When Bikaner-based graphic designer Laxmi Rajpurohit, 22, began noticing changes in the taste, smell and consistency of the milk her family was getting from a big, reputed brand, she suspected foul play and decided to take things in her hands. She had read about simple ways of testing milk at home to check for water, starch or detergent. For instance, an iodine test would reveal starch if the milk turns blue-black. She picked up the water test from the Detect Adulteration with Rapid Test, or DART, programme manual of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).

She put droplets of the milk on a sloping surface. “It flowed quickly,” she says, “like water instead of leaving a thick white trail.” She complained to the company’s customer care, who asked her for further information about the product. She hasn’t heard back ever since.

Rajpurohit can test a drop of milk at home but the test cannot tell her everything that happened before the packet of milk reached her. It can’t tell her if the milk contains an adulterant or is contaminated or if it might fail some food safety standard.

The FSSAI has initiated legal action against Nestlé India over non-compliances with regards to regulations for infant food products.

Enough is enough

Between shiny paraffin-wax-coated apples, calcium carbide (“masala”) ripened mangoes, brick dust in red chilli powder, boric acid powder in maida and rice, and synthetic milk (detergent, urea, caustic soda, refined oils, milk powders, carbonates/ bicarbonates, melamine, heavy metals, pesticide residues), fake/ analogue paneer, and spurious ghee (dairy cream with palm oil and vanaspati), the average Indian is sick, cautious, angry and fed up. Milk, in particular, is consumed daily by infants up to the elderly, making itsadulteration a widespread public health and consumer safety concern.

Bengaluru-based doctor and food writer Nandita Iyer (@saffrontrail on Instagram) recalls how once an ice cream arrived looking like “some separated liquid or oil”. From then on, she has become really cautious. She checks labels carefully, sticks only to brands she trusts, and rarely orders from restaurants now.

Luke Coutinho, a wellness and lifestyle coach, argues that adulterated foods can add chemical stress burden to the body, triggering diseases. While “genuine mistakes happen sometimes,” he says, adding, the problem is “when companies/ brands with a running history of false marketing claims, fancy packaging, small print, wrong/misleading labels, and wrong accuracy, believe they can get away with it.” His advice is simple: stop buying from repeat offenders, encouraging others to boycott them, and buy instead from ethical brands.

The Supreme Court is now pushing FSSAI to set a clear timeline for introducing front-of-pack warning labels on unhealthy foods, while also urging stronger nutrition education in schools so consumers can make informed food choices.

Fraud remains invisible

“A home test may indicate some things. It cannot establish that everything else is absent. Moreover, a food laboratory can establish what is present in the sample but not if it is an intentional adulteration,” says Nilesh Amritkar, managing director of Envirocare Labs, an FSSAI notified food testing laboratory in Mumbai and Goa.

Amritkar uses detergent to explain the problem. “Detergent accidentally left on dairy equipment because it was not properly rinsed would be contamination. But if detergent were deliberately added to manipulate the appearance of milk, the same substance would become part of an adulteration,” he says. Heavy metals, pesticide residues, antibiotics or aflatoxin may make food unsafe without necessarily being adulterants. A product can be substandard because it fails a prescribed composition or quality benchmark without there being deliberate fraud.

In 2024-25, food-safety authorities analysed 1,70,535 enforcement samples and found 34,388 non-conforming, roughly one in five of the samples tested. Of these, 7,945 were classified as unsafe and 22,516 as substandard, while the rest involved labelling defects, misleading claims or other violations. While the numbers are significant, they cannot be read as a survey of everything we Indians eat. These were enforcement samples, often collected because regulators had a reason to look.

By the time a litre of milk reaches Rajpurohit’s or any kitchen in India, it may have passed through a long chain, running from the dairy farmer to the village collection centre, chilling facility and tanker, and then to a processing plant, packaging unit, distributor and retailer. The consumer doesn’t see the chain.

Unless one buys fresh, directly from farms. Consumers can purchase a greater degree of traceability. But not all farms might reveal if any banned antibiotics, hormones, or steroids were administered to their cows/ buffaloes, for instance.

Finding the sweet spot

In Kolkata, Partha Nandy, 42, has spent much of his life around milk. His family has owned Girish Ch. Dey & Nakur Ch. Nandy, the sweetmeat shop known for its kada-pak and naram-pak sandesh, since 1844. Nandy is its fifth-generation co-owner. The shop has maintained relationships with vendors for decades. Milk with added water produces less chhena. Adding milk powder for cost benefit produces low-quality, grainy chhena. During festivals, when demand for milk rises, these variations can become more common, he says.

Nandy adds he can also recognise impurities that appear during the preparation of chhena. The shop has historically relied on experience and relationships with suppliers rather than laboratory testing for adulterants. If there is something wrong with the milk, the vendor is warned. The problem, however, is that not every consumer is making sweets with it.

FSSAI’s risk-based inspection and surveillance system dates back to at least 2022. In 2026, FSSAI’s Central Advisory Committee called for intensified risk-based inspections and sustained surveillance of high-risk commodities such as milk and milk products, edible oils, spices and honey.

Milk illustrates the difficulty particularly well. The world’s largest milk producer, accounting for nearly 25% of global output, India produced nearly 248 million tonnes in 2024-25. In that period, the FSSAI’s data shows: of 33,405 milk samples tested, 12,780 were non-conforming. This does not mean 40% of India’s milk is defective, just that regulators found a significant number of problems. The consumer has no equivalent way of investigating.

Paneer presents similar challenges. An August briefing from the Centre for Health Equity flagged dairy analogues being sold as paneer. While not inherently unsafe, passing these off as traditional paneer is misleading. In Maharashtra, 109 of 308 samples were non-compliant between April 2025 and March 2026. Consequently, the FSSAI’s West Region has mandated accurate labelling for cheese analogues.

What can consumers do? Udai Kumar Saxena, a food-safety accreditation assessor and FSSAI-listed expert in risk assessment and analysis, says: “Check the date. Check the ingredients. Check the FSSAI number.” But exercise caution. An FSSAI licence or registration “establishes that the food business has entered the regulatory framework and is required to comply with its conditions but doesn’t mean the regulator has laboratory-tested and certified the packet in your hand,” he says. The law places the larger responsibility on the business and the regulator.

What the lab tells us

The regulator and the laboratory have different roles, but the objective is the same: “safer food”.

Ashwin Bhadri, founder-CEO of Navi Mumbai-headquartered Equinox Labs, which tests food, water and air, recalls a large food-service business that came to his laboratory concerned about the dairy product supplied to its kitchens. Tests showed it didn’t meet the expected specifications and indicated manipulation.

Equinox Labs, which has been working with food manufacturers, QSR (quick service restaurant) chains and cloud kitchens, for the last 21 years across five cities, have, at times, asked food companies to remove or review claims such as “100% pure” or “100% natural” when unsubstantiated. The big change now, Bhadri observes, is that individual restaurants, clubs, cafeterias, hospitals, and schools are starting to reach out to them for auditing.

“The FSSAI and FDA don’t care about intent. They care about the final outcome. Today, there are millions of SKUs (unique code or number to identify/ track products) in the market. One brand itself will have 50-100 different SKUs. FSSAI can’t test every batch, the country doesn’t have the budget or bandwidth,” says Bhadri, “One good thing FSSAI is doing is self-approval. They tell food brands to get their products tested by a third party and upload the quality reports to their websites. There’s a FosCos (Food Safety Compliance System) website, where regulation mandates uploading quality reports every six months.”

The lesson for Bhadri is that testing needs to happen before the inspector, or the customer, discovers the failure. “A food company shouldn’t discover a problem because an inspector found it,” he says. “It should discover the problem through its own quality-control system.” Testing, he says, should work as an early-warning system rather than a compliance formality.

Price of awareness

Another sample revealed microbiological contamination, including Coliforms, Enterobacteriaceae, E. coli, yeast, and mould. For an individual consumer, a food test at Equinox can cost between ₹500 and ₹25,000. A milk adulteration test may cost ₹1,000. A microbial safety test costs ₹1,500-₹2,000. A comprehensive panel covering pesticides, heavy metals and other tests can run into tens of thousands of rupees.

“Why should any consumer have to pay a premium merely to obtain food that is safe?” asks consumer-rights advocate Bejon Kumar Misra. A better-off consumer can choose an organised supermarket, a familiar brand or a subscription-based direct farm-to-home service. She can switch products when she loses trust. She can even pay for a laboratory test. “Money can buy more choices, but it cannot buy complete food safety,” adds Misra. Bhadri points to a section of society that does not read labels, or recognise food fraud when taste or consistency changes, and doesn’t have the money or power to pursue a complaint. The inequality here is glaring.

Making the system work

But here’s the thing: “As an individual, you don’t need to do this. Your job is simple. Just complain to FSSAI,” says Bhadri, mentioning that the Maharashtra FDA recently launched an AI portal to speed up food safety complaints, “where you literally talk and it will write the complaint for you”. The more privileged Indians complain, the more it benefits all Indians.

In the last few months, Mumbaikars have been tagging the FDA on social media and checking before eating if restaurants and packaged foods have passed the ‘Tukaram Mundhe test’. Mundhe, who took over as Maharashtra FDA commissioner in May, has been busting profiteering food-fraud rackets, seizing adulterated and suspect milk/ dairy products, and suspending licences across the State. Mundhe’s tenure illustrates what active enforcement can achieve — and its limits.

Can a suspect packet of milk/ paneer be quickly traced to the farm/ factory that made it and packaged it, revealing the ingredients used? So that consumers like Rajpurohit aren’t compelled to test at home/ labs? That brings us to the question of accountability: who is responsible? The manufacturer, to ensure quality control. And the regulator, to inspect, test, penalise and enforce. While the laboratory can establish what is present in a sample, and the consumer can identify irregularities and complain, their job is only to notice and report, not inspect, test, investigate, prove or prosecute.

Bhadri doesn’t believe in “more raids” but credits Mundhe for removing the “chalta hai” attitude. He says, “Enforcement is necessary, but enforcement alone won’t fix the system.” The goal, as Bhadri puts it, should be to “make adulteration difficult to do, easy to detect, and costly to ignore”.

The writer is a Kolkata-based freelance journalist.

How serious is food adulteration as a public-health problem in India and who does it hit the most?

Low- to medium-income households are more prone to food fraud due to affordability and accessibility issues. While some adulteration is primarily an economic deception, some can create genuine health risks.

There is also a significant data and knowledge gap regarding population exposure to chemical contaminants, heavy metals, environmental toxins, microplastics and antimicrobial-resistant organisms through food and water. Comprehensive and easily accessible public data on the scale and cumulative impact of these exposures remain limited, while the long-term health consequences of some emerging contaminants are still not fully understood.

Sukhvinder Pal Singh, senior research scientist, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Ourimbah, Australia.
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Where is India going wrong in tackling adulteration?

A major weakness is the lack of a sufficiently systematic, intelligence-led and risk-based approach to food fraud and contamination. The system needs to identify food supply chains that are particularly vulnerable to adulteration, substitution, misleading labelling or contamination and determine where in the supply chain these risks are most likely to originate or occur at scale and who are the supply chain actors involved. Enforcement can become fragmented when it is overly concentrated on inspections and sampling at the retail end.

Why isn’t catching adulterated food at shops and markets enough?

Given the enormous scale and complexity of India’s formal and informal food economy, from farms and mandis to processors, distributors, restaurants, street vendors and households, monitoring compliance at the final point of sale cannot adequately control risks that originate much earlier in the supply chain.

What should India do immediately to control food adulteration?

First, make high-risk food chains safer through risk-based, intelligence-led enforcement. Rather than attempting to fix every part of an enormous and complex food system simultaneously, India should identify, perhaps, top 10 high-risk, high-volume food categories and address them systematically. These could include milk and dairy products, spices, edible oils, meat and seafood, and fresh produce.

For each commodity, authorities should map the entire supply chain and identify where adulteration, substitution, contamination and temperature abuse are most likely to occur. Regulatory resources should be concentrated at these critical points, particularly bulk manufacturers, processors and distributors, rather than relying predominantly on end-point retail sampling.

Can India make a noticeable difference without overhauling the entire food system?

 India does not need to wait for a complete transformation of its food system before achieving meaningful improvements. It can concentrate resources on a manageable number of high-risk food chains, build safer behaviour from the household upwards, and prepare now for the growing pressures of heat and flooding. The objective should be to move from a system that predominantly detects problems after they occur to one that anticipates where the greatest risks will arise and intervenes before unsafe food reaches the consumer.

CSIR–CFTRI Director Giridhar Parvatham addressing a press conference in Mysuru on Tuesday. He spoke on the integration of artificial intelligence into CSIR–CFTRI research. PHOTO CREDIT: M.A. Sriram / The Hindu.
| Photo Credit: M.A. Sriram

Food safety inspections conducted by the Telangana Food Safety Department at Urban Monk Fine Dine and Baking in LB Nagar and Meld Haus brewery in Nagole on Wednesday, May 20 uncovered serious hygiene and food safety violations
| Photo Credit: @cfs_telangana on X

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. File photograph
| Photo Credit: Reuters

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday, September 20, 2024, highlighted the critical role of food regulators in combating unsafe food, which causes 600 million cases of foodborne diseases and 4,20,000 deaths annually.

In a video message to the second Global Food Regulators Summit in Delhi, Ghebreyesus said, “Our food systems are facing increasing challenges due to climate change, population growth, new technologies, globalisation and industrialisation.” He said that 70 per cent of fatalities from unsafe food occur among children under five.

“The food regulator community has a critical role to play in addressing these global challenges,” the WHO Chief said, emphasising the need for coordinated efforts as over 3 million people cannot afford a nutritious diet.

Ghebreyesus stressed that collaboration was essential to ensure safe and accessible food for all, as food systems cross borders and continents.

Union Health Minister J P Nadda, Food Minister Prahlad Joshi, Health Secretary and Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSA) Chairperson Apurva Chandra, Codex Chairperson Steve Wearne and FSSAI CEO G Kamala Vardhana Rao attended the event.

File photograph used for representational purposes only
| Photo Credit: AFP

More than 3,600 chemicals used in food packaging or preparation have been detected in human bodies, some of which are hazardous to health, while little is known about others, a study published on Tuesday, September 17, 2024, said.

Around 100 of these chemicals are considered to be of “high concern” to human health, said lead study author Birgit Geueke from the Food Packaging Forum Foundation, a Zurich-based NGO.

Some of these chemicals are relatively well-studied and have already been found in human bodies, such as PFAS and bisphenol A — both of which are the target of bans.

But little is known about the health effects of others, Geueke told AFP, calling for more research into how chemicals used in packaging end up being swallowed along with food.

The researchers had previously catalogued around 14,000 food contact chemicals (FCCs), which are capable of “migrating” into food from packaging made of plastic, paper, glass, metal or other materials.

They can also come from other parts of the food-making process, such as from conveyer belts or kitchen utensils.

The researchers then searched for these chemicals in existing biomonitoring databases, which track chemicals in human samples.

The team was expecting to find a few hundred FCCs, Geueke said. Instead, they were surprised to find 3,601 — a quarter of all the known FCCs.

Geueke emphasised that this study could not show that all these chemicals necessarily ended up in bodies from food packaging, as “other exposure sources are possible”.

Among the “high concern” chemicals were numerous PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, which have been detected in many parts of the human body in recent years and linked to a range of health problems.

Also detected was bisphenol A, a hormone-disrupting chemical used to make plastics that has already been banned from baby bottles in many countries. Another hormone-disrupting chemical was phthalates, which has been linked to infertility.

Less is known about oligomers, which are also byproducts of plastic production. “There is almost no evidence on the health effects of these chemicals,” Geueke said.

Reduce contact with packaging

When it comes to toxicology, an old saying is that “the dose makes the poison”.

A limitation of the study was that it could not say whether there were particularly high concentrations of any of the chemicals, Geueke acknowledged.

But she warned that these chemicals can interact with each other, pointing to a single sample that had up to 30 different PFAS.

Geueke recommended that people reduce their contact time with packaging — and avoid heating up food in the packaging it came in.

Duane Mellor, an expert in evidence-based medicine at the UK’s Aston University and not involved in the research, praised the “very thorough piece of work”.

“However, it does not cover how much of these chemicals we are exposed to and hints at other sources of these chemicals in our environment,” he told AFP.

Rather than being “unduly alarmed”, Mellor suggested that people “demand better data and minimise unnecessary exposure to chemicals which may ultimately impact our health”.

Some of the chemicals are also already facing bans.

The European Union is in the final stages of banning the use of PFAS in food packaging. The EU has also proposed a similar ban for bisphenol A from the end of this year.

The study was published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

Beijing:

Revelations that cooking oil has been transported in containers also used to carry fuel have sparked outrage in China, the latest scandal in a country where fears about food safety are widespread.

Local state-backed outlet the Beijing News last week published an investigation into what it called an “open secret” in the transportation industry.

The outlet found that several tanker trucks had transported edible cooking oil immediately after unloading coal oil, with no cleaning process in between journeys.

Truck drivers told the newspaper the practice helped to cut costs in the face of increasing competition.

The outlet also quoted food science expert Zhu Yi as saying that long-term consumption of coal oil, which consists mainly of hydrocarbons, could lead to poisoning.

Authorities have vowed to crack down, with the central government announcing Tuesday that it would launch an investigation.

Beijing has in recent years pledged to do much more to tighten food safety regulations and strengthen public trust.

The Chinese public is no stranger to scandals around food safety.

Milk adulterated with the chemical melamine killed six infants and poisoned hundreds of thousands of children in 2008.

In 2022, Chinese pork-processing giant Henan Shuanghui apologised after unhygienic work practices such as packaging meat that had dropped on the floor and workers wearing dirty uniforms were exposed.

And last year, top beermaker Tsingtao opened an investigation after a video that appeared to show a factory employee urinating on raw ingredients went viral.

Social media users expressed outrage at the latest contamination scandal.

“After reading these issues that have been exposed, I am not shocked at all!” said one user on the X-like social media platform Weibo.

“From melamine to drinking kerosene, what have we not experienced?”

Another user said they hoped for a “quick” investigation and a “clear explanation” from authorities.

“Otherwise, I really don’t know what oil to buy,” they wrote.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)