India must think of Indians’ safety

This disregard is all-pervasive. Right from the individual level, when one does not bother to wear a helmet while riding a two-wheeler, to the organisational level, when there is poor regard towards environment, health and safety (EHS) norms, to the government level, where adequate deterrence is not built into the system to make safety of the citizenry a priority. Take these cases.

• On November 7, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) withdrew its 2020 order that made it mandatory to declare ‘best before’ date on containers and trays of non-packaged loose sweets.
• In September, GoI dropped its proposal to make it mandatory for automakers to fit six airbags in passenger vehicles, leaving car buyers to do their safety assessment based on the star ratings under India’s first car safety rating programme.
• Last week, Colombia passed a junk food law introducing a health tax targeting ultra-processed foods. But, in India, we have been deliberating on the kind of warning labels to adopt for packaged foods for years now. India is set to become the world’s third-largest consumer market by 2030.

Our ‘jugaad’ culture of solving problems, using limited resources, has made us overlook safety. So, it doesn’t unsettle us when there are not enough checks and balances to ensure the safety of the products we consume. Laws that bring in those checks and balances are either inadequate, not easy to pass or flouted.

For instance, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), the central body responsible for setting standards related to quality assurance of goods, systems and services in India, had 21,901 quality standards in force, but only around 361 product standards that required mandatory certification, as per data from its