Two gentlemen make a reservation for dinner at a “great” restaurant in Mumbai. When they enter, one of them notices that the licence is not prominently displayed. In his head, it is a violation. They are asked by the waiter whether they would have regular water or bottled water. A second violation because restaurants are supposed to offer regular water by default; bottled water is provided only on request. The restaurant serving them analogue paneer—a cheap, factory-made imitation of traditional dairy paneer—claiming it was real paneer, is the final blow. The dinner is left untouched. The management is apprised of the violations and given 24 hours to comply. “They did nothing about it, and the rest is history,” says one of the gentlemen, laughing, while narrating this incident in an interview.
Cover Story | Tukaram Mundhe Is The Exception. Unsafe Food Is The Rule In India
One Tukaram Mundhe can’t fix the broken system. For now, it is good enough that he is trying
The gentleman happened to be the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration of Maharashtra, Tukaram Mundhe. These days, whenever he walks into a restaurant, even for a casual cup of tea with friends, heads turn. His reputation precedes him. He was appointed in May, and since then, in an intensive crackdown on bad food and dirty kitchens, he has overseen over 12,000 inspections and raids, cancelled or suspended around 600 licences, sealed more than 300 eateries and issued more than 5,000 improvement notices.
Keep the kitchen clean or I’ll send Mundhe—this has become a running joke. His teams have been walking into restaurants, warehouses, dairies, manufacturing units, clubs, canteens and quick-commerce facilities, looking for what is usually invisible to customers.
Even the big and the famous have not been spared. From cancelling the licences of Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut and Iskcon food establishments to raiding warehouses of Parle Agro and the facilities of Blinkit and Zepto, Mundhe went after businesses across the food chain. He also tightened the noose around clubs patronised by the rich and powerful, and did not hesitate to cancel the licences of canteens inside the Bombay High Court premises. Even iconic Mumbai eateries such as Café Mondegar, Noor Mohammadi and Olympia Coffee House, each with a history spanning almost a century, have not been spared.
The images of raids and inspections reaching homes through social media have turned Mundhe into something of a messianic figure. For decades, Indians have eaten food they knew was unsafe, learning to live with the risks because there was little choice. In a country where hunger was the greater evil until only a few decades ago, the question was simply whether there was food on the plate, not whether it was safe to eat. This explains why a bureaucrat doing his everyday job has emerged as a hero of sorts, even as his actions unsettle some of the biggest names in the country’s food and beverage industry.
India has seen its share of food scares over the years: worms in Cadbury chocolate, lead in Maggi, pesticide allegations involving Pepsi, and the now-familiar parade of cockroaches and lizards turning up in food served at restaurants and on trains. Social media has since turned such discoveries into a daily procession of disgust: unsafe chemicals and artificial dyes in spices, synthetic milk, analogue paneer, adulterated khoya in sweets, expired chips, biscuits and beverages.
Yet the outrage has rarely had a face to attach itself to. That is beginning to change with Mundhe. His raids and inspections have given a human face to the regulator’s otherwise invisible eye, making the machinery of food safety visible in people’s homes. Perhaps that is why celebrities such as Bipasha Basu and Shweta Tiwari have also taken to social media, posting videos of what they claim are “tiny, live worms” in newly opened protein powder and cockroaches in cans of Red Bull ordered through Swiggy Instamart. Their experiences carry an unsettling message: money may buy choice, but it cannot always buy certainty about what is on the plate.
For the first time, it seems consumers across the economic spectrum are looking in the same direction, towards a bureaucrat who has made the routine business of regulation feel like a public crusade against a system that has for too long treated food safety as someone else’s problem.
While there is no single number that captures how many people fall sick in India every year specifically because of unsafe food, the data is still staggering. Latest numbers show that more than a thousand deaths were attributed to food poisoning in 2024. Millions of acute gastroenteritis and diarrheal illness cases are recorded every year. More than 200 diseases can be caused by eating food contaminated with bacteria, parasites and chemical substances, which range from diarrhoeal illnesses to cancers and can produce gastrointestinal, neurological, gynaecological and immunological effects, says the World Health Organisation.
The more troubling part is that contaminated food rarely comes with a warning. You cannot tell by looking at it, smelling it or, sometimes, even by eating it. The most expensive restaurant can serve you food that is just as unsafe as the humble roadside stall.
Shubham Kulkarni, a Pune-based techie, learnt this the hard way after a recent outing to celebrate an early promotion. The family was excited about their maiden five-star hotel visit, but all four ended up bedridden for the next three days after a severe bout of food poisoning. “I eat deep-fried samosas and bread pakoda at a thela [stall] near my office every day. I thought I had solid immunity. But I never expected dinner at a reputed hotel to knock us out,” he says.
Interestingly, the thela that Kulkarni mentioned and the five-star restaurant serving the choicest à la carte menu both fall under the same regulator, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). Established in 2008, the FSSAI is mandated to protect public health by regulating and supervising the safety, manufacture, storage, distribution and import of food across the country. The Food Safety and Standards Rules, 2011, lay down the legal procedures, licensing requirements and enforcement responsibilities.
So, the system exists. The rules exist. The regulator exists. Why, then, does unsafe food continue to find its way on to our plates, into our grocery baskets and, eventually, our refrigerators?
The answer lies in the nature of the problem itself. Food safety is much larger than raids, licence cancellations or shutting down an eatery. What reaches the consumer travels through a long and complicated chain, making safety “less a single checkpoint than a continuum, from production and processing to storage, distribution, retail and food service”, the FSSAI says in a written response to Outlook.
It is in the gaps between these stages that the system begins to fray. On paper, India has policies, rules and enforcement mechanisms. On the ground, there is an overburdened regulatory machinery and violations that slip through the cracks, smaller operators who often bear the brunt of enforcement. Meanwhile bigger players find ways around it and the quiet economy of bribes that helps businesses navigate rules and regulations. Alongside these are blatant violations that persist despite the law being clear. Fixing these gaps, rather than merely conducting more raids, is therefore at the heart of India’s food-safety challenge.
Manpower Crunch
India has 274 FSSAI-recognised and notified food-testing labs including 254 primary food labs and 20 referral labs for appeals and imported food testing. The network is supplemented by 305 ‘Food Safety on Wheels’ units.
It’s a David-meets-Goliath situation, considering there are more than 800 five-star hotels, more than five lakh organised and unorganised restaurants and millions of authorised and unauthorised street food vendors in the country. A guy selling idlis on a bicycle or fish and rice for two hours in the afternoon or chaat, paani puri and kulfi sellers are probably not even counted. Additionally, there are thousands of manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and e-commerce food businesses in each state.
It is practically impossible for a single national regulator to keep a tab on multiple players. Which is why responsibility is distributed across the food chain—manufacturers and packers are held liable when food fails prescribed requirements; wholesalers and distributors can be pulled up for improper storage and sellers can be penalised for selling expired stuff.
So, where is the gap? It’s between the law that is national and execution that happens at a local level. The FSSAI monitors about one per cent of the total number of businesses; regulation puts the onus on states—they are responsible for monitoring, inspection and quality checks for 99 per cent of food businesses. The food-safety commissioners, designated officers and food-safety officers may have to cover a large number of businesses across one administrative area. With the number of establishments vastly exceeding the number of people who can inspect them, even routine monitoring becomes difficult.
Sanjay Idani, a food-safety expert who was formerly associated with the FSSAI, identifies manpower crunch as the biggest problem. “The question of how often the regulator inspects becomes redundant,” says Pawan Agarwal, former chief executive officer (CEO) of the FSSAI, because the inspectors can’t visit each and every restaurant.
To deal with the manpower crunch, the FSSAI came up with the Risk-based Inspection Scheduling System (RBIS) in 2021, under which the frequency of inspection depends on public-health risk associated with a certain food category and the compliance history of a particular business. High-risk items include dairy, meat, fish, eggs, prepared foods, Indian sweets, packaged drinking water and honey, among others. Risk-based inspections have gone up consistently in the past four years—from 11,904 in 2022 to 26,267 in 2025—and different states have adopted RBIS mechanisms.
Keralam, for instance, which has topped the ranking in the FSSAI’s food safety index twice, has grouped businesses into low-, medium- and high-risk categories. This is how it works: the system automatically picks establishments for review and randomly assigns an inspecting officer. No inspector can conduct inspections for the same establishment twice in a row. Inspections strictly follow standardised digital checklists to ensure transparency and inspecting officers must upload the finalised digital report within 48 hours.
Uttar Pradesh (UP), on the other hand, is focussing on manufacturers rather than waiting for adulterated products to enter the market. Their strategy has been article-specific, such as water, oil, paneer, milk products, spices, etc. Vineet Kumar, assistant commissioner (food), says microbial testing is being conducted at labs in Meerut, Varanasi and Lucknow, alongside testing for heavy metals and pesticide residues and adds that the state is working towards labs at divisional headquarters, with 10 currently functional and more being developed. The state has adopted an intelligence-led approach. Instead of treating every inspection as random, officials say they collect information about where adulteration is likely to occur and then plan enforcement around those hotspots. During periods of shortage or increased demand, checkpoints are established to intercept adulterated products entering the market.
Quick-commerce companies have stated that some dark stores carry between 60,000 and 70,000 stock-keeping units, while the stores themselves can be around 2,000–3,000 square feet.
The Maharashtra example thus stands out. Mundhe was able to increase the efficiency of the system “five to six times” with existing manpower, resources and equipment. “When I joined, the yearly output of labs was around 25,000 samples. We have tested 32,000 samples in the past three months alone. We just changed the strategy. A proactive approach, the effective use of technology, empowering genuine businesses and taking stringent action against defaulters helped,” Mundhe tells Outlook (see page 14).
Rajit Punhani, the CEO of the FSSAI, also praised the efforts taken by the states. “Many states have been able to suspend the licences of manufacturing units. This is significant because they have been able to stop bad products from entering the market,” he says in an interview to Outlook (see page 28).
But there is another problem. While the regulator relies on laboratory tests to check the quality of food at the manufacturer’s end, there is a larger question about whether the parameters being tested are sufficient to establish that a product is safe. A laboratory clearance does not necessarily mean a product is safe. It only tells us whether the particular sample tested met the specified limits for the parameters examined using the prescribed test methods.
Amit Khurana, programme director, sustainable food systems at the Centre For Science and Environment (CSE), mentions a study conducted by his team in 2020. It found how honey from 13 different brands, including big processed brands and niche raw brands, failed. The study also found that the prescribed battery of tests by the regulator was not sufficient to assure consumers that honey was genuinely pure. “There were limitations on the testing capabilities. Sugar syrup adulteration, for instance, could go undetected at significant levels. The same is true for all products,” he adds.
The Quick-Commerce Mess
The absence of a universal, end-to-end, batch-level digital traceability system is another problem that is being highlighted. Recent raids led by Mundhe exposed severe hygiene and compliance violations at several quick-commerce dark stores—small warehouses that are used exclusively to fulfil online orders. While these dark stores are just one step in the end-to-end process, in the absence of a tracking system, it is impossible to trace at which stage the violations occurred.
Quick-commerce companies have publicly stated that some dark stores carry between 60,000 and 70,000 stock-keeping units, while the stores themselves can be around 2,000–3,000 square feet. “Such density raises questions about proper aisles, cold storage and damaged and expired goods,” says Dhairyashil Patil, the president of the All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation, a prominent trade body representing fast-moving consumer goods distributors and dealers across India. He says that in some cases, dark stores may operate in tin sheds where heat and sunlight can affect products that are supposed to be stored in cool, dry conditions. Thus, a product may still be well within its expiry date, but unfavourable conditions may have compromised its quality by the time it reaches the consumer. That is precisely why, he argues, food safety cannot be reduced to checking the date printed on a packet.
His federation, which represents more than four lakh fast moving consumer goods distributors and a retail network serving approximately 1.3 crore neighbourhood stores and retailers, has raised questions with the health ministry about how some dark stores are managing food storage and has sought a specific standard operating procedure for such storage environments.
The federation has also raised concerns over how expired food products are handled. Patil says that while rules exist for dealing with such goods, there is no industry-wide standard operating procedure, leaving companies to devise their own systems.
On paper, the disposal and destruction of expired packaged goods are governed by legal frameworks overseen by the FSSAI and the Central Pollution Control Board. Food business operators are also required to maintain records, and the FSSAI says a bill, cash memo or invoice can establish the link between a seller and its upstream supplier. If a product is found to be unsafe, the business can initiate a recall or the regulator can order one. Yet, there have been negligible instances of major brands recalling expired food products. To fix this, in March 2026, the FSSAI added a digital recall-tracking module to its food safety compliance system. Whether it can make the chain more traceable and accountability more tangible remains to be seen.
The Cost of Safety
Recently, two children aged 8 and 12 living in a residential school in Banda, Uttar Pradesh, reportedly died after eating momos with chutney. About 100 employees fell ill after eating idli, vada and sambar-rice at a private-company canteen in Bengaluru. Around 115 people, including children, suffered from food poisoning after consuming golgappas from a street vendor in Kota. A video went viral, reportedly from Noida, showing a shirtless worker rolling in a dough-like mixture at an extremely unhygienic soya chaap making unit.
The informal sector is an integral part of our existence. Despite knowing the risks involved, we all relish street food. The law does not exempt street vendors and small food businesses from food-safety requirements. They too need registration or licences and are expected to comply with prescribed hygiene requirements.
A street vendor needs safe water, clean surfaces, appropriate storage, proper ingredients, waste disposal and even refrigeration. But is a small idli vendor necessarily storing fermented batter in a refrigerator? Or is your favourite pani puri vendor preparing the tangy and spicy liquid using filtered water? From where is your go-to momo vendor procuring vegetables? When the margins are wafer thin, quality is often compromised.
The law does not exempt street vendors from food-safety needs. They too need licences and are expected to comply with prescribed hygiene requirements.
That is why a regulatory system that simply says “comply” is inadequate. The system has to make compliance possible and enforceable.
The FSSAI says it is doing its bit. From introducing fee waivers, rapid testing kits and Eat Right Street Food Hubs, it has trained more than three lakh street food vendors after launching its Food Safety Training and Certification programme in 2017.
Again, scale is the problem. As Idani, the food-safety expert, puts it: “Food is one of the easiest businesses to enter. That does not mean street vendors are inherently unsafe. It means the regulatory system cannot assume that every person handling food understands food safety.”
One owner of a mid-sized restaurant in Chandigarh, while speaking to Outlook on condition of anonymity, argued that several requirements are expensive and, in practice, difficult for smaller businesses to meet. Refrigeration, separate storage for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food, pest control, staff medical examinations, appropriate containers and equipment all add to the cost. A blast chiller or other specialised cooling equipment can cost around Rs 1 lakh, he says.
“I source most of my products from registered vendors which alone adds at least Rs 70,000–80,000 to my costs. It’s an amount I can afford, but that may be difficult for smaller businesses to absorb,” he says.
He also confesses that he pays Rs 25,000 a year whenever the food-safety officer comes for a check. Inspection is one word that establishments despise, even though inspectors make rare appearances. Restaurant owners, street-food vendors and operators of larger food establishments that Outlook spoke to across different cities, including Delhi, Chandigarh and Dehradun, say visits by food-safety officers are relatively infrequent, typically once every six months and, in some cases, only once a year. A lady selling snacks in South Delhi’s CR Park, home to clusters of street food joints, says she has never seen any food-safety officer in the locality. The open drain in front of her stall is proof.
Critics argue that implementing stricter norms will make food expensive. Idani disagrees with the argument and says: “Maintaining hygiene will attract more customers and street-food businesses can recover the additional cost through increased sales.” The problem, however, is that there is no guarantee that paying more means you are bulletproof. As it happened in the case of Pune’s Kulkarni, whose family ended up ill after consuming food at a five-star hotel.
Accountability is still a grey area because the law is not biting hard enough.
Fines and Convictions
Under the FSSAI regulatory framework, minor infractions are typically dealt with through civil adjudication and monetary penalties, while serious violations involving unsafe or adulterated food can trigger criminal prosecution. Yet, convictions for food-safety violations in India remain relatively rare.
Between 2021 and 2026, authorities across the states tested more than eight lakh food samples, of which roughly one in five failed to conform to prescribed standards. While 1.39 lakh civil cases resulted in penalties, only 6,203 led to convictions. The disparity is striking. UP, for instance, reported 20,427 non-conforming samples but recorded just 342 criminal convictions. Tamil Nadu, by contrast, reported 3,984 non-conforming samples and 857 criminal convictions.
The FSSAI’s distinction in penalties adds another layer of complication. While substandard food attracts a penalty of up to Rs 5 lakh and misbranded food up to Rs 3 lakh, establishments can end up paying Rs 10 lakh for misleading advertisements. For a small vendor, this amount of fine can be devastating, but for a large company earning crores, it may be absorbed as a business expense. This is the fundamental deterrence problem. If violating a regulation is cheaper than complying with it, regulation becomes negotiable.
The duration of legal cases is another issue. When a foodborne outbreak, contamination or adulteration case enters the legal system, resolving it quickly is rare because food safety cases rely on highly complex scientific evidence and require strict adherence to regulatory due process.
The Maggi controversy is an example. In June 2015, the FSSAI ordered a nationwide recall after tests reported lead levels above permissible limits. Nestlé challenged the ban in the Bombay High Court, questioning the reliability and accreditation of testing labs. While the immediate ban was lifted in August 2015 after fresh tests, related legal proceedings, compliance verifications and regulatory discussions surrounding processed food standards and testing transparency continued for several years—11 to be precise. In August 2026, the Delhi High Court quashed two criminal cases arising from the controversy.
Another case that is bracing for a long legal battle is that of Patanjali. A fine of Rs 1.40 lakh was imposed on it in 2025 after a cow-ghee sample collected in 2020 was found substandard. Patanjali moved to challenge the ruling before the Food Safety Tribunal, questioning the testing methods and lab accreditation.
Both Maggi and Patanjali are big brands that have the bandwidth, legal expertise and financial strength to go on fighting. And yet the FSSAI continues to pull up the big guys with an aim of sending a powerful message across the supply chain—no brand is too big to escape compliance. The FSSAI recently issued over 150 compliance notices to major food, beverage and hospitality brands over misleading advertisements, false health claims and labelling violations. These include, among others, Nestlé and Dabur.
Questioning the Regulator
A packet of atta promising it is “100% natural”, a snack calling itself “healthy” or a drink selling “energy” have helped companies sell products for years. But these familiar selling points are now attracting a different kind of scrutiny. Across packaged food and beverages, regulators are looking more closely at what companies claim about their products, from “natural” and “fresh” to “immunity”, “no added sugar” and “no maida”.
The regulatory debate has also moved to what consumers should be told about what a product contains. A public-interest petition filed by non-profit 3S and Our Health Society seeks mandatory front-of-pack warnings for foods high in sugar, salt and fat, arguing that the detailed nutrition table at the back of a packet is insufficient to help consumers make informed choices.
In a system where laws are often not enforced or are bypassed, Mundhe cracking the whip by enforcing the existing laws comes across as a welcome change.
The Supreme Court has since questioned the FSSAI over the delay in introducing such interpretive warning labels. The regulator has proposed a prominent red-hexagonal warning on the front of packages for products high in two or more specified nutrients, but plans to implement the system in two phases. During the hearings, the court, citing concerns over children’s health and rising lifestyle diseases, questioned why earlier directions to introduce such warnings had not been implemented, the logic behind the two-phase norm and asked whether the regulator was yielding to industry pressure. Food companies have lobbied against the proposed front-of-pack warning system.
At a tense meeting in March between the FSSAI and major brands, a Coca-Cola executive argued warning labels were pointless because they won’t prevent consumers from otherwise having sugary foods and because Indian doctors had done a good job telling patients what to avoid. While commenting on the remark made by Coca-Cola, Mundhe wrote in his LinkedIn post: “Warning labels don’t insult consumer intelligence, they respect it. The argument that doctors already advise patients misses the point: prevention should not depend on already being sick enough to see one.”
Mundhe has also urged companies to adopt ethical practices and consistent nutrition standards globally. This was in reference to companies making different versions of the same products—a can of Fanta sold in London has 63 calories, but the same product in India contains three times as much sugar and 185 calories. “Where are ethics in this? They have responsibility towards society,” he says.
Mundhe is the man of the moment. His remarks and statements are making headlines. But there are critics as well.
The Tukaram Philosophy
While hearing a petition from Cadila Pharmaceuticals challenging sudden stop-sale orders and actions taken against certain drugs, the Bombay High Court told Mundhe that his agency was using “a sword to kill a mosquito” by taking disproportionate and drastic enforcement actions against commercial establishments. Taking the observation of the court seriously, the next day, Mundhe and his team turned up to inspect the high court’s canteen. Out of the three canteens inspected, two were found functioning without required licensing and were shut down. The third canteen was issued an official improvement notice due to minor hygiene and cleanliness lapses.
Criticism, however, doesn’t dilute what Mundhe has managed to achieve. In a system where laws are often not enforced or are bypassed, Mundhe cracking the whip by enforcing the existing laws comes across as a welcome change. People are calling him the real-life Singham who is taking on corruption head-on. His rise from a drought-prone farming family in Maharashtra’s Beed district to becoming a respected IAS officer makes him relatable to the common man.
His 25 transfers in 21 years are a highlight of his resume. Because of this track record, he rarely completes a full traditional tenure in any single office. When asked if he would complete a three-year tenure as the food commissioner, Mundhe tells Outlook: “That’s not for me to decide. The government will take a call. My job is to give my best. Individuals will come and go. We are trying to create a culture every stakeholder is proud of.”
In a country as vast as India, with a system so deeply broken that corruption often seems easier to accommodate than to confront, one Tukaram Mundhe can hardly fix it. For now, the fact that he keeps trying may have to be enough.
A pinned video in Marathi on his Instagram handle defines Mundhe’s thought process. “Everyone says we want change, but we want someone else to bring that change. We want Shivaji to be born, but in the neighbour’s house, not ours. Someone will raise their voice and someone will do the needful are the two thoughts that come to our mind whenever we see injustice. Leadership is not one person sitting on a high chair. Leadership is a simple decision taken in that one moment by crores of ordinary people, when they say, ‘I will speak’. History is not made by those who clap. It is made by those who act.”
Mrinalini Dhyani is senior correspondent, Outlook