Mumbai: 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 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.
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.
This is the first part of a two-part series
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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