made from the same. It is estimated that the police and government fail to seize even 5% of the adulterated and fake ghee produced in India every year, which easily reaches the hands of the people and may now even be included in temple offerings.
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