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Food safety cannot depend on occasional raids or heroic officers. India needs a regulatory culture in which every kitchen knows that inspection is inevitable.
Forty-five kilograms of rotten meat.
Not in some nameless roadside shack. Not in an illegal back-alley kitchen. It was reportedly discovered this week at a fashionable Bengaluru pub in UB City. Across five establishments, officials seized 132 kg of food deemed unfit for consumption, including expired products and improperly stored food.
If this is what inspectors find behind the polished doors of establishments patronised by affluent Indians, an uncomfortable question follows: what are we eating in the millions of kitchens that are rarely, if ever, inspected?
India loves food. What it has not yet learnt to love sufficiently is food safety.
And that is why India needs a Tukaram Mundhe in every city.
The Maharashtra FDA Commissioner has created something unusual in Indian administration: fear of the regulator. Since taking charge, the 2005-batch IAS officer has unleashed an enforcement drive against restaurants, hotels, clubs and food businesses across Maharashtra. Famous names have discovered that reputation is not a substitute for refrigeration, hygiene or compliance. His FDA continues to revoke licences and seize prohibited food stocks.
The most interesting consequence is not what Mundhe’s inspectors have found. It is what they have caused.
Restaurants across Maharashtra have reportedly begun deep-cleaning kitchens, improving storage, calling pest-control companies and reviewing compliance because they do not know when an inspector may arrive.
That is regulation working.
The successful policeman is not the one who catches the largest number of thieves. It is the one whose presence makes people afraid to steal.
India’s tragedy is that we already possess food-safety legislation. FSSAI registration and licensing requirements cover the food economy, including petty food businesses. Yet between regulation written in Delhi and the plate placed before an Indian consumer lies an enormous enforcement abyss.
Street food may be cheap. Food safety cannot be.
India has romanticized informality. We celebrate the roadside chaat wallah, the dhaba, the wedding caterer and the neighbourhood eatery—and rightly so. They are part of India’s extraordinary culinary civilisation.
But culture cannot repeal microbiology.
Salmonella does not distinguish between a ₹50 plate and a ₹5,000 dinner. E. coli does not respect tradition. Rotten meat does not become wholesome because the cook has been serving it for thirty years.
Nor should this become a crusade against small vendors. Quite the opposite. India should help them become safer.
Every person commercially preparing food should be identifiable and registered. Basic food-handler certification should become universal. Potable water, hand-washing, waste disposal, separation of raw and cooked food, pest control and appropriate refrigeration should be non-negotiable minimums.
And India should introduce something more radical: a national public hygiene-rating system.
Every restaurant, hotel, caterer, canteen, cloud kitchen and street-food outlet should display its latest inspection grade prominently—A, B, C or whatever transparent system we devise. A QR code should reveal the date of inspection, serious violations found and remedial action taken.
Let the consumer decide whether he wants to eat there.
Sunlight may prove a more effective disinfectant than bureaucracy.
There is, however, an equally important warning in the Mundhe story. The Bombay High Court has questioned aspects of Maharashtra FDA enforcement, including allegations of inconsistent treatment.
That matters.
A powerful regulator must also be a lawful regulator.
Inspections must be evidence-based; emergency closures must satisfy statutory requirements; samples must be properly tested; establishments must receive due process; and enforcement must apply equally.
We do not need arbitrary bureaucrats.
We need fearless regulators constrained by fearless law.
And therein lies the larger lesson.
India should not actually need 100 Tukaram Mundhes. A country of 1.4 billion people cannot protect its dinner table through administrative heroism. The objective must be to convert what one determined commissioner is doing into an institutional culture extending from Mumbai to Madurai and Srinagar to Thiruvananthapuram.
Inspections should be routine, risk-based, digital, unpredictable and publicly recorded. Repeat offenders should face escalating penalties. Those deliberately selling dangerously adulterated or rotten food should risk losing the right to operate.
The Bengaluru raids should therefore disturb us for a reason larger than 45 kilograms of rotten meat.
Why did it require a special raid to discover it?
Food safety has succeeded when the inspector does not have to discover rotten meat—because every proprietor knows that keeping it could destroy his business tomorrow morning.
That is the real Tukaram Mundhe effect.
India does not merely need a Tukaram Mundhe in every city.
It needs to build a system so formidable that eventually it does not need Tukaram Mundhe at all.
Mohan Murti, FICA
Advocate & International Industry Arbitrator
Former Managing Director-Europe
Reliance Industries Ltd. Germany
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.