Opinion | Why Does India Applaud A Food Inspector For Doing His Job?

Tukaram Mundhe's crackdown on food safety violations shows how institutional failure can turn routine enforcement into extraordinary news.

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A Food Inspector Opens A Fridge, And A Country Applauds

On 10 August, a crowd outside a Pune eatery cheered as a food safety commissioner walked into its kitchen. He was simply doing his job, which in India is rare enough to draw applause. Restaurant associations will tell you inspectors are paid never to come.

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Tukaram Mundhe, a 2005-batch IAS officer, took charge of Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration in May 2026. His teams found a checklist of neglect: cockroaches and expired stock at a Blinkit warehouse in Malad; unlicensed messes at IIT Bombay; two unlicensed canteens inside the Bombay High Court; rat droppings and blood in a fridge at Kyani & Co, Mumbai’s 122-year-old Irani cafe.

By August, WION reported 1,131 inspections, food worth about Rs 49.57 crore seized and 56 licences suspended. A separate 100-day drive reportedly covered 12,000 outlets, with 603 suspensions and more than 5,200 notices.

Is this only a Mumbai problem? What are the commissioners in Bengaluru, Delhi and every other city doing? Has anyone asked? Or does one man’s performance blind us to a system as rotten as the kitchens it never inspects?

The Bombay High Court has stayed several suspensions, but it is debating how hard to enforce the law, not whether the violations were real.

When Doing The Job Becomes A Miracle

In a functioning system, no one would clap. The applause is a verdict on everyone else.

India makes two kinds of famous bureaucrats. The first is famous for being transferred. The best known is Ashok Khemka of the Haryana cadre. In Just Transferred (HarperCollins, 2020), journalists Bhavdeep Kang and Namita Kala count 53 transfers in 27 years; by retirement, it was 57. Khemka made headlines in 2012 by cancelling the mutation of a DLF land deal with a Robert Vadra company.

Yet the country remembers the transfers, not the work. Did his honesty change how any department functioned, or did it become a story about honesty itself?

The second kind is famous for doing the job. Mundhe belongs here and, ironically, to the first group too: WION counts about 25 transfers in two decades.

Then........

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