Ayesha Mumtaz is a name of fear for all those who owns from small to large scale food business. Social media and its usage is often categorized as a waste of time but if used properly it can really be used for bringing about a change in society. Most memorable examples include Obama’s Health Insurance Campaign, the “Bring our Girls Back” Campaign among many more. Keeping these examples in mind, we are nothing but proud to add the latest campaign for sanitary food by Punjab Food Authority (PFA) to this list.
The campaign led by Ayesha Mumtaz has garnished quite many country wide followers and praises as well as being recognized by many non Pakistani people. In just a short period of time, Ms. Mumtaz has managed to bring about a positive change in how restaurants cut corners by toying with sanitation costs and rightfully earned the nickname of “Dabang Lady”. Now, I know in a non corrupt country, this would be quite a simple task, but in our country for a government agency to be able to go against multi million (if not billion) rupee businesses was almost unheard of.
So how did the PFA manage to go against the likes of the heads of Avari, Hardees and Pearl Continental? The answer lies in almost an amazing social media campaign which not only publicized each raid but also shared the pictures of the sanitary transgressions each of these restaurants were committing. This led to a positive public backing and cornered corporate heads into a corner. If they were to bribe or have Ms. Mumtaz removed from her post, the public would still cry in an outrage and boycott their product thus leaving them with no other choice than to pay the fine and actually improve the quality of the food they served to the masses.
The great thing about the whole campaign is that no restaurant is too big or too small for the PFA and all of them have faced their wrath equally. This has also led other restaurants to either straighten up before being fined or to take to social media on their own to showcase that their customers have nothing to fear when they choose to dine at their establishment. This has truly led to a breathtakingly fresh change in our otherwise corrupt system. We only hope that other provincial food authorities, nay all other governmental authorities follow suite and learn how they can make a positive change in our system.
