1. Introduction: The Supreme Court’s Ultimatum and the Invisible Majority
On April 9, 2025, the Indian Supreme Court issued a stern warning to the Centre and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (“FSSAI”) to reform and notify pending food safety rules within three months. The court acted after years of inertia, bureaucratic indecision and growing public health hazards due to unregulated promotion of health supplements and nutraceuticals. These goods, now a ₹30,000 crore market, usually have deceptive claims of curing diseases and promoting health without scientific support.
While this judicial action is a plea for action, it reveals a more insidious malaise—regulatory lethargy. FSSAI, responsible for safeguarding consumer well-being, has consistently been unable to keep pace with emerging market forces and consumer expectations. But the most insidious victims of such lethargy are not the ones that capitalized on access to courts, Twitter, or consumer politics. They are India’s semi-urban and rural poor—individuals that depend on word-of-mouth are unable to adapt to digital grievance systems and are most susceptible to disinformation. For example, imagine how well-known brands such as Complan and Bournvita promote height or brain-enhancing claims which are scientifically unsubstantiated. Such claims, although believable, are scientifically incorrect and opaque and disproportionately harm consumers who have limited access to fact-checking.
This article examines not just legal failure, but also the regulatory and research vacuum in food safety — particularly its effects on India’s rural poor. It argues that decentralization is the only viable response.
2. The Legal Duty of FSSAI and Systemic Regulatory Failure
FSSAI is a statutory body under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, and is legally obliged to issue certification that food being marketed in India is safe, properly labelled, and reasonably advertised. Section 16 of the Act outlines the FSSAI’s duty to regulate and monitor food safety through scientific risk assessment and standard setting. Section 18 mandates that risk analysis be communicated to the public effectively ensuring consumers are not just protected but also informed. Despite these clear mandates, FSSAI’s enforcement has been patchy, inconsistent and reactive.
Health supplements and nutraceuticals, which promise to do everything from losing weight to curing diabetes, function in regulatory loopholes. The industry is worth over ₹30,000 crore and increasing at a fast pace, so here is the need for FSSAI. Every product is making a claim on the words “clinically tested,” “natural,” or “Ayurvedic” without evidence. Even companies such as Complan and Bournvita have turned to overblown health claims, e.g., growth, which tends to mislead carers, particularly in low-literacy settings. Such deceptive marketing postpones medical care, promotes self-medication, and exacerbates chronic illness. Such failure of regulation directly violates the right to health.
3. Judicial Prodding After Years of Inaction: A Timeline
The journey towards intervention by the Supreme Court has been a long process marked by institution inaction. FSSAI had in 2022, prepared a comprehensive regulation to regulate the fast-evolving health supplement industry. These were never officially notified. Civil society, public health professionals and physicians started raising the alarm as unregulated products poured into the market.
The Indian Medical Association moved a petition to the Supreme Court in May 2024 arguing that the Centre and FSSAI were compromising public health by allowing nutraceuticals and health supplements to make a claim that was not verified. The Court, with focus on the urgency, issued a call for response and highlighted the necessity of regulatory reform at the earliest. In June 2024, FSSAI revived the 2022 draft guidelines. However, it still failed to notify them as binding law, defeating the purpose of legal certainty and enforcement.
In April 2025, the Supreme Court made a stern three-month deadline for a revamp of food safety law, declaring that procrastination was against consumer rights and the right to health. Judicial interference in executive affairs is to be undertaken only as a last resort, but its urgency indicates extreme regulatory failure. More significantly, it is a top-down, market-based reaction to a problem well impacting base populations.
4. The Silent Suffering: How Rural India Is Left Out
Indian food safety is perceived via an English-speaking, urban, digital filter that overlooks the situation of semi-urban and rural sectors. Amongst the elderly, wage earners, and rural women, nutritional literacy is weak, and they turn towards folk remedies or untrained recommendations. In contrast to city consumers, rural consumers are subjected to digital, language, and connectivity barriers that exclude FSSAI online tools from being used. Unregistered syrups and health powders are distributed by kirana shops and ASHA workers or are misled with pseudoscientific advertisements. Pseudo-cures have hoarded promotional material in local fairs and markets, taking advantage of regulatory loopholes with no monitoring or protection to the consumer.
This is not a regulatory gap—it’s a structural failure. By failing to calibrate enforcement and outreach to the ground reality of rural India, FSSAI has written off vast chunks of the population. These are people who don’t file PILs. They remain invisible in official data systems. But they pay the maximum price.
5. Misleading Marketing and the Communication Deficit
It’s not a coincidence that the majority of such false products reach Tier-2 and Tier-3 economies. Companies are conscious enough of the gap in regulation and have decided to capitalize on it knowingly.
In this context, marketing targets culturally rooted health beliefs and anxieties. Terms invoke terms like “Ayurvedic,” “natural,” “chemical-free,” “blood purifier,” and “sugar control”—terms that sound pleasant to the ear but are not scientifically or legally defined. They are also emotive, invoking religious belief, folk healing and traditional confidence relationships.
The promotional items are hyper-local. They are promoted through local language radio jingles, local influencers or self-declared gurus as promotional emissaries and bus and health centre posters. Such campaigns often undermine formal health messaging.
At the same time, FSSAI ground-level enforcement in these sectors is either non-existent or woefully under-funded. Fewer district-level officers, little or no surprise checking and little public health communication. This manipulation of marketing finds room to grow in silence because the watchdog isn’t paying attention.
At the core of this failure is a key missing link: food safety literacy. FSSAI public outreach is intended for a digitally literate and urban consumer segment. But what if the consumer is not English-speaking, does not have a smartphone and does not know what to make of food labels?
Rather than waiting for rural consumers to approach the regulator, FSSAI has to go where they are. Basic food safety modules can be incorporated into existing grassroots programmes. Offline complaint boxes, pictorial charts and local workshops are all possibilities. Food safety literacy has to be a public health right and not a digital luxury.
6. Reimagining the Regulatory Framework: Decentralization and Equity
India must change fundamentally the way it communicates and enforces food safety. Top-down regulation from Delhi and the occasional press release with portals will never fly in a country as large and heterogeneous as ours.
Decentralization is the key:
- Increase the number of food safety officers at the district level with enforcement and educative powers.
- Have helpdesks at Primary Health Centres and tehsils to provide services in local languages.
- Collaborative efforts with local Self-Help Groups and NGOs to disseminate food safety literacy.
- Establish community reporting systems—such as audio grievance hotlines or physical registers at panchayat offices.
FSSAI will have to fund changes in labelling thresholds that are visually easy and multilingual as well as easily understandable. A color-coded system, for example, would highlight high sugar or chemical content without literacy.
Finally, public-private collaborations may assist in the implementation of region-specific awareness campaigns through the utilization of media such as community radio and religious institutions to disseminate the message.
The April 2025 verdict should be seen as a starting point — not the end — of meaningful reform. Reform of regulation that languishes in file drawers or benefits only city enclaves cannot live up to the promise of the right to health. Getting caught up in food safety isn’t about digital literacy or GDP—it’s about justice. And justice begins at the edges.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court’s ultimatum to FSSAI is a wake-up call, but change has to be more than Delhi. Judicial reform means little without grassroots protection for vulnerable consumers. India’s public health cannot be allowed to suffer from the increase of the health foods market, particularly in the context of regulatory uncertainty and pervasiveness of confusion.
Food safety needs to shift from rule-formulation in the middle to enforcement on the edges, from websites to door-to-door delivery. Effective consumer protection relies upon multilingual education, local inspection, and grievance redressal. Health does not start in boardrooms, but in ration shops and kirana shops. To truly safeguard health, regulation must begin with the voices and needs of those most often ignored.
This blog is written by Ananya Singh, student, GNLU.
