The troubling truth behind India’s food-safety regime

When the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament recently tabled its critical report on the functioning of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), it rekindled a long-overdue national conversation. Food safety—an issue that affects every citizen, from street vendors to multinational manufacturers—rarely receives the political or administrative urgency it deserves. The PAC’s findings are troubling, but they also offer an opportunity: to rethink India’s food-safety architecture at a time when supply chains are expanding, diets are changing, and new risks are emerging.

The PAC’s report depicts a regulator struggling to keep pace with its mandate. FSSAI, created to unify multiple food laws under a single authority, was envisioned as a science-led body capable of modernising India’s food-safety ecosystem. Instead, the committee notes serious shortfalls:

Inadequate infrastructure: Food-testing laboratories are unevenly distributed, and many lack modern equipment. Several states depend heavily on private labs, raising concerns about quality and accountability.

Weak enforcement: The report highlights poor compliance monitoring, infrequent inspections, delays in sample testing, and low conviction rates in adulteration cases.

Vacancies and resource constraints: Many key positions in FSSAI and state food-safety departments remain unfilled. Technical expertise—nutritionists, food technologists, toxicologists—is in short supply.

Gaps in surveillance: India still lacks a strong, real-time food-borne disease surveillance system, making it difficult to track outbreaks or detect systemic risks.

These problems are not new. They reflect deeper structural issues that hinder India’s ability to ensure safe food for its 1.4 billion citizens. The broader challenges are: 

A fragmented supply chain vulnerable to contamination

India’s food system is extraordinarily complex: millions of small farmers, thousands of mandis, wholesalers, transporters, storage points, processors, retailers, and street vendors. Contamination can occur at any stage—pesticide misuse on farms, unhygienic transport, adulteration in wholesale markets, or unsafe handling by small eateries. Ensuring safety across such a fragmented chain requires coordination among ministries of health, agriculture, commerce, transport, consumer affairs, and urban local bodies—coordination that remains weak.

Rise of ultra-processed foods and hidden risks

The Indian diet is changing rapidly. Ultra-processed foods—high in salt, sugar, fat, and additives—now occupy supermarket shelves and children’s lunch boxes. FSSAI’s proposed front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) norms have faced years of industry pushback. Without clear labels and strict nutrient standards, consumers remain unaware of the health risks, contributing to India’s rising rates of diabetes, childhood obesity, and cardiovascular disease.

E-commerce and food aggregators: A regulatory blind spot

The explosive growth of food delivery platforms has reshaped eating habits, but regulation has not kept pace. Ensuring hygiene standards in thousands of cloud kitchens, home-based businesses, and aggregator-linked outlets is a challenge for which current inspection systems are ill-equipped. These platforms have also blurred jurisdictional boundaries, demanding new digital models of oversight.

Climate change and new threats

Climate change is a food-safety issue. Rising temperatures accelerate bacterial growth in perishables, while erratic rainfall affects crop quality and pesticide dynamics. Mycotoxins in grains, contamination in seafood due to warming waters, and pathogen spread in supply chains signal risks that traditional regulatory models do not fully consider.

Weak consumer awareness and lack of demand for safe food

Consumer movements demanding strict food-safety standards remain weak in India. Low public awareness allows adulteration and unsafe practices to persist. Food safety can succeed only when citizens recognise it as a right—not a luxury.

India must look beyond incremental reforms. Food safety deserves the same urgency the country accords to public health, digital governance, or infrastructure.

FSSAI should be empowered with greater autonomy, adequate budgetary resources, and a clear mandate to hire top-tier scientific talent. India needs more toxicologists, microbiologists, food technologists, and nutritionists—not just administrators.

Every state should have at least one world-class, NABL-accredited lab, supported by mobile testing units covering rural areas. Public-private partnerships can help, but with strict safeguards to ensure impartiality.

India needs integrated, digital, real-time surveillance systems linking hospitals, municipal bodies, and laboratories to track food-borne illnesses, contaminants, and adulterants. Early detection must become the new norm.

Clear “High in Fat/Salt/Sugar” labels, as recommended by global best practices, are essential. Industry objections should not override public health imperatives.

FSSAI must collaborate with state governments and tech platforms to develop digital inspection models, risk-based scoring of food businesses, and standardised protocols for cloud kitchens and home-based vendors.

Municipal bodies must be central to food-safety enforcement—hygiene grades for eateries, audits of street-food hubs, and sanitation infrastructure in marketplaces.

Just as the Swachh Bharat Mission changed public hygiene behaviour, a nationwide programme—led by schools, community organisations, and media—can empower consumers to demand safe food.

The PAC report has exposed critical gaps in FSSAI’s functioning, but the deeper message is clear: food safety cannot be treated as a routine regulatory task. It must be understood as a foundational pillar of national health, economic productivity, and human well-being. At a time when India aspires to become a global manufacturing hub and a $10-trillion economy, ensuring safe food is not merely a regulatory obligation—it is a moral responsibility.

Strengthening India’s food-safety ecosystem is not about adding more rules; it is about building trust in what we eat every day. The PAC has done its job by sounding the alarm. It is now for policymakers, industry, and citizens to act—before the next crisis arrives on our plates.

(The writer is an Hon Professor at Mahatma Gandhi Rural Development and Panchayat Raj University, Gadag; Adjunct Professor at Kristu Jayanti University, Bengaluru; and Visiting Professor at St Claret College, Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh)