Implementation of Food Safety Laws

♤ The Government should ensure enforcement of the Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA) in spirit, including increasing radically the number of trained inspectors and state-of-the-art lab facilities.

♤ Given the objective of the FSSA and the mandated transparency, it is important that: food authorities, scientific panels and scientific committees must be given

defined tasks with specified objective of rule-making; public and industry participation at an early date.

♤ In order to increase the exports of processed foods, there is a need for enforcing strict safety standards as per the global requirements. There have been many incidents of rejection of Indian food products due to safety concerns.

The National Mission on Food Processing is an important initiative of the government, which aims to overcome the above constraints and reap the potential of food processing sector in India.