Cultural and social fabric in India is deeply woven around festivals, where faith, tradition and the sharing of food bring families and communities together. It is precisely this season of heightened demand and unquestioning trust that adulterators exploit.
As production races to keep pace with consumption, synthetic substitutes, unsafe ingredients and relabelled products can find their way from the supply chain to the household table. Latest measures such as proposed red warning labels are an important step towards informing consumers. But labels alone cannot defeat a menace that operates across farms, factories, markets, medicines and digital platforms. India is working towards a more integrated systemic system of traceability, enforcement and accountability backed by a mass movement that makes food safety and consumer awareness a shared public responsibility.
For two decades, the national priority was simple: put food on every table. The Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana today delivers free foodgrain to roughly 81 crore people every month, the largest food-security programme in the world, extended by the Cabinet through 2028 at an outlay of nearly ₹12 lakh crore. The 2025 Global Hunger Index India climbing from 105th a year earlier and well past its “alarming” scores of the early 2000s. Behind these numbers sits a quieter architecture of reform: a draft Pesticides Management Bill to replace the 1968 Insecticides Act with mandatory lab accreditation and traceability for farmers, a nationwide rice-fortification programme, and nearly 17,000 Jan Aushadhi Kendras selling generic medicines that officials say have saved citizens close to ₹38,000 crore in a decade. But the next and equally important question is whether what reaches the consumer is safe and trustworthy. India has made remarkable progress in answering the question of quantity. It is now addressing the equally urgent question of quality, safety and trust whether what reaches the plate, or the pillbox, is truly what it claims to be.
Deception at Scale
That trust gap widens visibly every festival season. As festivals approach, food safety departments across states are once again racing against adulterators. In Uttar Pradesh, officials destroyed contaminated rasgullas in Ghaziabad and Noida last week and seized suspect paneer and mawa near Modinagar.
Ahmedabad’s municipal corporation has begun on-the-spot rapid testing of sweets and khoya for starch and vegetable fat, sealing two units already. Madhya Pradesh’s food and drug authority intercepted consignments of synthetic mawa rerouted from Maharashtra after that state’s own crackdown began to bite, while the FSSAI has issued notices this year to food giants including Nestlé, Pepsi and Dabur. Elsewhere this season, over 4,000 kilograms of khoya were seized on a single national highway and 910 cartons of adulterated sweets intercepted at one toll post. The imitation has spread so widely that at least four states have banned “analogue paneer,” a vegetablefat-and-starch substitute, outright, and the FSSAI is now weighing a nationwide prohibition.
The deception does not end with sweets. Delhi Police, working with the FSSAI, recently dismantled an Okhla factory that stripped and reprinted expiry dates on well-known snack and beverage brands, extending shelf life by up to six months before the goods reached e-commerce warehouses. Food-delivery platforms have not escaped scrutiny either: the FSSAI issued nine notices to Swiggy Instamart this year over expired whey protein and contaminated infant formula. Medicines carry the same rot. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation flagged 168 formulations as substandard or spurious in a single month this year, taking the quarter’s tally past 570. Just days ago, Mumbai’s FDA found a popular allergy tablet containing barely three-quarters of its stated ingredient and none of a second; interstate rackets producing fake blood-pressure and anti-anxiety drugs continue to surface from Haryana to Puducherry.
Towards safer systems
Government is not standing still and has zero tolerance to adulteration. Just this week, the FSSAI, acting on Supreme Court directions, proposed red front-of-pack labels reading “HIGH FAT,” “HIGH SUGAR” and “HIGH SALT” on packaged food, alongside a September 30 deadline for e-commerce platforms to display manufacturing and expiry dates, and a citizen-facing Food Safety Connect app for reporting adulteration.
India’s second National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, coordinating more than twenty ministries through 2029, is now anchored in a “One Health” approach, backed by a new National Institute for One Health in Nagpur, treating human, animal and environmental health as one chain, the same chain along which adulteration travels from farm to fork.
Way forward
That is the way forward: not louder raids alone, but one continuous system running from the farm gate to the delivery rider’s doorstep. Smart adulterators, who relabel expiry dates with handheld printers and mimic paneer with starch and palm oil, call for smarter countermeasures: QR-coded batch traceability, DNA and isotope testing for dairy, shared databases linking FSSAI, state drug controllers, police and e-commerce platforms, and penalties that combine licence cancellation, blacklisting and criminal prosecution rather than a fine alone. Awareness must close the gap that enforcement cannot: most consumers still cannot read a nutrition panel, let alone spot starch in khoya or a fake hologram on a strip of tablets.
The Eat Right India movement already aspires to be a genuine people’s movement; it now needs to become one in practice, enlisted as the last line of verification that no inspector can staff alone. A nation that feeds 81 crore citizens every month has the capacity to guarantee what fills their plates is pure too, as civil society is a partner in enforcement and not merely its beneficiary. None of this diminishes what has already been built. It only asks India to finish the job: having decided that no one should go hungry, it must now decide, with the same resolve, that no one should be deceived by what fills that hunger.
*The author is President & Founder, India Water Foundation. His views are personal.
