DHANUSA: Chief Minister of Madhes Province Satish Kumar Singh has inspected the night hotels along the highway in Dhanusha district.

A high-level government team led by Chief Minister Singh inspected the hotels on Thursday night in the wake of complaints that stale and substandard food is being served in the hotels operating in the local Lalgarh Bazar and the food charges are expensive there.

According to the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, the high-level monitoring team led by the Chief Minister along with security personnel deployed in plain clothes travelled in microbus bearing private number plates and stopped at hotels along the highway. The Chief Minister held discussions with the hotel operators regarding the amount of ‘commission’ to be paid to the drivers and conductors of public buses and microbuses in particular for providing food to the passengers.

The hotel operators told the team led by Chief Minister Singh that it is customary for the operator to pay ‘commission’ at a fixed day interval based on the number of passengers eating food daily, weekly, monthly or as per the agreement between the two parties.

The high-level team has reached Lalgadh to continue the hotel monitoring work that started from Janakpurdham earlier.

According to Santosh Sah, chief of the Cottage and Small Industries Office, Janakpurdham, during the inspection most of the hotels were found to be dirty, the pulses contained turmeric and water instead of grains, vegetables were cooked without separating weeds and other plants and when the fish and meat was cooked could not be determined, and due to the overcrowding at hotels, it was not possible to determine who ate what and the customers were likely to be charged for the food they had not eaten due to the confusion on the part of person collecting money at the hotel counter.