Stepping Up to the Plate: Will India finally manage to clean up its food?

THE RESTAURANT Noor Mohammadi Hotel is something of a cultural landmark in Mumbai. Started as a modest establishment con­sisting of little more than a kitchen and a counter in 1923 that later grew into a dhaba and then a full-fledged restaurant, it is today invariably the first stop at a Mohammad Ali Road food crawl, the establish­ment any visitor keen on Mughlai food is taken to in the city. Its patrons have ranged from MF Husain, whose gift—a sketch, made impromptu, of a rooster calling out to the restaurant's signature dish Nalli Nihari—still adorns the restaurant’s wall, tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, actor Sanjay Dutt, who is credited with sharing the recipe of a popular dish (named ‘Chicken Sanju Baba’), food celebrity Nigella Lawson, and many others.

Sometime last month, some unexpected guests turned up— food inspectors.

Mumbai’s food enthusiasts and writers and their modern coun­terparts—the food bloggers—may have composed paeans on the restaurant’s slow-cooked Nalli Nihari and succulent kebabs for de­cades, but this small group of officials from Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found something else worthy to put on record. The kitchen was a mess. The floor and walls were dirty and greasy, old utensils lay about unwashed, raw materials were stored poorly, little or no supplier records were maintained, and crows and flies seemed to have unhindered access through open windows. The next day, when the FDA sent its order, the family that runs the establishment was crushed. Noor Mohammadi Hotel’s licence was being suspended with immediate effect.

“We were shattered,” says Wajahat Shaikh, one of the mem­bers of the family running the establishment. “We were at most expecting a notice to improve ourselves. We hadn’t in our wildest dreams thought that the licence would be taken away.”

The restaurant’s closure made it to the news that day, but it was quickly overtaken by news of raids and closures of other establishments and food businesses. Ever since the civil servant Tukaram Mundhe took charge as the commissioner of Maharash­tra’s FDA towards the end of May, it is a rare morning that arrives without the newspaper announcing a raid that had taken place the previous day. The crackdown has been unprecedented. Iconic and fine-dining restaurants, fast-food chains and small eateries, govern­ment canteens and the cafeterias of Mumbai’s poshest clubs, ware­houses of quick-commerce platforms and global conglomerates, the dairy industry, edible oil industry, drug manufacturers—no one has escaped his department’s scrutiny. Every visual from the raids, the viral images of the squalour inside kitchens and warehouses, of roaches and rats and expired products, have both shocked and captivated the public.

Mundhe’s enforcement drive may be the most visible, but it also appears to be triggering similar efforts in other states like Karna­taka. The case of analogue paneer, the factory-made, artificial sub­stitute for traditional dairy paneer that replaces real milk solids and fats with vegetable oils, industrial starches, and chemical stabilisers, is a good case in point. From the start of this month, several states have banned or restricted the sale of this unhealthy product. As a result, dishes with paneer have vanished from many restaurants, pointing to just how widely used this product was. Even the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the government body responsible for creating and maintaining food standards in the country, appears to have stepped up its crackdown on mislead­ing claims, pulling up some of the top companies for selling prod­ucts with false or deceptive claims. In some cases, the companies have challenged the FSSAI’s orders. In many others, the claims have either been removed, or the products remained banned.

“Everyone is in a state of panic right now,” says Ajinkya Udane, the legal head of the Pune chapter of the National Restaurant As­sociation of India, referring to the fear among restaurant own­ers over Mundhe’s crackdown. “Everyone, even those who are fully compliant, are making doubly sure everything is in order.”

Dhiraj Wankhede, a former FSSAI official who runs a consul­tancy that liaises with government bodies to secure approvals for restaurants, is even more emphatic. “Have you seen the colour of the chicken lollipop you get at roadside eateries [in Mumbai]. It’s colour has changed fully,” he says. “People are being careful about using food colours. Even the hawker with a roadside stall is saying, ‘Why take the risk?’”

IT IS ABOUT 4PM, and the conference room in Maharash­tra’s FDA office is crammed with journalists. This is in Mum­bai’s Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), one of the country’s most expensive business districts, but it is still a government office. Deep cracks run through the room’s walls, and the large table at the centre looks like it could do with some sprucing up.

Mundhe has walked in only moments before, dressed in his customary blue shirt and grey trousers. He takes short quick steps through the length of the room to his chair, and when he finds a white towel draped around it, removes it with little hesitation. This visual, of Mundhe removing the white towel, that colonial-era symbol of bureaucratic rank and hierarchy, will later go viral online, and become, to an already captivated audience, yet an­other evidence of why he is a bureaucrat unlike others.

The press conference is about an important, although to the media, an anodyne news event. The FDA is issuing a compliance order to the edible oil industry warning against adulteration. On any other day, this news event would have attracted only a hand­ful of health reporters. But Mundhe is a viral sensation today, and the room is packed with journalists from various national and regional language outlets. Someone wants him to respond to ac­tress Shweta Tiwari’s Instagram post about an unhygienic gro­cery delivery that had tagged him, some are asking for comments on a Bombay High Court order pulling up the FDA for going ‘overboard’ in one case, and many simply want him to talk about the show-cause notices sent to Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff for promoting, in Mundhe’s words, a banned pan masala through surrogate advertising. Mundhe answers every question patiently, and with little prompting, repeats it in other languages for regional language journalists. When the confer­ence ends, a crush of reporters converge on him, with requests for interviews, but Mundhe makes excuses and disappears. The rumour in the room is that he is only doing TV interviews for now.

Some of Mundhe’s current popularity can be explained in no balancing of interests being perceived, unlike with other govern­ment institutions. The consumer sees him uncompromisingly on his side. For instance, when rumours of him being transferred began to do the rounds, Paresh Rawal, actor and former Bharatiya Janata Party MP, posted on X, “To put it with humility and respect that it should [be] the priority and Dharm of Honourable CM @Dev_Fadnavisji to protect Shri @Tukaram_IndIAS that he should not be transfered or shunted out of his department.”

To anyone asking the question, why Mundhe would begin such a drive, there are two possible answers. One, he really wants to do his job. He is a maverick who refuses to compromise with the system. Or perhaps he is doing it for publicity. There were other government officials who suddenly became public figures. Take Sameer Wankhede, who, first as a customs officer and then as a narcotics officer, frequently made headlines, culminating in the arrest of Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan. He was, in fact, from the sales tax department and got deputed to the other agencies which had policing powers. They weren’t punishment transfers. Mundhe, on the other hand, has been transferred, by some accounts, 25 times in a 21-year-long career, and that can only happen to someone antagonising the system.

Within bureaucratic and political circles, Mundhe has the reputation of being someone hard to work with. He’s known to have had several run-ins with political bosses across party lines, and this became most evident exactly a decade ago, when, while serving as the Navi Mumbai Municipal Commissioner, the mu­nicipal body’s corporators united across party lines to pass a no-confidence motion against him. Devendra Fadnavis, then the chief minister of a BJP-undivided Shiv Sena government, over­turned the motion, but succumbed to the pressure a few months later. Even this time, he was appointed principal secretary (disas­ter management, relief and rehabilitation) first, but that transfer was abruptly put on hold, before he was shipped off, about two months later, to the less glamorous assignment at the FDA.

The post of FDA commissioner may have appeared to be a be­nign one, and no one really knew that it carried so much power until Mundhe started to enforce the rulebook. Fadnavis has publicly backed Mundhe. And some have seen in his appointment to the FDA and continued support a way for Fadnavis to use a ‘dif­ficult’ officer to keep Narhari Zirwal, the Nationalist Congress Party leader and Mundhe’s immediate boss as minister for the state’s FDA, someone who is often embroiled in controversies, in check.

This enforcement drive already appears to be making an impact. One of Mundhe’s actions was to enforce a ban on the sale of junk food on school premises. Most schools across Mumbai and elsewhere in the state have now changed the menus in their school canteens, replacing packaged and High Fat, Sugar and Salt (HFSS) food with healthier alternatives. Some schools in Mum­bai have even done away with traditions like the distribution of chocolates during a child’s birthday, asking the parents to instead come up with alternatives like stationery.

THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY, which was among the first hit, is already taking steps. Some are reaching out to former FSSAI and FDA officials to conduct mock audits. Dhiraj Wankhede, who set up Global Food Safety Council with another FSSAI official Suraj Wasnik, has spent the last few weeks conducting such mock audits for individual restaurants. “Our work is more about helping restaurants secure permissions, but because we have worked with the food regulator, we are be­ing requested to examine the premises. Nobody wants to take a chance at all,” Wankhede says.

To Kamlesh Barot, a hospitality veteran and the director of VIE Hospitality who has served as president for both the Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) and Hotel & Restaurant Association-Western India (HRAWI), this current food safety drive isn’t quite the indictment against the restaurant indus­try that it is being made out to be. “All this hype on social media where it’s skewed to the wrongdoings of one or two black sheep in the entire industry, these are being taken up as symbols of the entire industry doing everything wrong. That is not a fact at all,” he says.

Barot was the president of the FHRAI in 2011 when the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 (FSS Act), which replaced the ear­lier laws which were geared primarily towards dealing with food adulteration, came into force. According to Barot, the initial draft of the Act was a near copy of the US FDA regulation. “That was the time when I took over the all-India presidentship of the FHRAI and I countered that this big mistake is happening at the govern­ment level, which is when I engaged [a consultant], who... knows the entire science behind food technology. We went through the entire Act line by line and changed it to an Indian context,” he says. Barot gives the example of how restaurants in the US rely on packaged ingredients and how the regulations there are framed to deal with such a scenario. “With Indian food, we cook every­thing from scratch. The entire process is different. You don’t buy a readymade product from the shelf, which has an expiry date, and which already has some standards laid down when it was packed. You have to be more cautious here,” he says.

The new rules when they came into effect overnight changed the way the industry went about its business. Associations like FHRAI and HRAWI played an integral part in ensuring the industry was made ready through the rollout of seminars and the Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) training programmes across the country. “There is probably around 30 per cent of the industry which isn’t part of our associations, or there are the stray members here and there who have not gone through the FoSTaC training. And they are the ones being made part of this hype,” he goes on.

Some establishments have approached the courts to challenge the actions taken against them. They have complained about the naming and shaming of restaurants, and the tendency, according to them, to slap them with licence suspension instead of a notice to improve themselves. “This drive is a good thing. We all believe that. But it has to be a little less harsh. You have to give the establishment a bit of time to work on itself,” Udane says.

The drive has got such public resonance because the underlying issue—the food you eat—applies to everyone. Fifty years ago, restaurants being raided or exposure to the sale of a paneer-like product might have aroused interest but not touched a per­sonal chord. Indians didn’t go out to eat that often then or regularly buy things like paneer from stores. Today, every­one eats out or uses delivery apps to order food. Big companies are expect­ed to have unquestionably hygienic products. Consider the range of what Mundhe’s drive has touched—instant grocery deliveries, famous restaurants, iconic club canteens, franchises of global brands. The reach of his actions includes articles of daily consump­tion like eggs and milk, and making schoolchildren eat healthier in school canteens by dissuading junk and sugary foods.

How much India operates without regard for food regulations was ironically evident when the Bom­bay High Court on a petition asked the FDA whether it was being selective in only targeting private establishments; what about gov­ernment and government institutions? A few days later, a team of food inspectors came to the court itself to check its canteens. Two of them were found to be operating without licences on the premises.

The complexity of how India deals with food safety can be seen in two recent episodes related to the FSSAI. On August 22, it posted on its social media handle that it had sent notices to major consumer brands for misleading advertisements and false claims. The post said, “Ensuring strict adherence to regulatory standards remains essential to maintaining transparency and safety across the food supply chain.”

Meanwhile, nine days earlier, the Supreme Court had come down on it for not enforcing transparency about ingredients that the FSSAI itself had proposed. In 2022, it had come out with a policy of giving a ranking on the front of packs about the health quotient of the food. On August 3, the FSSAI told the Supreme Court it had changed its stand and wanted only nutritional information dis­played against recommended daily intake, like, say, of sugar or fats. But the consumer just doesn’t take the effort to make the compari­son. The FSSAI said industry bodies were against its earlier proposal to outrightly indicate if a food was unhealthy. But it gave the impres­sion that the industry’s interests were more important than the health of Indians, leading to caustic comments from the Supreme Court. To Dr Arun Gupta, a senior paediatrician and convenor of pub­lic health and nutrition think tank Nutrition Advocacy in Public Inter­est (NAPI), to bring about meaning­ful food safety, India’s regulators will have to go beyond ensuring restau­rant hygiene and look at the packaged food industry. He points to the long-pending demand to introduce front-of-the-pack labels (FOPL) and clear warning labels for packaged foods that contain HFSS content, with the Supreme Court frequently pulling up the FSSAI for coming up with ex­cuses. “Food safety means introduc­ing practices like FOPL, restricting the sale of ultra-processed and HFSS foods. It is great that the FDA in Ma­harashtra is cracking down. But as long as we don’t address these issues, we aren’t really dealing with the full problem of food safety in India,” Dr Gupta says.

Back in Bhendi Bazaar, Shaikh is contemplating the period of 22 days during which the restaurant remained closed. Calling it the worst period in their history, one where the restaurant’s future seemed under threat, Shaikh and the rest of his family pulled up their sleeves to meet the challenge head-on. They remade the kitchen entirely, adding a new counter and re­doing the floors and chimney, introducing separate sections for different aspects of cooking, and drilling in new habits among the employees. Earlier this month, when the FDA reinspected the premises, they found the conditions satisfactory and allowed for its reopening.

Asked if he felt the FDA’s order to suspend the restaurant’s licence was too harsh, Shaikh refuses to get drawn into that. “In a way it was for the good,” he says. “We were able to look at the restaurant honestly and decide that ‘Yes, we may be old, but we will change how things are done.’”

(with Madhavankutty Pillai)