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:
