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Informist, Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – The Supreme Court Wednesday issued notices to the government, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on a petition seeking a nationwide performance audit of the implementation of the food safety and standards regime, including licensing and registration processes. Aniruddha Narayan Malpani, the petitioner, has alleged that the inherent inadequacy of the current penal framework in the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, has rendered the statutory food safety regime ineffective in its enforcement. 

 

The framework, though comprehensive in design, operates in a manner that fails to deter violations, resulting in the unchecked sale and consumption of unsafe, adulterated and misbranded food products, posing a direct threat to the right to life, the petitioner said. The current framework prescribes fixed and inadequate penalties that fail to create any real deterrent against violations by large-scale food business operators, said the petitioner.

 

The petitioner has sought that the penal structure for food business operators be determined on a turnover-linked basis rather than being confined to capped penalties, so as to ensure that penalties are real, deterrent, and commensurate with the scale of operations and gravity of violations. The petitioner has sought development of a dedicated, publicly accessible, digital platform in the form of a website for the redressal of grievances of citizens pertaining to food safety violations, which would be equipped to receive, register and adjudicate consumer complaints in real time.

 

Citing an audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General 2017, the petitioner said there were systemic and structural lapses in enforcement of food safety norms, including prolonged adjudication far beyond prescribed timelines and the non-recovery of about 47% of imposed penalties. The audit thus showed that even in cases where violations are duly detected and adjudicated, the absence of a robust, proportionate, and effectively enforceable penalty mechanism renders the entire process nugatory at the stage of consequence, defeating both deterrence and compliance, said the petitioner.

 

The petitioner gave examples of incidents, such as Eclairs, Mango Bite, and similar confectionery products being consumed by children being found unsafe across 109 establishments in Telangana, leading to the destruction of 35 kilograms of expired stock in March. The seizure of 1,000 kilograms of fake paneer and 800 litres of adulterated ghee in Jaipur and the detection of contaminated food items including kulfi, falooda, badam milk and chocolates in Hyderabad further illustrate the scale of the problem, said the petitioner. In September, over 70 individuals fell ill due to contaminated buckwheat flour in Greater Noida West, with over 200 similar cases in Delhi, said the petitioner. In February, 58 children fell ill after consuming mid-day meals in Jamalpur village, Karnataka, due to infested grains, while 225 kilograms of adulterated paneer was seized near Patiala, the petitioner added.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Avishek Dutta

 

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