DOHA: In more than 29,000 crackdowns on outlets civic inspectors detected over 2,500 violations of municipal health and safety rules in 2014.
The inspectors caught more than 4.82 million tonnes of food stocks that had either outlived their validity or turned stale.
The food stocks included canned food, fish, meat, fruits and vegetables, Qatar News Agency reported yesterday quoting the head of monitoring section of the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning.
Salem Hamoud Shafi Al Shafi said 1,300 samples of food were collected from suspect stocks last year and were sent for lab tests.
Some 70 of those samples tested positive but none of them was such that it could not be consumed by humans. It was just that these samples did not meet Qatari standards and specifications.
In the year some 162 outlets were closed temporarily for violating civic health and safety rules, the official said.
And 111 labour camps were removed from family residential areas in the year and some 616 violations of building safety rules were detected in over 2,700 clampdowns.
About 800 violations were forwarded to the police for legal action while 2,333 were solved amicably.
A total of QR1.2m was collected in fines imposed on the violating outlets, said Al Shafi.
He said that so far no candidate in the fray for May 13 Central Municipal Council (CMC) election has been caught for violating civic rules pertaining to campaign posters and banners.
The idea behind having rules for campaign posters and banners is to make sure that they are not put up in public places in a way that they obstruct view of motorists.
He praised Qatari citizens and said all of them had become socially aware so much that they act like civic inspectors and call the municipalities or the ministry to file complaints about suspected irregularities. The recent watermelon episode is a good example of that.
Samples were, though, taken and lab tests didn’t reveal anything, but that’s a separate issue. The fact is that nationals report suspected irregularities to the civic authorities.
The Peninsula
