Use your noodle

The United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore and Australia are a few of the foreign nations that have found Nestlé’s Maggi safe to eat after India held that its sundry varieties of instant noodles suffered from toxic contamination. So what should we make of this? It is tempting to argue we should go by our own tests, our own testing protocols, and our own interpretation of food safety norms, rather than be influenced by what other countries do or say. But this is a piece of hyper-nationalistic nonsense for more than one reason. To begin with, our food safety regulations are largely borrowed from the West. They are also extremely poorly enforced. Also in Maggi’s case, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), when testing for the contaminant lead, appears to have applied a norm that is totally at variance with international practice. The FSSAI’s ban on the product took place under the glare of a largely hostile media, an atmosphere in which TRPs trumped reason, self-righteous anger prevailed over sober analyses, and ideology replaced science.

The real economic cost of the entire episode, which far exceeds the actual loss suffered by Nestlé or other manufacturers, is the impact on Brand India. Conflicting test reports from different parts of the country, the lack of clarity in the process and protocols followed, the shifting stance on part of the FSSAI, and its continued refusal to answer questions, all combine to cast a shadow over the idea of ‘Make in India’ itself. Because core to that proposition — since what is made here also needs to be sold — is the underlying premise that anything with a ‘Made in India’ stamp is as good as or better than the best available in the market from any other country. Building this perception cannot be left solely to the manufacturers, although they need to do the heavy lifting in terms of delivering consistent quality and reliability. Government — in the larger sense of independent regulatory bodies, safety and quality inspectors and auditors, and the like — plays an equally important role in building the brand equity of a nation-brand. Countries such as Germany or Japan, which have achieved this for their engineering or manufacturing quality, have reaped the benefits. Those which haven’t — and China is a good example of this — perforce have to feed at the bottom of the price pyramid.

Nestlé may be guilty of selling unhealthy instant noodles advertised as a health product to children and mothers. But this issue is unconnected to whether the product contained more lead than permitted or whether it committed a gross impropriety by saying there was ‘No added MSG’ on its packets. What the FSSAI, the various state-level food safety regulators and labs and even the Centre, can certainly be charged with is a lackadaisical approach to food safety, poorly structured standards, poor training and equipping of those responsible for implementation of such standards, and above all, a total lack of transparency in an issue which involves millions of people. Unless systemic fixes are applied — since these problems are not restricted to the food sector alone — the economy will end up paying a high price for this failure of governance.

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