Opinion | Hygiene ratings for eateries

The FSSAI will soon require restaurants and hotels to display hygiene ratings on their doors

Hygiene ratings for eateries

For those of us who love to dine out but are wary of the hygiene standards of the eateries we frequent, help may be at hand. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) will soon require restaurants and hotels to display hygiene ratings on their doors, says a news report. There will also be food supervisors to check the safety of what is served, for which the regulator intends to train around 170,000 people. The FSSAI is in the process of forming guidelines to implement the rating system.

If implemented diligently, the programme would be in the interest of the customer and could raise the quality of food served. Ratings will give restaurant owners an incentive to improve their standards and will likely filter out food joints that pose a health risk. That extra costs borne to maintain quality may raise menu prices, too, is another matter. In general, few can object to such an idea.

However, any system that requires an external assessment of quality could be abused. As those in the hospitality business would testify, state-directed scrutiny tends to descend all too easily into an “inspector raj", with officials determined to give them a hard time, unless given some reason—pecuniary or otherwise—not to. As a way to guard against this, the criteria for hygiene ratings will need to be clear-cut and uniformly applicable, with no scope for subjectivity. A lot of well-intended initiatives end up hurting a market simply because their execution is faulty.