India's food safety crackdown: What the viral raids don't show

For weeks, Indians have watched a bespectacled civil servant become an unlikely social media star. Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's food safety commissioner, posts photographs of cockroach-infested kitchens and rat droppings on warehouse floors, and his raids are shared like reality television.

His fame is part of a much bigger reckoning: regulators across India have intensified checks on restaurants, street stalls and packaged food, while a long-stalled plan for red warning labels on unhealthy products has reignited a fight with the country's food industry.

Look past the viral clips, though, and India's food safety system tells two rather different stories about itself.

A commissioner with millions of followers

Since taking charge of Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration in May, Mundhe's teams have carried out more than 3,000 raids, suspending roughly 165 business licences within just the first two months. Nicknamed “Singham” by supporters, after the hard-charging film cop, the 2005-batch IAS officer has been transferred 25 times in a 21-year career and has never shied away from a fight.

His targets this year have included outlets run by Domino's, Pizza Hut and McDonald's, as well as upmarket clubs and restaurants in and around Mumbai.

In one raid in Uttar Pradesh, inspectors seized 1,300kg of adulterated paneer, the cottage cheese eaten daily by millions of vegetarian Indians.

Mr Mundhe now has more than 3.7 million followers on Instagram, a remarkable reach for a state bureaucrat, and Bollywood stars including Salman Khan and Preity Zinta have publicly cheered him on.

He, for his part, insists he is simply doing his job rather than chasing fame.

What the official numbers show and hide

Nationally, food inspectors have tested more than 100,000 samples a year since 2020, and roughly one in five has come back unsafe, substandard or without proper labelling; almost 8,000 food business licences have been cancelled over the past three years.

Yet a separate official measure paints an oddly reassuring picture. A parliamentary committee reported in August 2025 that inspections of food business premises, which check hygiene and compliance on-site rather than testing samples in a laboratory, found only about 2 per cent non-compliant over the previous two years.

MPs on the committee said the figure did not look realistic for a country of India's size, and urged the regulator to inspect more often in places already known to be problematic. The gap between the two figures says less about food safety improving than about which measurement gets used and when.

Old cracks the cameras don't show

Some of the weaknesses no raid can fix were flagged years ago. A 2018 parliamentary report found that only 13 of the country's 62 functioning state food laboratories then held national accreditation, that most states had no dedicated food safety department, and that the regulator kept no central database of food businesses at all.

Progress since has been patchy.

Last year's committee still found little coordination between the food regulator and the department overseeing plastic packaging and noted that no safety standard yet exists for ordinary food-grade bowls and spoons.

As recently as June, the regulator's chief executive was still urging states to fill vacant food safety officer posts, a reminder that enforcement depends on laboratories and staff as much as viral footage.

Meanwhile, a years-long push for front-of-pack warning labels, of the kind used in Chile and Mexico, has resurfaced after Reuters revealed in August that the government had yielded in March to lobbying from Coca-Cola and groups backing Nestlé.

The regulator has now proposed a red hexagonal stamp for products high in two or more of sugar, salt and saturated fat. Food industry executives argue the thresholds are so strict that, as one company chief executive put it, “everything will be red.”

Health campaigners say that's too soft. A packet of biscuits could be loaded with sugar alone, and this sugar can be way over any reasonable limit, but if its salt and fat levels are normal, it dodges the warning label entirely, because it only trips one of the three categories, not two. So a genuinely unhealthy product can still end up with a clean-looking package.

Shoppers got there first

Consumers, meanwhile, are ahead of the debate. A PwC survey of just over a thousand Indian shoppers, published last year, found 84 per cent extremely or very concerned about food safety, with more than three in four worried specifically about pesticide residue.

Some food companies have responded by printing QR codes on packaging that link to laboratory test results, a small but visible sign that trust, once lost, is being rebuilt product by product.

None of this is uniquely Indian. The World Health Organization estimates that one in ten people worldwide fall ill from contaminated food each year and that children under five bear 40 per cent of that burden. Researchers who study food safety systems argue that lasting progress requires a shift from reacting to crises towards proactive systems, backed by proper laboratories, shared data and enough trained staff to catch problems before they reach a plate.

For now, in India, it is the raids that keep public attention on the problem. Whether they leave behind cleaner kitchens, or simply a more photogenic regulator, remains to be seen.

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