Mumbai: At small Ganpati mandals in Mumbai, food rarely moves through one neat supply chain. A sweet shop sends modaks, residents contribute ingredients, volunteers arrange the cooking and then a local caterer may be called in for mahaprasad. It all comes together magically in a state of happy chaos.
But this Ganeshotsav, mandals are being asked to keep track of where all of it comes from. It is the Tukaram Mundhe effect on the Ganpati mandals of Mumbai.
The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA), headed by Mundhe, has introduced a year-round “Festival Enforcement Calendar”. Ganesh mandals now have to source food and ingredients from registered or licensed suppliers, maintain bills and records and follow norms on storage, hygiene and distribution.
For Mumbai’s large mandals, many of which already deal with professional caterers and vendors, the new rules may mean little more than extra paperwork. But some smaller mandals have to find a whole new way of doing things. They have limited budgets and usually have informal arrangements for buying and cooking festive treats such as modaks and laddoos.
ThePrint spoke to a few small mandals in Mumbai. All said they would follow the rules. But the extent to which they will have to change the way they function varies. One organiser even wondered whether he could afford to hold a community mahaprasad at all.
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One rule, two experiences in Girgaon’s wadis
In Girgaon, the city’s sarvajanik Ganeshotsav tradition is embedded in its wadis — compact residential clusters of chawls and old buildings around common lanes and spaces. In the Thakurdwar belt, several wadis have their own community Ganpati celebration for a few hundred or sometimes just dozens of residents.
At the Akhil Hemrajwadi Ganesh Utsav Mandal, the celebrations are largely for residents within Hemrajwadi. Volunteer Kishor Lonari said the mandal has been planning to revive its mahaprasad tradition after a gap of around 14-15 years. Earlier, that meant buying ingredients themselves and engaging a cook.
“We would tell them what had to be cooked. We would give them rice, wheat flour, spices and oil, and give them the work of cooking,” Lonari said.
That arrangement is harder to recreate today. Caterers recently quoted the mandal around Rs 75,000 to serve 300 people, he said.
Now, the FDA requirements add another consideration.
“Some things are very difficult. The government should also understand this. It is not possible to do everything on paper,” Lonari said.
He said the mandal could source sweets from established shops and would take whatever precautions were required, but stressed the limits within which a small mandal operates.
“We have to follow the rules. We will take precautions. We will try to give as much as we can,” he said. “We have a certain limit. We have to bear the cost.”
A short distance away, the Annapurnawadi Vaidyawadi Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Mandal is more confident about the systems it already has in place. The mandal, which celebrated its 105th sarvajanik Ganesh utsav in 2025, organises mahaprasad only once during the festival and already outsources it to a licensed caterer.
“We have a valid caterer. We don’t have to go through all of that because we anyway go to a valid caterer,” said the president of the mandal on condition of anonymity, adding that the mandal sees only around 50 devotees a day.
He pointed out, however, that the list of compliances overall has increased.
“There are already so many things that are licensed through the police. There is a visit by the police. Now we have CCTV cameras,” he said. However, he does not expect the FDA requirements to push costs up substantially or reduce the amount of prasad served.
“There is not much to worry about considering our scale. We will ensure whatever compliance is necessary,” he said.
All in all, the mandal supports the move.
“It is good because everyone does it properly. We don’t know what happens at the back end. Rules-wise, it is good,” he said.
His only reservation is that mandals need clearer instructions on implementation.
“The Ganesh Mandal Samanvay Samiti is seeking greater clarity from the FDA on the SOP and how these requirements are to be implemented,” he said.
No kitchen in Borivali, all set in Dharavi
Other than finalising the menu, a mandal in Borivali East has also added a temporary food licence to its procurement list.
The Odhav Nagar Sarvajanik Ganesh Utsav Mandal in Borivali East is celebrating its 25th year and plans to serve food over five to seven days. But it does not have a permanent kitchen. Food is usually prepared in makeshift arrangements near the mandal.
“We are going to get our own licence. Temporary licence is available these days. They have made it compulsory, so we are going to get that,” said mandal secretary Mangesh Jog.
The licence is not what worries Jog most. With food being served for several days, volunteers and housekeeping staff will have to ensure that the temporary preparation and serving areas remain clean throughout.
“In my opinion, cleanliness is the biggest problem. But the food rules can be a problem too. Maintaining the register is a problem,” he said.
In Dharavi, the Shree Hanuman Seva Mandal is in less of a flap as it has more formalised arrangements already.
“We get supplies from the wholesale market. We get it in a sealed pack. We don’t get anything in the open,” said mandal secretary Pramod Jagannath Khade. “We get it from them year after year.”
He said around 200-300 people visit each day during the 10-day festival and that the mandal works with a licenced caterer.
“They take precautions. They have their own catering business. They have a licence,” he said.
Khade also backed the FDA’s intervention.
“We welcome the rules that are given by the FDA,” he said. “We have to take care of the food that we are going to make. We are going to give it to people as prasad.”
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Same rules, unequal burden
The FDA’s festival food-safety framework empowers officials to inspect places where prasad, mahaprasad and other community meals are prepared and distributed, besides checking suppliers and collecting food samples.
The emphasis is on traceability: whether organisers can show where ingredients and prepared food came from, and whether they were stored and handled safely.
For a mandal already using a licensed caterer, that requirement may not change much. For another that buys ingredients itself, cooks at a temporary site or depends on volunteers to maintain records, the same rule can mean considerably more work.
That difference is visible across the four mandals—Vaidyawadi and Dharavi with their licensed caterers, Hemrajwadi trying to work out whether a community-based mahaprasad system remains financially and practically viable, and Odhav Nagar, which does not have a dedicated kitchen.
On paper, every mandal has the same responsibility. On the ground, some have much further to go than others.
But none of the organisers rejected the tighter compliances for food safety. The president of the Vaidyawadi mandal even argued that the rules should apply beyond Ganeshotsav.
“The rules are practical, and they should not be restricted to Ganeshotsav alone. Similar requirements should apply to other sarvajanik utsavs as well,” he said.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)