New Delhi: Just like ‘yoga’ has become synonymous with Baba Ramdev in India, his brainchild ‘Patanjali’ an FMCG brand claims to be a metonym for ‘pure and natural’. Building an FMCG business worth 5000 cr in less than a decade is a topic of case study for MBA students. But repute and money also bring fear of losing along with it.
A video has gone viral on social media in which, a man is quashing Baba Ramdev’s claim of being the biggest producer of pure ghee in India. Man in the video is explaining the math behind Patanjali’s erroneous claim of producing 16 lakh liters of cow ghee every day.
“If you are producing one kg ghee than you will need 25 liters of milk. Going by this arithmetic, Ramdev needs 4 crore liters of milk every day. If one farmer supplies 10 liters of milk to Patanjali at Rs 40 per liter that simply means the farmer is earning Rs 400 from Patanjali every day. This also means that Patanjali is directly helping 40 lakh farmers. But is this true?”
He alleges that Patanjali does not buy more than 10 liters of the milk from outside. So the company purchases contaminated ghee from local brands and repackage it with Patanjali brand. While concluding, the man claims Patanjali is selling poisonous ghee and people are consuming it in the name of the company.
Sporadically, Patanjali products have been put under the scanner for quality check and Patanjali ghee is latest on the list. In 2016, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India raised questions over its edible oil advertisement for misleading consumers. Similarly, in 2017, Nepal Department of Drug Administration asked Patanjali Ayurved in a public notice to immediately recall six medical products as they were found to be of “substandard quality”. All medicines mentioned in the notice had failed the microbial tests used to detect bacteria, mold and other toxins.
Patanjali’s Amla juice had also been suspended by the armed forces’ Canteen Stores Department (CSD) last year after it failed the quality test at a Public Health Laboratory in Kolkata.
In 2017, an RTI revealed that Patanjali products had failed in quality assessment tests conducted by Haridwar’s Ayurveda and Unani Office.
Patanjali was built on the proposition of offering superior quality swadeshi products and Baba Ramdev has always mentioned that ‘Turnover and profit is never their goal and this is their success mantra’. However, in light of these allegations maintaining the trust of consumers will be a challenge for the billionaire Baba and his billion-dollar ‘swadeshi’ enterprise.
