The surprising thing about Tukaram Mundhe is why his story is not yet a Bollywood potboiler. Hero to many, villain to some, the controversial food and drug administration (FDA) commissioner of Maharashtra has been hogging the headlines for days now, even as his team cracks down on food safety violations across Mumbai and Pune.
While other bureaucrats notch up promotions, Mundhe is known for his 25 transfers in 21 years, and obviously, his no-nonsense attitude. His targets, ranging from billion-dollar e-commerce firms to five-star hotels to tony clubs and even neighbourhood joints, have given him monikers ranging from ‘Singham’ to Chinese whispers on whether he is positioning himself for an upcoming career in politics.
Perhaps it’s a domino effect, but states from Karnataka all the way to Punjab and Kerala and others have also jumped into the fray, while the central body FSSAI (Food Safety Standards Authority of India) has also been cracking the whip.
It couldn’t have come at a better time, given the rampant adulteration of staples like milk, ghee, paneer, etc, the reckless use of artificial ripeners for fruits and vegetables and the usage of blatantly fake claims like ‘energy’ or ‘zero maida’ etc for packaged food items. For India’s middle class, which had almost resigned itself to its fate, this is like a hygienic manna from the heavens.
Yet, Mundhe’s recently acquired stardom or his real intentions aside, the truth remains that these attempts have been akin to plastering a Band-Aid on a gaping, septic wound, if you ask the vox populi. A survey released Monday afternoon showed how consumers are still waiting for real results on the ground before getting too impressed.
Despite all the recent hyper-activism in the food safety space, the survey found just one in ten consumers having high trust in their respective district or state FDAs. Perhaps not surprisingly, the highest trust levels were seen in Mumbai with 36 per cent, while it plummeted to just 8 per cent in Delhi. In fact, nearly 6 out of 10 in Delhi said they had very low or no trust in their food regulatory ecosystem—rather ironic considering it is the capital where the FSSAI is also based.
“Consumers are not being asked this in a quiet period; they are being asked at the peak of the most visible food safety enforcement drive in recent memory, with licence suspensions of well-known clubs, restaurants, hotel chains, dark stores and warehouses reported almost daily. That trust has still not moved suggests consumers read the current drive as episodic and concentrated in a few cities rather than as evidence of a system that inspects consistently, everywhere, throughout the year,” said a statement issued by LocalCircles, which conducted the survey which spoke to 22,000 people across more than 300 districts across the country.
This does bring under the spotlight the acute state of a lack of a dynamic food safety environment in the country—the story had grown murkier with some of the shocking reports of rotting meats, vegetables with fungus and flies and insects in the cooking areas coming from upscale hotels as well as premium restaurants and pubs.
In fact, the general feeling of the present drive, besides the fact that they seem to be concentrated in just a clutch of cities in two states (Mumbai and Pune in Maharashtra, and Bengaluru in Karnataka), is also that there are suspicions about whether these are just posturing by some over-zealous officials.
Even some consumer rights activists THE WEEK spoke to voiced such apprehensions off-the-record. This perhaps may have strengthened after the authorities now seem to be inordinately focused on celebrities and influencers endorsing brands—stars like Shah Rukh Khan have been asked to explain his brand endorsement of a surrogate pan masala ad, while FSSAI on Monday issued a set of guidelines for content creators and models to bear in mind while plugging a food brand.
While a spree of raids has shown up the Achilles’ heel in India’s food quality and safety, what makes the matter daunting is the extent of the problem. FSSAI has been proactive in tracking down malpractices by big corporations when it comes to false claims and mislabelling, but the real extent of the issue is beyond branded food products and is in the vast, informal, local foods industry.
From shampoo and emulsifiers going into making fake milk, vegetable oil going into making analogue paneer and not to forget an organised underbelly working to rejig expiry dates on packages as well as spew out counterfeit products, the job at hand is gargantuan. The happily-ever-after that Mundhe and his ilk hope for is way in the distance, and will require some really hard work and persistence of enforcement before it is anywhere close to reality.
