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How to end the loot and bad food at our highway eateries?

Every day, not hundreds but thousands of buses ply our highways across the country. Hundreds of thousands of passengers travel from here to there every day and nearly all of them have to deal with nasty food and have nowhere to complain.

You are forced to pay Rs 350 or even 450 along the Prithivi Highway routes for your lunch or dinner. The food is stale most of the time, and if anybody dares to complain, he or she becomes the lonely joker while the rest of the passengers just act like it is okay to be served substandard food.

In the past two decades, we have seen our government agencies go after these highway eateries once in a while but nothing seems to have changed. Putting red stickers on them didn't work. Giving them warnings and a few thousand Rupees fine didn't work. Hope the new government will soon tackle this issue and provide relief to hundreds of thousands of passengers every day.

There are two kinds of eateries along our highways. One is known only for its khaja set, mostly when the highway buses stop after a few hours of driving to allow passengers to take a break and visit the restroom (often nasty and smelly) and also eat some tea and snacks.

But the only problem is that most of these 'Khaja Set' places will have those machines for quick coffee and lemon tea but will say it is broken, so no tea or coffee for you. They will have veg Khaja set for Rs 250 and non-veg khaja set for Rs 350. If you do the math then the set is priced at 250% of the cost. I mean, if your veg khaja set is one samosa, one jhol-tarkari, a little bit of chowmein and chana then even if you order all the stuff individually, it will not cross a hundred Rupees. But you cannot order à la carte and have to either choose the set thing or go outside and then grab a bottle of water and some fruitcake, which would be the best option health-wise.

This is the case when dealing with 80% of the 'Khaja Set' places. There are some good ones along the Pokhara-Damuali route with coffee and many more items but the one in Naubise and all the way to the Terai region are mostly expensive and offer stale food and if you complain they just stare at you and when nobody joins with you to protest such food and prices, then they act like you are the crazy one.

Most of the highway eateries tell us that they have to pay off the bus drivers for bringing in customers or else they could have charged less but even if you charge Rs 200 for a chicken meal and still serve stale chicken and watery daal and smelly sabji then it is still against the law to sell substandard food products.

Most of the drivers, sorry, all of our bus drivers, take Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 from highway eateries and most of the passengers have no choice but to eat at these places. Out of 30+ passengers in a bus, nearly 80% have no choice but to eat at these eateries, while the rest still buy water, chips and other snacks from the shops owned by these eateries.

Even after paying off the bus driver, the eateries still make tons of profit from each bus. And the biggest issue is the tax thing. No receipt, no bills, nothing, only a token for a non-veg or veg meal. Everything is in cash, and either these eateries pay off everyone from the Ward to the CDO and tax people or nobody seems to be know about all this natak. Well, you decide which is the case when it comes to our eateries!

According to my math, these highway eateries who have like a minimum of 10-15 buses stopping by their place, make at least 30,000 net profit every day. After paying their staff, mostly young boys (who are under-paid) and other expenses, they easily make a cool 4 to 5 lakhs rupees per month. This is a very conservative estimate. And they pay minimum taxes while also serving adulterated food products and playing with the lives of the consumers.

I don't know what our ward chairperson is doing. Then comes the Municipality wallahs and their market monitoring team because every enterprise has to be registered at the local level right? Then comes the food quality checking people who seem to be checking or stuffing their own wallets rather than going after those selling substandard and adulterated food products.

And then come our CDOs who are mostly busy dealing with big issues like financial disputes between two byaparis or fights between two gangs wanting to take over the rivers for their crusher industries. Yes, our CDOs are busy dealing with high-level stuff that actually helps fatten their wallets rather than going after these enterprises playing with the lives of the consumers.

And in some cases, the inspection teams are attacked by our eateries. This means that they are not scared of the government. The new government should make it mandatory for all highway eateries to have well-equipped bathroom facilities with clean water and soap at all times. If not then close the place down without any warning or fines.

The eateries have to make sure that all the food are freshly-cooked and not a day old or have been sitting around for hours. If an inspection team comes, then they should be allowed to check everything and interfering with their checking will result in a six-month ban from operating the place. Any physical assault against the government employees will result in a six-month jail as well. Maybe, it is time to make some kind of a 'consumer body' to help tackle this issue and empower them with at least monitoring rights and reporting it to the government agencies.

It is time to hold all these 'mafia' byaparies who run the show in this land. We should maybe start from the bottom. Highway eateries have been fleecing the consumers for too long. It is time to either shut it down or for the government to open their own restroom facilities and eateries selling healthy food at affordable prices.

I think if the new RSP government can tackle this 'highway robbery' thing as soon as possible, it will certainly win the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people who are on our highways every day. We want to see changes at our local level, we want to see that the government cares for our well-being and wants to provide us basic services at reasonable prices.

Let's hope the new government will bring changes at the local level first, rather than jumping into the US$100 billion economy thing, because we want clean drinking water, affordable food prices and reasonable medical and school fees first.

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