The same day, he launched a sweeping enforcement drive across the state, starting with the milk supply chain. Four months on, the officer’s name has become shorthand for a kind of food regulation India’s middle class had almost stopped expecting. On 25 May, IAS officer Tukaram Mundhe took charge as Food Commissioner of Maharashtra.
FSSAI has said that demand for sweets, milk, ghee, khoya and paneer rises during festivals, and this raises the economic motive to adulterate.
Indian health experts say medical bills, lost wages and reduced productivity often push families into a cycle of poverty and poor health, and that antimicrobial resistance is making foodborne infections harder and costlier to treat. It is the doctor’s fee, the medicines and the days of work lost. As the festive season begins, Mundhe’s crackdown has landed at the centre of a bigger question. India is inspecting and testing more food than ever before. Is that enough to make the mithai box, the ghee in the puja thali and the paneer on the festive menu safe? But the number needs careful reading. The government reports only the non-conforming count, a category that can include adulterated, sub-standard, contaminated or misbranded food, without a breakup. Most failures, in other words, were about quality and labelling, not immediate danger to health. But a large unsafe category remains, and consumers cannot see how it splits by food type. The global picture has worsened. For a household, the cost is rarely dramatic. Multiplied across millions of families, it becomes a drag on the economy. Large players argue that regulation alone cannot close the gap. It has to be a daily discipline.
Because of unsafe food, the WHO now estimates that US$ 310 billion is lost each year in productivity and medical expenses. Because demand is high, that means clean hands and surfaces, correct sanitisation, honest shelf-life practices, proper temperature control and no shortcut. The last detailed split available, for 2023-24, shows why that matters. Of 33,808 non-conforming samples that year, 22,603 were sub-standard, 6,782 were unsafe and 4,423 had labelling defects.
Umesh Kumar Agarwal, Director, Haldiram, told NDTV that festivals and food are inseparable in India, but the celebrations also stretch every link of the food chain, from sourcing and production to transport, storage and the final counter. In such a season, he says, food safety cannot be treated as a seasonal campaign. “For me, the simplest standard is also the most powerful: every person handling food should serve a customer with the same care they would expect for food served in their own home, to their own family,” says Agarwal. “A festival may explain pressure; it can never justify compromise.”
Consumer trust, he says, is built or lost in the details. Agarwal’s closing point captures the challenge. Government action alone cannot put safe food on every plate. The regulator must keep raising the bar, and every food business must meet it, every batch, every shift and every day. India’s festive plates will be safest when enforcement and prevention work together, and when food safety is practised as a daily habit rather than performed on inspection day.
