Across Maharashtra, restaurant and club kitchens are being steam-cleaned and scrubbed, pest-control contractors summoned and food storage practices reviewed with great urgency. After elite clubs and storied shops were raided and shut, several other clubs quietly shut their kitchens for several days, to ensure compliance before inspectors arrive. Social media was flooded with reels of dairy operators dumping stocks of adulterated food and milk, rather than risk seizure.
In a matter of weeks, Tukaram Mundhe, commissioner of Maharashtra's food and drug administration (FDA), has achieved something that years of routine enforcement failed to do. He has made businesses realise that the law may actually be enforced, regardless of who they are. This is the ‘Mundhe effect’.
And, if FDA inspectors were reluctant to act as strongly against government establishments, this changed after a Bombay High Court order, ironically issued in response to a lawsuit by a restaurant. Hearing challenges to FDA's crackdown, the Court asked FDA to ensure that the same rigorous standards that were applied to private restaurants and elite clubs should extend to government canteens too.
FDA’s response, under Mr Mundhe, was inspiring. Inspection teams moved into the High Court complex, followed by government canteens and action was taken wherever violations were found, including at the canteen at the Mumbai municipal headquarters.
Tukaram Mundhe’s actions have rattled the administration, infuriated the food industry and restaurant chains, especially the decision to name, shame and shutdown businesses until they clean up. But his actions have huge public support, even from clients of the affected restaurants and club members. More significant is the behavioural change that it appears to have triggered across an entire sector.
The inspection that drew the greatest attention was at Mumbai's 93-year-old Cricket Club of India (CCI), an elite institution frequented by industrialists, senior bureaucrats, politicians and sports personalities. FDA inspectors reported serious food safety violations, including insect infestation, poor housekeeping, unhygienic storage conditions and expired food items. The agency suspended the Club's food business licence, forcing the kitchens to close until deficiencies were rectified.
Within days, inspections extended to other prominent establishments, including Willingdon Sports Club, MIG Cricket Club, Juhu Gymkhana and the iconic K Rustom ice cream outlet. The nature of the violations differed, as did the regulatory response; but the message was clear: everybody had to comply.
For decades, there has been a widespread perception that elite establishments attracted less rigorous scrutiny than small eateries. The recent inspections have challenged that perception.
This time, fear and the rush to comply is also visible in the Maharashtra FDA’s crackdown on those supplying adulterated and potentially hazardous milk and medicines, following its ‘Safe Food, Safe Medicines, Safe Maharashtra’ campaign.
Consider this: organised networks manufacturing synthetic or adulterated milk using vegetable fats, starch, detergents and other substances to mimic genuine milk have been known for a long time in Maharashtra. Yet, such dubious business has continued and flourished. After FDA intensified inspections, using mobile laboratories and highway checkpoints to identify adulterated dairy products and illegal manufacturing units, the large-scale disruption was publicly visible.
Videos of operators, reportedly dumping synthetic milk, had gone viral. These create a suspicion of guilt more than any FDA test report can. It also signals that raids and inspections cannot be fixed, to give operators a clean chit.
Mr Mundhe’s Track Record
Mr Mundhe's career has a consistent pattern. He takes charge of an institution, applies existing laws against entrenched interests, triggers resistance from powerful political or commercial lobbies and is transferred. Over a 21-year career with the Indian administrative service (IAS), he has been transferred 25 times—an average tenure of less than a year. Whether taking on illegal sand mining in Solapur, anti-encroachment drives in Navi Mumbai, transport contractor cartels in Pune, property tax evasion in Nasik or hospital overcharging during the pandemic in Nagpur, each posting has left a trail of vigorous enforcement of rules, leading to a transfer. His current campaign at FDA may lead to a similar outcome.
Ordinary people, who support his actions, view the transfers as evidence of his integrity; critics label them as a sign of inflexibility and publicity seeking actions. But anyone who has exposed wrongdoing in India knows that there is a far greater price to be paid by being honest and far better rewards and postings to be had by aligning with powerful politicians and businessmen.
Predictably, Mr Mundhe’s actions have also led to powerful and organised resistance. Hotel and restaurant associations have sent out press statements criticising the ‘naming and shaming’ of establishments which has actually led to a massive clean-up. They argue that businesses ought to receive improvement notices and an opportunity to rectify deficiencies before licences are suspended or reputations damaged. The argument is valid and due process is important to any regulatory system.
India's food safety challenges are far bigger than a few clubs and restaurants. Our food and pharmaceuticals exports have faced recalls by many countries over contamination and poor manufacturing standards, even as domestic consumers grapple with adulterated milk, synthetic paneer, contaminated eye drops, carbide-ripened fruit, misleading labels and periodic food poisoning incidents.
Public outrage rarely translates into meaningful punishment. Instead, industry lobbying regularly leads to relaxation of standards or weakening disclosure requirements, while online marketplaces provide a huge platform for the easy sale of fake and spurious products.
That is why, when raids and inspections reveal active pest infestation, contaminated, rotting or out-of-date food and unhygienic conditions that pose obvious threat to public health, it requires immediate action, rather than notices and time for rectification.
The law gives regulators the power to initiate immediate action when circumstances justify it. Also, with the industry filing law suits against the FDA action, it is a matter of time before courts look into it.
Importantly, Mr Mundhe’s actions in Maharashtra must be viewed against a wider crisis Disclosures in Parliament reveal 40,000 out of over 200,000 food samples tested across India annually, fail safety and quality standards, but criminal convictions remain below 2%.
Lax domestic enforcement is now causing international embarrassment. Indian spice exports have faced bans and recalls after detecting carcinogenic residues. Indian companies have been caught in scandals over toxic cough syrups linked to child deaths in Gambia and Uzbekistan and contaminated eye drops recalls elsewhere.
India does not lack food safety rules and legislation. We have a comprehensive legal framework, but enforcement is poor and convictions worse. History shows that institutions are transformed only by administrators willing to implement existing laws consistently. From time to time, a few notable individuals rise above the timidity of ordinary administrators and regulators act decisively in public interest. They have done this by risking their careers; but their work is remembered even three decades later, when their peers and successors have long been forgotten.
In 1992, chairman GV Ramakrishna established the credibility of the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in the face of loud and relentless opposition by every market intermediary. SR Rao, as municipal commissioner, transformed Surat's civic administration in 1994, after the global ignominy of a plague outbreak, by rigorously enforcing municipal rules that already existed. Mumbai remembers deputy municipal commissioner, GR Khairnar—known as the ‘Demolition Man’—for his campaign against illegal constructions, despite their political connections. RC Sinha, as head of Maharashtra state road development corporation limited (MSRDC), gave us world class infrastructure such as the Mumbai Pune Expressway, having previously accelerated the planned development of Navi Mumbai through CIDCO and went on to lay the ground work of Cyberabad.
Whether Tukaram Mundhe joins that small group will depend less on the headlines generated by recent raids than on what remains after they fade. If restaurants continue to maintain higher standards, adulteration becomes commercially unviable, and food safety enforcement acquires lasting credibility, his tenure will have left behind something far more valuable than a series of high-profile inspections: the knowledge that the law will be enforced, no matter who the violator is.
One man can make so much difference! But the tragedy of India is that we lack this "one man" in every government department which does not do its job. Where people have to keep visiting the office even after complying with everything that is needed and more!
When we will get this one man in every department?
Ashok Khemka, Vinod Rai, etc. Same thing. Different day. Things will never change. The day corrupt and dishonest bureaucrats go to jail will be the day we can trust governments. Until then democracy will never work. The typified 'heroes don't wear capes' has become a caricature. We need someone like Lee Kuan Yew. It's easier said than done because Singapore is smaller than Chennai.
They are the real gods today, because they are putting themselves and their families at risk, doing their duty, knowing very well that system will not give them any protection. In comparison many of commercial man gods naming themselves as sri sri or isha or amritha giving discourses and becoming big groups with colleges and hospitals.
Please publish the names, designations & present contact nos & addresses of all his past 21 superiors who were corrupt or hand in glove with corrupts who trasferred him. They should be immediately put behind bars.
Laws have always existed, it is the enforcement and compliance which make the difference. I wonder, when, Tukaram Mundhe would be transferred to a new posting - and this all happens even when there is press and public outcry in support of such honest and diligent IAS officers, which includes the likes of T N Seshan also.
However, the courts still favour the wealthy and powerful. This very case of Mr. Mudhe and FDA's acction has been diluted by the Bombay High court for not following the set norms by FDA and cancelled the 'Suspension of the Licences' by FDA. This shows that the power forces operating in India.
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When we will get this one man in every department?