In the second week of March this year, in Andhra Pradesh, 12 people died out of the 20 who suffered renal failure after consuming milk contaminated with Ethylene Glycol – a toxic chemical that is used in coolant.In February of this year, it was discovered that a factory with a swanky set-up located in Gujarat had been making synthetic milk from urea and detergent. It had profitably running the enterprise for five years. In this case we don’t know the extent of liver and kidney damage it caused, beyond minor gastric discomforts, to those who consumed it during this time.A few days ago, a person in Jaipur was caught red-handed selling expired dairy products of a market leading brand. He allegedly bought these expired products from the company in a fire-sale, used chemicals to erase dates on the packaging and pushed them back into the retail network.A few days back during a discussion in the Uttar Pradesh assembly, a Samajwadi Party MLA claimed that a BJP MLA allegedly admitted to him in confidence that the sale of fake paneer is ubiquitous but if its sale is stopped then the price of real milk will cross Rs 150 a litre. This account sums up India’s food adulteration crisis on two counts. The elected representative’s comment establishes acceptance of this crisis at such economies of scale that any attempt to halt it can jack-up the price of milk by 100% from the current band of Rs 70-80 per litre, implying that every second kilogram of paneer sold in India is fake. Two, the comment accepts that the fake paneer syndicate exists not in clandestine form but in a confident and an explicit persona that is known to one and all. A shared responsibilityAs early as the 12th century, human society understood that the issue of food safety can’t be left to the volition of those responsible for producing, manufacturing and selling food, when in 1202 King John in England enacted the Assize of Bread to prevent adulteration in bread. This law was the first official recorded acknowledgement that the profit motives will always outweigh the moral mooring to sell food that is safe and clean. Since then, food safety has kept pace with modern innovation in pharmaceuticals, processed food and restaurant industries.India, like other federal nations, recognised long ago that not only is the subject of food safety a legal priority but also a shared responsibility between the Union government and states. The Union government has the responsibility to set standards and enact laws like the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act (PFAA) of 1954. The states take the onus of implementing these standards and create a food safety enforcement infrastructure in the form of food controllers, food inspectors and food safety officers (FSOs). PFFAA was revisited in 2006 and replaced with Food Safety and Standards Authority of India or the FSSAI. With so much water under the bridge on food safety in India, why is it that the government’s food safety apparatus appears like a hapless bystander to such horrific and shocking news?Here, two arguments merit examination. Firstly, the human capacity to evolve food safety standards and enforce them is chronically underinvested and severely detached from the reality of the scale of the issue of food safety in India. In 2025, India consumed more than Rs 16 lakh crores worth of food, between packaged and food services (restaurants and eateries) and another Rs 3 lakh crores worth of medicines. These were sold through more than two crore points of sale comprising eateries, pharmacies, mithai shops, carts and grocery stores across India. To inspect these points of sale, India’s sanctioned benchmark strength of FSOs and food inspectors does not cross 8,000 making each such officer responsible for more than 2,500 such outlets. With a plan of thoroughly inspecting 15 such outlets on all working days of the year, one can only visit the same outlet only after a year. If we embellish this math with the number of vacancies that exists for this cadre across most states in India and that ranges from 25% to 90% at any given point in time, then the probability of a food retail counter of any kind getting a visit from the food inspector is once in nearly three years. Take the case of Maharashtra, where against the needed 1,100 food safety officers only 130 operated on the ground in 2025.Secondly, the infrastructure needed to support the enforcement for food safety remains ignored and underinvested if we go by the number of food testing labs currently operational in the country. These labs do the critical job of testing samples, establishing breaches and providing evidence. They research and develop standards, and also train and fulfil other such objectives. Currently, a little more than 200 FSSAI-accredited laboratories are expected to cover nearly 800 districts, 5000+ towns and 6.4 lakh villages across India. This scarceness makes it impossible for the food safety apparatus to provide swift action and become proactive even with the best of intentions. Take the case of Indore that till 2025 lacked a food testing lab in the city but recorded a high instance of food samples recorded as unsafe, substandard or misbranded. These samples were sent to the nearest food-testing lab 200 kilometres away to Bhopal causing delays of a month or two to close the loop. A few months ago, a new testing lab was inaugurated in the city but it is yet to become operational.This incapacity hollows out the state’s ability to collect real-time data on food safety for research and make proactive interventions. We also need to be able to trace food products that are past their expiry, are not sold and are to be taken off from the shelf. How are such products to be disposed? Without real time data collection on the ground to size up the pool of products currently on the shelf approaching expiry in weeks or months, the government can’t install a proactive protocol in place. Every edible product type requires a disposal mechanism that is unique. But without a mandatory disposal guideline and surveillance of it, much of expiry management of edible products in India is done through informal or semi-formal arrangements that strains the waste and sanitation management. No wonder then the distributor in Jaipur was able to “buy” expired products from the leading dairy products brand in an attempt to recycle the expired products as fresh stock.Consequently, the Indian state is affected by the lack of proactive judicial intervention on the matter. If a month or longer is needed to even test a sample collected from the “cleanest city of India”, what chance holds for such a crime to face the full fury of the law? When was the last time we heard anyone receiving punishments for deaths caused by an adulterated product?India needs innovation in food safety with mobile laboratories, digital technologies in data analytics, surveillance, traceability, training campuses, research advancements in forensics and food chemistry. The total annual budget allocated to FSSAI in FY 24-25 was Rs 620 crores, out of which only Rs 520 crores was released during the year. For the year FY 25-26, the budgetary allocation to FSSAI was reduced to Rs 525 crores. On one hand, India consumes food and pharma like the first world but on the other, the central agency tasked with the agenda of food safety for the whole of the country receives a reduced share of allocation that stands at 0.02% of the total size of the food and pharma basket that India consumes, annually. Contrast this with the USA that in 2020 spent 0.2% of its food and pharma consumption on food safety in the country.Here we must rewind to the early part of the decade of 2000 and visit China of that time. The country had already emerged as the factory of the world, sought an assertive place in the world order and had won the right to host Olympics in its capital city. But, its food manufacturing and supply chain was tremendously compromised with adulteration and malpractices and horrific cases of food safety breaches were a regular occurrence. China made its horrendous record on food safety a matter of national shame so much so that it started to execute people for this crime in the run up to the Beijing Olympics of 2008 and after. Zheng Xiaoyu was one such person who served as head of State Food and Drug Administration and was convicted of taking bribes to approve fake drugs that caused 14 deaths and thousands who fell ill. He was given a lethal injection in 2007. It is not to say that all is resolved about the food safety protocols in China but today the country is administratively and politically more conscious on the matter from where it was 30 years ago.India needs to stitch a bigger picture on the issue of food safety but it can’t do so merely through a bureaucratic and a technical lens.The politics of the day needs to elevate it to a bigger stage of human rights, consumer protection and national pride. One aspect of national pride is India’s continuous struggle with low share of food exports and that is to do with importers’ suspicion about India’s patchy food safety standards.The urgency for India to diversify India’s export basket and to increase the share of food and pharmaceuticals in it is the issue that is increasingly becoming a crisis call for India after the shocks from AI lead disruption of India’s IT services exports. But, until India demonstrates to the world that its food safety playbook on counts of detection, proactive actions, research and prosecution is sorted, it will remain a case of missed chances.Ankur Bisen is a Senior Partner at The Knowledge Company, and the author of Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change (Pan Macmillan; 2019). The author is on X: @AnkurBisen1.