The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) has announced strict monitoring of slaughter houses and meat supplying shops.

Addressing a workshop on the management of animal slaughterhouse in the Capital on Tuesday, KMC’s Chief and Executive Officer Ishwor Raj Poudel said that the metropolis is planning more effective and intensive monitoring of abattoirs.

Though the metropolis has been conducting monitoring of meat shops and slaughterhouses for the past one decade, distribution and sale of unhygienic meat is still rampant in the Valley.

An estimated 2,500 meat shops and 1,000 fish shops are in operation in the Valley.  Of them, around sixty percent have been found to have failed to meet the hygiene standard.  

The KMC had earlier proposed transporting meat from slaughterhouses from outside Kathmandu. However, it failed to implement the plan. Similarly, it had also announced that it would phase out abattoirs from Kathmandu and import packaged meat from outside the Valley citing the lack of proper places to dump slaughterhouse waste.

“We are still planning to transport meat from abattoirs outside Kathmandu,” said Hari Kumar Shrestha, head of the KMC’s Urban Health Division.  

Though the Animal Slaughterhouse and Meat Inspection Act was formulated in 1999, it has not been implemented.