While you savour those mouth-watering Diwali sweets, here's the bitter truth: what you are consuming is most likely substandard, adulterated and poisonous.

Raids across the country have unearthed hundreds of kg of adulterated sweets or their ingredients, but that's just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

In Meerut, 500 kg of adulterated milk cake and 300 kg of poisoned petha were seized on Monday while around 550 kg of adulterated mawa was seized in Gonda. The mawa was being transported in a bus to avoid detection.

In Allahabad, around 900 kg of rotten peas and 100 kg of contaminated ice cream were seized.

In Jalgaon, Maharashtra, around 9,900 kg of spurious sweets were confiscated. A tip-off led the state food department to a godown where heaps of sweets made from substandard ingredients were ready for circulation.

In Delhi, Headlines Today found many factories producing poisonous sweets. One such factory is in Mandawli, where rasgullas were found kept in the most unhygienic conditions. Even stale, germ-infested rasgullas were being re-used to produce new ones.

Rinku, the factory owner, claimed he supplied nearly 50 tonnes of rasgullas to all the major sweet shops of Delhi.

Pethas, another big hit during Diwali, are equally harmful. Headlines Today found one factory in Mandawli where pethas were lying in a tank full of lime solution used for whitewashing. This was being done to hasten the softening of the sweets. At one point, the sweets were also found being prepared besides a toilet strewn with excreta.

In a milk cake factory in Paschim Vihar, Delhi, Headlines Today found dead flies floating in the milk used for preparing the delicacy. A worker was found dipping his dirty hands in the milk to take the flies out.

Shahzad, the owner of the factory, even promised to arrange for milk that was cheaper. He openly admitted that the sweets were adulterated.

And worse still is the way the sweets are processed and preserved. The sweets factories use formalin, a chemical used to preserve corpses.

Consuming formalin-mixed products can damage the kidneys and liver, cause asthma attacks and even cause cancer. Pregnant women are most vulnerable to the chemical and can end up giving birth to physically challenged babies.

Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the rules against adulteration were strict, but it was up to the state governments to take action.