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Subject:Sweets are non-vegetarian: The lowdown on waraq (aka varakh)
Sweets are non-vegetarian

Beasts in my belfry / Maneka Gandhi

In India, by law, every food item has to have a green
dot on it, if it is vegetarian - and a maroon dot, if
it is non-vegetarian. If a manufacturer is found to be
cheating by mislabelling his product, the sentence is
many  years in jail.

So, how have the mithai (sweets) people not been
arrested so far? Milk has been treated as vegetarian
to appease the powerful dairy lobby, but the  silver
;foil&nb sp;or 'varakh' on each mithai cannot by any
stretch of imagination  be considered vegetarian.

'Beauty Without Cruelty', a Pune-based NGO that
investigates into product  ingredients, has produced a
remarkable booklet on the varakh industry. Here  is
their report on how it is made.

The varakh-makers select animals at the
slaughterhouse. Each animal is felt  for the softness
of its skin before it is killed. This means that a
substantial number of goat, sheep and cattle are
killed specifically for the industry. Th eir  ;skins
are soaked in filthy, infested vats for 12 days to
dehair them. Then, workers peel away the epidermal
layer, which they call jhilli, just under the top
layer of the skin in a single piece.
These layers are soaked for 30 minutes in another
decoction to soften them and left to dry on wooden
boards.

Once these are dry, the workers cut out square pieces
19 cm by 15 cm. These pieces are made into pouches
called auzaar and stacked into booklets. Each booklet
has a cover of thic k l amb suede called khol. Thin
strips of silver called alagaa are placed inside the
pouches. Workers now hit the booklet
with wooden mallets for three hours to beat the silver
inside into the ultra-thin varakh of a thickness less
than one micron called '999'. This varakh is then sent
to sweet shops.

Here are the statistics that you should know. An
animal's skin can make 20-25 pieces/pouches only. Each
booklet has 360 pouches. One booklet is used to make
30,000 varakh pieces - less than the daily supply of
a single big mithai shop.

About 12,500 animals are killed for one kg of varakh.
Every year, 30,000 kg of varakh (30 tonnes) are eaten
on mithai. 2.5 crore booklets are made by varakh
companies that keep their slaughterhouse connection
secret. But the truth is that not only is this
industry killing animals furiously, much of the animal
tissue that the booklet is made of remains in the
varakh.

Each Jain knows in his heart that varakh is
non-vegetarian. But they still use these dreadful
items of mass destruction to decorate the idols of
Jain tirthankars. How amazing that the idols of those
that preached and practiced strict non-violence to all
creatures should now be covered with slaughterhouse
derived silver foils. Jains are the biggest buyers of
the varakh industry. Many try to bluff themselves by
saying that the varakh is machine-made.

'Beauty Without Cruelty' has
done a thorough investigation and found that there is
not a single machine-made varakh piece in this country
(or even the world).

On the web, there is one letter from a person,
Jalandhra, claiming that he has a company which has
"fully automatic machines manufactured with German
collaboration to beat silver pieces in between a
special Indian manufactured paper in a hygienic and
controlled atmosphere run round the clock by qualified
Engineers and experienced R&D team". Initially, we
were
importing the special paper from Germany. But when I
followed this up, no factory of the given name, or
even address, was not found.

The production of varakh is done mainly in north
India: Patna,
Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur and Gaya (which is a Buddhist
holy centre) in Bihar; Kanpur, Meerut and Varanasi
(the holy city of Hindus) in Uttar Pradesh; and
Jaipur, Indore, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The booklets
come to them from the slaughterhouses of Delhi,
Lucknow, Agra and Ratlam.

Not only is varakh non-vegetarian, it is also very bad
for your
body -whether you are vegetarian or not. The silver
cannot be digested; therefore, there are no benefits
from its consumption. A study done in November 2005 by
the Industrial Toxicology Research Centre in Lucknow
on varakh says that the silver foil available in the
market has toxic and carcinogenic metals in the thin
silver foil, nickel, lead, chromium and cadmium.

Over half of the analyzed silver foils had lower
silver purity than the 99.9 per cent purity stipulated
by the prevention of food adulteration act of India.
When such foil enters into the body, it releases heavy
metals that can lead to cancer.  The report also
details the unhygienic conditions in which workers put
silver in small leather bags and beat it into foil in
filthy shops.

It is time we refused varakh-covered mithai, fruit or
paan. If you want to send booklets to all your
sweetshops, you can send a donation to Beauty Without
Cruelty, 4 Prince of Wales Drive, Wanowrie,
Pune-411040 (Tel:020-26871166).

As for me, I think that this year, I will take the
mithai shops to court for not labeling their products
non-vegetarian, & nb sp; before selling them. Let us
see how many of them go to jail, or have their
business closed down. I suggest you cut out this
article and show it to your local sweetshops.

Regards

Nambiar Manoj Kumar
Manager - IT
Bhaktivedanta Hospital
Bhaktivedanta Swami Marg,
Sector 1, Srishti Complex,
Mira Road (E)
Office - 28459888 Ext- 2145
Direct - 28453852
Mobile No. 9323939323








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