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Mundhe’s crackdown only concerns cleanliness. India’s food safety problem is much bigger

The multinationals are content to profit from India but unwilling to include cigarette-package-style health warnings about high levels of salt, sugar, etc on their products.

The response to Tukaram Mundhe’s campaign against unhygienic conditions in Maharashtra’s restaurants shows how concerned Indians are about food safety.

But the crackdown initiated by Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, which has involved 3,000 raids so far, touches upon just one aspect of food safety: cleanliness. There are many other areas that receive too little attention, possibly because regulators and those meant to enforce the regulations are either too lazy, too weak or too corrupt.

The first is food adulteration and the manufacture of fake food. For instance, we have all applauded Mundhe’s campaign against so-called analogue paneer. It is basically a bogus product but, bizarrely, it is legal to call it ‘paneer’ as long as you use the term ‘analogue’ with it.

There is also fake and unsafe ‘paneer’ made from maida, palm or other cheap oils, baking powder, detergent, discarded skimmed milk, sodium bicarbonate and industrial sulphuric acid. It is made in small workshops all over India and sold as real paneer to credulous consumers and to the restaurant and food-stall sector.

The Mundhe kind of crackdown targets restaurants that cook this ‘paneer’, which is good but does not go far enough. What about the places that actually manufacture it? You hear, once in a while, about a raid on a workshop, but these raids miss at least 95 per cent of the manufacturers. Usually, they pay off local authorities........

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