Discuss the challenges of enforcing food safety standards in India's federal structure.

The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 created a single-point system with FSSAI, established in 2008 under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, setting science-based standards [1]. Yet standards are framed centrally while enforcement rests with states, and this split is where compliance leaks.

Divided responsibility, uneven capacity

• FSSAI, a statutory body under Section 4, notifies standards and regulations; State food safety officers and Commissioners do the sampling, licensing and prosecution [1].
• A new central rule therefore adds work to state offices without adding state resources — the draft FSS (Amendment) Regulations, 2026 restricting "paneer made of constituents not derived from milk" under Regulation 2.1.1 of the 2011 Sales Regulations will be enforced entirely by state machinery [2].

Testing infrastructure is the binding constraint

• The CAG audit on implementation of the FSS Act (2017) found most state food laboratories lacked NABL accreditation and equipment to test microbes, pesticides and heavy metals [1].
• Detecting non-milk fat in analogue paneer is a laboratory question, not a visual one; an unaccredited lab's report is easily contested on appeal.

Information and personnel deficits

• The audit found no FSSAI database of food businesses, and licences issued on incomplete documents in over 50% of cases examined — risk-based sampling becomes guesswork [1].
• Recruitment regulations remained unframed a decade after the Act, causing acute staff shortage across states [1].

The unorganised market

• Much food, including analogue paneer, is sold loose or as a cooked dish, where a printed label never reaches the buyer, limiting labelling-based regulation.

Effective food safety is thus less a problem of weak standards than of asymmetry between central rule-making and state implementation capacity. The way forward lies in cooperative federalism: accrediting state laboratories and notifying recruitment rules before new restrictions take effect, building the food-business database the CAG sought, and aligning naming rules with Codex CXS 206-1999, which reserves dairy terms for dairy while permitting honestly named substitutes [3]. Credible enforcement, not more prohibition, secures the consumer's right to know.