Overview
Rajni and Arif sampled five vegetables and the soil beneath each crop from farmland in Faridabad, an industrial district in Haryana, India, in July 2024 and measured lead and cadmium by ICP-MS. The paper prints every result in percent units. The vegetable values (0.03 to 0.09 %) would equal 300 to 900 mg/kg, yet the text describes them as below food limits of about 0.3 mg/kg, so the reported unit cannot be trusted.
Key numbers
- Lead in vegetables V1 to V5 (lady finger, potato, cucumber, green chilly, round gourd): “0.03, 0.07, 0.07, 0.06 and 0.03 %” (Table 4, p. 1767).
- Cadmium in vegetables V1 to V5: 0.04, 0.09, 0.06, 0.08 and 0.04 % (Table 4); the Section 3.6 text instead repeats the lead series.
- Soil lead 1.77 to 1.82 % and soil cadmium 1.52 to 2.90 % (Table 4).
Methods (brief)
One composite 1 kg sample per location; 500 g of edible parts washed in tap and deionized water and ground; ICP-MS at a commercial testing laboratory. No digestion method, detection limits, reference materials or recoveries are reported, and the basis (fresh or dry) is not stated.
Evidence Fitness
Five single samples from farmland at harvest, not retail produce. The percent units contradict the paper’s own limit comparisons, and the text and table disagree on the cadmium series, so the values are stored with integrity flags and no converted concentration. For vegetables-mixed this is a proxy: it measures individual vegetables, not a mixed-vegetable product. Useful only as a weak signal that the paired soils are described as heavily contaminated.