India eats, drinks at its own perilAt a small food processing unit with an annual turnover of about Rs 16 crore in south Delhi's Okhla Industrial Complex, an elderly gentleman, perhaps in his early eighties, shouts instructions on the phone to run a metals test on all products that his company processes. "This is turning out to be a big issue," he says.
He started the company just before Independence, and the way he does business has not changed substantially since. Earlier there was the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, and other acts dealing with milk, edible oil and water, among others. Now all that has been subsumed into one. Has any food inspector visited his factory? "Not once," he says. "The FSSAI is a very opaque body. If you need any clarification, who do you go to?" "The product approval clause in the act was added on their insistence," he adds, referring to the big boys club in the FMCG industry.
A company is required to approach the food safety regulator for product approval when it wants to introduce a product whose specifications are not in the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, Food Safety and Standards Rules, 2011, and Food Safety and Standards Regulations, 2011. The act has specifications for nearly 90 per cent of food products in the market. It is an exhaustive list of products and what can be added in them. Which also means that products in this category need not be tested by a central government laboratory. "We don't test those products. We trust every word the company states in its licence application," says a senior officer of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).
Food controversies are not new to India. Like iconic brands such as Cadbury, Pepsi and Coke that had once been considered unsafe, Maggi too will be back sooner than later. But something would perhaps have changed this time. For one, FSSAI, the food regulator of India, is waking up to the magnitude of the job at hand-of regulating India's organised and unorganised food sector. Second, a more evolved consumer.The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has got the maximum number of calls in its history enquiring about food safety in the week after the Maggi controversy erupted.
Food safety is a state subject, which further aggravates the challenge of keeping food clean and companies accountable. States such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Goa are taking the lead in putting together a food safety mechanism, but that's just a handful. Sample this: Tamil Nadu has more than 500 food safety officers, the highest in the country, while Delhi has only 12.
Most state labs also lack the capability to test most products. In Delhi, one of the first to ban the sale of Maggi for 15 days, the sample was sent to a referral lab. "I picked 13 samples of which 12 failed. Five samples were mislabelled," says K.K. Jindal, food safety commissioner, Delhi. He complains of shortage of staff: there is need for 10 food chemists in the lab, but there are only three. "If I have to do a microbiological analysis, I don't have the expertise," he adds.
The onus of implementation lying with the states, the enforcement angle often stands compromised. "We act on complaints, largely of milk and sweets, but I have not been able to move systematically," says a state food commissioner.
The infrastructure for continuous monitoring requires both public and private sector laboratories and exclusive central referral laboratories to validate the testing procedures. In India, there are sufficient National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories-accredited laboratories to undertake the food quality analysis at a cost ranging between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,0000 per sample. However, estimating heavy metals in food samples needs sophisticated equipment costing about Rs 1 crore, and states such as Tamil Nadu are among the few that have such facilities.
An activist with the Consumer Association of India says food safety officers tend to stay away from packaged foods such as noodles since they are from established brands. "They would rather test products such as milk and oil which are more susceptible to adulteration and sub-standards."
The FSSAI, however, seems to have shifted gear. Recently, it took on global coffee chain Starbucks, which operates in partnership with Tata in India and continues to sell products rejected by the regulator after risk assessment. Starbucks has asserted that it imported globally standardised product ingredients, and the products are identical to those served in more than 60 countries. Along with products sold at Starbucks outlets, FSSAI has given state food commissioners a list of 500 products rejected by it as of April 30. The latest controversies notwithstanding, FMCG companies, however, say Indian regulations have not been difficult to comply with so far.
But the crux of the issue is the lack of standardised testing protocols, and the differences in interpretation of the act. The upshot is the ambiguity-whether the concentrate (in the case of Starbucks) or the tastemaker (in Maggi's case) should be tested separately, as the FSSAI says is right, or in the form it is consumed, as companies such as Nestle vouch for.
The issue also gets tougher to fathom when a country such as Singapore, which has stricter food safety laws, stamps Maggi made in India as safe. And lest we forget, the world's fifth largest instant noodle market, India, still doesn't have a limit for MSG for noodles. What's encouraging, however, is that the FSSAI has come out emphatically that whether branded or not, the regulator will be watching.
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