In Focus: Reimagining Food Safety in India
There is something revealing about the way food safety enters public conversation in India. It usually begins with an image: a cockroach in a kitchen, a dirty refrigerator, an adulterated food product, a restaurant being shut down, or a popular brand receiving a notice. The image travels quickly, outrage follows, and suddenly the regulator becomes visible.
The recent actions of Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe have brought precisely this visibility to food safety. His department has intensified inspections across restaurants, food businesses and quick-commerce warehouses, with serious hygiene violations leading to notices, seizures and licence suspensions. In one recent drive, the Maharashtra FD inspected 86 establishments, issued 60 improvement notices and suspended the licences of 12 warehouses.
But the Mundhe moment also presents India with a larger policy question. What does it take to build a food-safety system in which enforcement remains strong, but safety increasingly becomes a property of the system rather than an outcome of individual inspections?
The Real Challenge is Regulatory Capacity
The scale of enforcement itself is substantial. More than 5.18 lakh food samples were analysed over a three-year period, alongside 252 notified food-testing laboratories and 305 Food Safety on Wheels units across 35 States and Union Territories. The numbers reveal a basic administrative reality: the state cannot be everywhere, all the time. This is why India’s movement towards risk-based inspection is more important than it may appear. FSSAI’s framework increasingly uses compliance history, enforcement and surveillance findings, self-compliance testing and third-party audits to determine inspection priorities.
UP Offers an Important Lesson: Regulation at Scale
Uttar Pradesh is particularly instructive because it forces the food-safety question out of the metropolitan restaurant and into the realities of scale. The state’s Food Safety and Drug Administration has increasingly combined enforcement with mobile testing, targeted drives and field-level surveillance.
In January 2026, UP’s FSDA ordered the suspension of licences and closure of 159 packaged drinking-water and mineral-water processing units following statewide inspections that uncovered serious violations. The 2026 Magh Mela in Prayagraj illustrates this particularly well. The FSDA divided the area into three zones, deployed additional food-safety personnel, operated five mobile food-testing laboratories, established a 24-hour camp office and introduced QR-linked feedback mechanisms for visitors.
This points to an important future direction for India: food-safety regulation cannot always wait for the food to reach a laboratory. Sometimes the laboratory has to move towards the food.
FSSAI’s Food Safety on Wheels programme reflects precisely this logic. The network currently has 305 registered mobile units nationally, which together have conducted more than one million sample tests according to the programme’s dashboard. This is what a modern regulatory state should increasingly look like: mobile where it needs to be, digital where it can be, and visible where public trust requires it.
Beyond the Inspection: What India Can Learn from the World
The most important international lesson is that food safety cannot be judged by a single visit from an inspector. The United States moved decisively in this direction with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), enacted in 2011, which shifted the regulatory emphasis from responding to contamination towards preventing it. Food businesses covered by the framework are required to identify reasonably foreseeable hazards, establish preventive controls, monitor them and take corrective action when those controls fail. Singapore has taken this thinking further with its Safety Assurance for Food Establishments (SAFE) framework, introduced in 2026. Instead of treating compliance primarily as a periodic snapshot, SAFE places greater weight on an establishment’s safety record over time, with stronger performers receiving better grades and poorer performers facing greater regulatory attention. Food safety should be treated as a track record, not a photograph. A business that consistently maintains hygiene, trains its workers, documents controls, responds to violations and demonstrates compliance should not necessarily consume the same regulatory bandwidth as a repeat offender.
India has already taken a step in this direction through FSSAI’s hygiene-rating initiatives, but there is scope to make such information considerably more useful: a consumer should eventually be able to understand an establishment’s recent inspection record, hygiene rating, significant violations and corrective action without having to navigate a bureaucratic database.
A meal ordered through an app or a packet delivered through quick commerce may pass through processors, distributors, warehouses and dark stores before reaching the consumer. The European Union’s “one step back, one step forward” traceability principle offers a useful conceptual starting point: businesses should know where their food came from and where it went. India’s expanding digital infrastructure creates the possibility of going further by connecting licensing, inspection, laboratory, complaint and supply-chain information. If a contaminated batch is identified in Mumbai, the ideal regulatory system should be able to identify its origin, trace its movement and determine which businesses and consumers may have been exposed. The objective is not to create another database; it is to give the regulator institutional memory.
India Does Not Need Fewer Raids. It Needs Fewer Reasons for Raids
Visible enforcement therefore has an important deterrent value. The question is what happens after the raid. A mature food-safety system should ensure that every inspection produces information, every laboratory result sharpens future surveillance, every consumer complaint informs risk assessment and every violation affects the establishment’s future regulatory profile.
The success of a regulator should therefore not be measured only by the number of establishments inspected, notices issued or licences suspended. More meaningful indicators would be whether repeat violations are falling, whether compliance is improving, whether high-risk businesses are being identified earlier and whether the time between detection and corrective action is shortening. In that sense, the regulatory system should behave less like an enforcement calendar and more like a learning institution.
This also offers a deeper governance lesson from the current debate around Tukaram Mundhe. Strong enforcement and a business-friendly environment are not contradictory; predictable enforcement can actually protect responsible businesses from being undercut by those who save costs by compromising safety. But firmness must be accompanied by proportionality. The objective is not leniency. It is precision. The real test, therefore, is whether the system can preserve the gains of decisive enforcement even after the individual officer has moved on by turning inspection data into institutional memory, compliance into an incentive and food safety from an episodic government intervention into an everyday business practice.
What India needs next
India’s food-safety journey has already moved a long way from the days when regulation was largely about adulteration raids and isolated prosecutions. The next phase should be built around five shifts.
First, from volume to intelligence. The question should not merely be how many inspections were conducted, but whether inspections are increasingly directed towards the highest-risk establishments.
Second, from snapshots to track records. Compliance should be assessed over time, not only on the day an inspector arrives.
Third, from punishment to incentives. Businesses with sustained good records should benefit from lower regulatory friction, while repeat offenders should face progressively greater scrutiny.
Fourth, from establishments to ecosystems. Food safety must follow food through warehouses, logistics networks, suppliers, processors and digital platforms.
Finally, from regulators alone to a regulatory community. Governments, businesses, laboratories, food handlers, technology platforms and consumers all have a role.
India already has considerable institutional capacity: FSSAI’s national framework, state-level enforcement machinery, hundreds of notified laboratories, mobile testing units and increasingly digital systems. The challenge is to make these pieces speak to one another. The ultimate ambition should not be a country in which every food business fears the next raid. It should be a country in which every food business understands that safe food is simply the cost of doing business. That is the larger lesson of the Tukaram Mundhe moment. The strongest food-safety system is not the one with the most dramatic raids. It is the one that quietly makes safe food the norm.
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