India should not need a celebrity bureaucrat to make the state enforce its own laws. Yet Tukaram Mundhe has become one precisely because, as Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner, he has made enforcement unusually visible. In less than four months, the FDA has dramatically increased inspections and testing, acted against hundreds of food and drug establishments and brought the regulator into places where it was previously easy to assume that nobody was looking.

The public enthusiasm is understandable. Food and drug safety is not an abstract regulatory concern. Contaminated food can make people ill, damage livelihoods and, on a large scale, impose a substantial economic cost. When an official actually enters kitchens, examines warehouses and acts against violations, citizens see the government doing something tangible. But Mundhe’s popularity also exposes an uncomfortable institutional truth. The extraordinary popularity of an officer doing an ordinary job is evidence that the ordinary system has been performing extraordinarily poorly.

Mundhe’s reputation did not begin with food safety. An IAS officer since 2005, he has accumulated a reputation for surprise inspections, strict enforcement and........

© The Statesman