BHIM can’t understand what he’s done wrong.
Before dawn every day he joins hundreds of wholesale traders at Delhi’s Azadpur Mandi, a sprawling, chaotic market where trucks blare Bollywood music, porters haul huge brown sacks of fruit and vegetables and hawkers ply tea and cigarettes.
His own trade is in rosy red apples, laced with calcium carbide.
Bhim says he’s been adding chemicals to his apples for years to artificially ripen them after a long journey from the Himalayan foothills, despite being told that it causes cancer.
As far as he knows, no-one has ever died from eating his produce. So he can’t understand why the authorities are pestering him now, and why he has to pay so many bribes to keep his business afloat.
“This is an age-old practice, trust me, I know. But suddenly doctors are claiming that it causes cancer. Come now, how is that possible?” he said, wrapped up in a woollen grey cap and anorak on a chilly Saturday morning at the Azadpur Mandi market.
“Everyone still does it. The only difference is that it’s done very surreptitiously now. And let me tell you, it will never stop. Why would anyone want to harm their sales?”
An interview with a senior food safety official starkly illustrates just how far India has to go to enforce the regulations properly.
Although the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has banned the use of calcium carbide as it is carcinogenic, the senior official to whom reporters spoke said “it is not harmful”.
“Unofficially, it happens everywhere,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “How can the ripe fruit be brought from far away areas?”
During the interview, the official also had to check with someone on the phone whether calcium carbide was legal or not.Such attitudes explain why India still struggles to make its food fit for consumption. From rat poison found in vegetables and Diwali-festival sweets laced with caustic soda, to batches of moonshine liquor that kill scores of people at a time – adulteration is rife.
A report by the FSSAI in January found that most of the country’s milk was watered down or adulterated with products – including fertiliser, bleach and detergent – used to thicken the milk and help give it a white, frothy appearance.
The report caused an outcry in the world’s largest milk producer, where the drink is used for religious rituals and is a source of protein for hundreds of millions of vegetarians.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The same agency has also found that 13 per cent of all food in the world’s second-most-populous country failed to meet its standards.
“The problem is so widespread that everything is contaminated,” said Savvy Soumya Misra of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). “If everything has problems, there is no choice but to eat whatever is available.”
After two decades of rapid economic growth and rising living standards, millions of Indians have a richer and more varied diet than ever before. There is a growing appetite for everything from French wine to sushi among the swelling ranks of urban middle classes, products that simply weren’t available to their parents’ generation.
But safety standards have struggled to keep pace in a country that still has more poor than anywhere else in the world and where modern supermarkets remain relatively rare.
A world away from the swanky restaurants of New Delhi and Mumbai, awareness about safety only slowly trickles down to the country’s millions of small-time vendors.
Poverty tempts sellers to add dilutants such as water to products to make them go further. Cheap cooking oil is mixed with expensive oil, tea waste is mixed with new tea, and anything from urea to blotting paper is added to thicken the food sold at festivals.
Poorly staffed regulatory authorities can struggle to cope. Given the scale of the problem, only a handful of people are prosecuted for flouting standards, let alone jailed, rights activists say.
Delhi’s traders often source their produce from hundreds of kilometres away. In India, where highways are often potholed and jammed with traffic, and where storage facilities are primitive, up to 40 per cent of perishable food rots before it can be sold.
Traders cannot buy fruit such as apples or mangoes when they are already ripe, because these would go to waste during the bumpy, un-refrigerated journey from the orchards. Instead, they buy the fruits and later ripen them with calcium carbide, a substance colloquially known as “masala”, or “spice”.
Using the white powder reduces a ripening process that normally takes weeks to a matter of hours.
Traders are also tempted to polish or dip fruit in artificial colours to make its appearance fresh for sale.
Some traders at the market were willing to discuss such practices openly. Others only alluded to it in winks and nods.
Authorities in Delhi and elsewhere say they are cracking down on safety violations, from fining culprits to conducting surprise raids of food outlets. Raids are especially important during festivals, when bad batches of items such as sweetened milk or flour can send hundreds of people to hospital.
But enforcing India’s food safety laws is a tough task.
Even assessing the scale of India’s food safety problem has been controversial. After the FSSAI published its survey on milk adulteration in January, state government after state government spoke out to deny the scale of the problem in their region.
