There is something cinematic about the past two months in Maharashtra’s food safety landscape. An IAS officer with 25 transfers in 21 years walks into the Food and Drug Administration as Commissioner and, almost overnight, the city’s kitchens, dairies and canteens begin to tremble. Tukaram Mundhe has been cast, with cheerful accuracy, as the real-life Singham of the state. The comparison is not idle. Raids, licence suspensions, viral videos of inspectors in the kitchens of the Cricket Club of India and K. Rustom, and the almost theatrical sequence of the Bombay High Court asking why government institutions were being spared only for Mundhe’s teams to appear inside the High Court canteens themselves the next day have the rhythm of a film that writes itself.
The honesty of what has been uncovered is harder to romanticise. Synthetic milk is no longer a village-level dilution trick. Investigators have found networks blending detergent, palm oil, emulsifiers and, in some cases, shampoo into a product that looks and feels like milk, then mixing it into the genuine supply. Estimates from one recent bust suggest over two crore litres of such adulterated milk may have entered the market in six months. The secondary market for expired goods is equally inventive: chemicals used to erase dates, counterfeit manufacturing stickers applied, and stock that should have been destroyed quietly redirected into warehouses in Bhiwandi and beyond, later appearing on shelves at discounted prices. Iconic names Shalimar, Parsi Dairy Farm have faced suspensions after inspections revealed pests, expired stock, unhygienic storage and cross-contamination risks. The charisma of the current crackdown is real, and social media has amplified it. Public support for an officer who appears willing to treat elite clubs, five-star kitchens and government canteens with the same severity is understandable in a city long accustomed to selective enforcement. Yet the deeper problem is not the absence of a tough administrator. It is the absence of a transparent, predictable system.
Yet the problem does not begin in the kitchen. It starts much earlier in the crowded wholesale yards where vegetables, fruits and poultry first change hands each morning. From the old market halls of south Mumbai to the sprawling produce hubs across the harbour, the same produce that ends up on our plates passes through spaces where cold storage, waste handling and basic hygiene are often afterthoughts. When standards fail at the source, contamination simply travels downstream.
Walk past a restaurant in New York and the letter grade is on the door. An “A” means the most recent sanitary inspection scored 0–13 points; a “B” or “C” signals progressive levels of violation. The grades are public, unannounced inspections are routine, and the information is available online. Singapore has refined its approach further with the SAFE framework, grading establishments on sustained track record rather than a single snapshot and linking higher ratings to proper food safety management systems. These systems do not eliminate bad operators overnight, but they shift power. The consumer is no longer dependent on the chance that a determined commissioner will arrive with a team on a particular Tuesday.
Mumbai, and India more broadly, still operates largely on a different logic. FSSAI licences must be displayed, and recent Maharashtra orders have pushed calorie and allergen information on menus of larger chains, free potable water, and stricter cold-chain and hygiene norms. Yet there is no mandatory, visible, routinely updated public hygiene score on the entrance of an ordinary restaurant or school canteen. Inspection findings remain largely internal until a high-profile suspension makes news. Compliance is often reactive. The secondary market for expired goods and the synthetic milk networks thrived not because no one knew the law, but because the probability of consistent detection and transparent consequence was low. The same applies upstream: wholesale markets need the same visibility and continuous accountability that restaurants are only now beginning to face.
What needs to change is structural. A simple, mandatory letter or numerical hygiene rating system publicly displayed, linked to recent unannounced inspections, and available online would force continuous rather than crisis-driven compliance. Government and institutional canteens (courts, Mantralaya, municipal buildings, schools) must be inspected on the same schedule and to the same standards as private ones, with results published. Traceability requirements already being tightened for milk need to extend more rigorously across the packaged and perishable supply chain, with real penalties for the logistics and disposal failures that enable the expired-goods secondary market. Wholesale yards require modern cold storage, waste handling, water and hygiene infrastructure as non-negotiable conditions of operation, not afterthoughts of redevelopment.
Mundhe’s drive has performed a public service by making the invisible visible. The cockroaches in elite kitchens, the shampoo in the milk, the quiet recirculation of expired stock, and the sudden seriousness with which school menus are being rewritten are all useful shocks. Charisma and social-media momentum can sustain pressure for a season. Durable safety, however, requires a policy architecture in which every citizen can see, at a glance, what they are walking into.
Ankieta Kothari is the founder of The Bombay Blueprint, a public platform chronicling Mumbai’s architecture, heritage, and evolving urban landscape.
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