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New Delhi/Pune: Since her ten-year-old daughter was diagnosed with one of the most severe forms of diabetes in 2018, Supriya Shonu, a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Pune, always carries a glucometer, a chocolate bar, fast-acting insulin and an ice-pack.

Her daughter’s illness has brought her back to her high-school curriculum. “It’s math! Today a parent [like me] has to do a lot of math and still fail,” she tells us at a diabetes community meeting in one of Pune’s parks.

She recounts how she has to carefully calculate the amount of salt, sugar or fat of every food item she purchases, using the Nutrition Information Panel on the back that provides details of calories, fat, sugar, sodium, protein, and carbohydrates per 100 grams or per serving.

“It’s not an easy read,” says Supriya, who has a simple request to the authorities.

“Make our lives easier. It should not take us 20 minutes to decide what is good for us. Why don’t you put ‘not fit for high BP’, ‘not good for diabetic’? At least provide access to better information about that product, and then we can decide.”

Supriya’s situation is far from unique. In India nearly one in three women and more than one in four men are overweight or obese, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023-24). Furthermore, nearly one in five women and more than one in five men were found to have high blood sugar levels.

To respond to challenges like those faced by Supriya, the World Health Organisation identified front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) as one of the most cost-effective public health interventions to manage and prevent non-communicable diseases, enabling people to easily pick healthier products.

A front-of-pack label – FOPL in short – is similar to the nutrition information panel on the back of many packaged products sold in India, but it is located at the front, making  it clearly visible. It also makes the nutritional quality of products more immediately legible. There are various approaches to this, including bold warnings where the products exceed recommended intakes in sugar or fat, a star rating with more stars when the products are healthier, or “traffic lights” where red means the product is unhealthy.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has been deliberating an FOPL regulation since 2014, setting up multiple expert panels and public consultations. The FSSAI attributed the slow progress to a lack of consensus among stakeholders, with civil society and the food companies at each end of the debate. The regulation does not appear to be any closer to being implemented, despite the Supreme Court directing the FSSAI to expedite the process after a non-profit organisation’s 2024 plea for urgent implementation.

The Wire, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and an international coalition of media partners, traces this long journey as part of a global investigation into how food companies resist public health regulation around the world.

We discovered a total of 239 lawsuits filed between 2010 and 2025 against health policies in six countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, United States, United Kingdom, and India. Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than one in three came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez.

Nearly 68% of the total lawsuits are related to FOPL mandates. In addition to labelling, the food industry has also been challenging taxes on unhealthy foods and advertising restrictions.

Illustration: Lighthouse Reports/Revisual Labs

FSSAI’s U-turn on the 2022 FOPL draft regulation

The FSSAI was created in 2011 to regulate the food industry and to develop and enforce science-based standards for food. In 2014, the authority set up its first Committee on FOPL, aiming to curb overall consumption of ultra-processed foods and address rising incidences of diabetes and obesity.

The food regulator first published a draft FOPL framework in 2018, and opened it up for consultations. With every new draft, the FSSAI drew criticism from non-profit public interest groups, such as the Centre for Science & Environment, for making modifications that made the framework less effective, while the food industry claimed the policies were too restrictive.

In 2022, the FSSAI introduced the Indian Nutrition Rating (INR) system to rate the overall nutritional profile of packaged foods, ranging from a half star (least healthy) to 5 stars (healthiest). More stars would indicate a healthier product and they would be calculated on the basis of prescribed amount of energy, saturated fat, total sugar, sodium or salt, and also positive ingredients such as fruits and vegetables, nuts, legumes and millets, fibre and protein.

The system was based on a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad and Dexter Consultancy with over 20,000 participants. A 2021 agreement between IIMA and the FSSAI, under the leadership of then FSSAI CEO Arun Singhal, shows that the FSSAI had provided financial support of more than Rs 2.4 crore to conduct the study. The study presented participants with different labeling schemes, including the Health Star Rating, warning labels, traffic lights (red, orange and green), and monochrome Guideline Daily Amount. The IIM found that the Health Star Rating, which Australia and New Zealand use, was the most suitable model for India.

This proposal received over 14,000 comments from consumer groups, public health experts, lawyers and industry associations. The FSSAI did not make the comments public and denied access when we submitted Right to Information requests, citing exemptions of “commercial confidence, trade secrets” and harm to third-party interests.

At the time, scientists wrote an open letter to the FSSAI criticising the IIM study, stating that its conclusions were “completely wrong from a scientific perspective”. Still, the FSSAI continued discussions and constituted an Expert Committee in February 2023 to review public comments over the proposed INR system. Then in 2024, a non-profit health advocacy group ‘3S And Our Health Society’ petitioned the Supreme Court of India to urge the FSSAI to implement warning labels as FOPL regulation. In April 2025, the Supreme Court responded, directing the FSSAI to submit recommendations of its Expert Committee within three months.

When the FSSAI finally submitted the report, in November 2025, it also included an affidavit stating its plan........

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