Nitin Sethi & Kumar Sambhav: Prime Minister Modi's office did away with scientific scrutiny of processed foods

As India’s processed food industry grows at a compounded 12% a year, companies are introducing a flurry of new flavours and products. Between 2012 and 2015, the industry tried to introduce nearly 4,500 products with completely new formulations. In this two-part series, Scroll.in details how India’s food safety regime has failed to keep pace with the industry’s enormous expansion. The first part of the series details recent Comptroller and Auditor General’s findings on how between 2012-’16 the authorities allowed the sale of food proven to be dangerous. This second part looks at how, starting 2016, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has subverted food safety norms under the guise of improving ease of doing business.

When it comes to the safety of many processed food products Indians are eating, they are relying on an honour system: if manufacturers assure the government regulators that their products are safe, they will go to the market, no questions asked, without any scientific assessment of these claims. This has been allowed under regulations that came into effect in January 2016, framed on the directions of the Prime Minister’s Office in August 2014, government records reviewed by Scroll.in show. The regulations were drafted by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, which is responsible for ensuring the food sold in the country is safe to consume. They were framed in consultation with the Union Ministry of Food Processing Industries, whose primary mandate is to promote processed food. The industry bodies such as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry were consulted too.

Till the new regulations were introduced, the government had a single set of rules to regulate three kinds of foods: proprietary foods, novel products and health supplements. Proprietary foods use known ingredients in combinations that have not been tested for safety before; novel foods contain ingredients that have never been used previously; while health supplements constitute products such as multivitamins that supposedly improve health generally but do not cure any disease.
As the first part of this series showed, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India recently noted that between 2012-’16 these regulations had been diluted, bypassed and violated to allow even dangerous food products to be sold.

In 2014, the Bombay High Court scrapped the old regulations on procedural grounds – they had not been approved by Parliament and were being used merely as guidelines by the food safety authority, which kept changing them at its whim. The decision was subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court.

Business friendly steps: Instead of addressing the procedural problems, the Narendra Modi government in 2014 decided to improve “ease of business” conditions for the food processing industry by recasting the entire proprietary food safety regime just the way industry wanted. It brought in separate sets of regulations for proprietary foods, novel products and health supplements. The regulations for proprietary foods, the CAG found, were put in place in January 2016 without consulting scientists of the food safety authority… read more:




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