Somewhere in your home there is a bottle that promises to fix your hair, your metabolism or your mood, and under Indian law it is classified as food. The tablet, the dosage schedule and the clinical-looking font are all packaging, since the regulatory framework that governs supplements treats the capsule exactly as it treats a packet of biscuits. That quiet legal fiction has let an industry grow to enormous size on the language of medicine without ever submitting to the obligations of it.
Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, has now announced that he intends to look inside the bottle. Speaking to The Indian Express, he called what his department has found "disturbing", and offered the detail that matters most: some products advertise an ingredient that is not actually in them. Asked whether the coming order would stop at labels or reach the contents, he answered in a single list: "Everything: content, consumption, prescription, selling."
The last two words of that list carry the weight. Prescription belongs to the vocabulary of drugs, and supplements are not drugs, which makes the commissioner's phrasing either loose or a deliberate signal that the state wants to drag the category toward medicine's rules. Selling matters just as much, because the infant food order he issued on 29 September already banned advertising, freebies and influencer promotion, and there is little reason to assume supplements will be spared the same treatment.
That order belongs to a sequence. School meals came first, then infant foods, then a standing order for festival-season adulteration, and on 15 October a statewide ban on loose spice powders. Read in order, the orders climb the life stages of an Indian household, and the supplement shelf is where the climb reaches the adult consumer who has been told, in every Instagram reel, that wellness is a purchase.
The case for scrutiny rests on numbers that predate Mundhe. The Advertising Standards Council of India found that nutraceuticals made up 52 per cent of the food and beverage advertisements it examined in 2025-26, and that 96 per cent of those needed to change. FSSAI's own rules forbid claims that food can treat or cure disease and require every label to say the product is not for medicinal use. The standards exist and the industry has been ignoring them at scale, which raises the question of why a state commissioner is needed to enforce rules written in Delhi.
Fairness cuts in several directions. A consumer who buys a protein powder that contains no protein, or a fertility supplement that contains none of what it advertises, has been defrauded in the plainest sense, and a regulator willing to test contents deserves credit. Against that, enforcement depends on laboratories, and Mundhe himself has spoken of expanding FDA lab capacity, which implies the testing machinery is still being built. Compliance costs also fall unevenly: the spice order has already drawn objections from traders warning of higher prices, and a small manufacturer with an honest label can be squeezed harder than a national brand with a legal department.
What remains unanswered is the order itself. Until its text is public, nobody knows whether it will mandate testing, restrict sales without a doctor's advice, or reach the influencer economy that moves most of this product. Nor do we know which brands failed, because the commissioner has described the findings without naming a single product. A crackdown that announces its disturbing discoveries but withholds the evidence invites the suspicion that it is built for headlines, and the burden is now on the FDA to publish what it found.
For the reader holding that bottle, the practical question is simple. The law has treated your supplement as food, so nobody was obliged to prove it did anything. If Maharashtra's order forces even one company to show what is inside the capsule, that will be the first time many of them have had to.
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Somewhere in your home there is a bottle that promises to fix your hair, your metabolism or your mood, and under Indian law it is classified as food. The tablet, the dosage schedule and the clinical-looking font are all packaging, since the regulatory framework that governs supplements treats the capsule exactly as it treats a packet of biscuits. That quiet legal fiction has let an industry grow to enormous size on the language of medicine without ever submitting to the obligations of it.
Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, has now announced that he intends to look inside the bottle. Speaking to The Indian Express, he called what his department has found "disturbing", and offered the detail that matters most: some products advertise an ingredient that is not actually in them. Asked whether the coming order would stop at labels or reach the contents, he answered in a single list: "Everything: content, consumption, prescription, selling."
The last two words of that list carry the weight. Prescription belongs to the vocabulary of drugs, and supplements are not drugs, which makes the commissioner's phrasing either loose or a deliberate signal that the state wants to drag the category toward medicine's rules. Selling matters just as much, because the infant food order he issued on 29 September already banned advertising, freebies and influencer promotion, and there is little reason to assume supplements will be spared the same treatment.
That order belongs to a sequence. School meals came first, then infant foods, then a standing order for festival-season adulteration, and on 15 October a statewide ban on loose spice powders. Read in order, the orders climb the life stages of an Indian household, and the supplement shelf is where the climb reaches the adult consumer who has been told, in every Instagram reel, that wellness is a purchase.
The case for scrutiny rests on numbers that predate Mundhe. The Advertising Standards Council of India found that nutraceuticals made up 52 per cent of the food and beverage advertisements it examined in 2025-26, and that 96 per cent of those needed to change. FSSAI's own rules forbid claims that food can treat or cure disease and require every label to say the product is not for medicinal use. The standards exist and the industry has been ignoring them at scale, which raises the question of why a state commissioner is needed to enforce rules written in Delhi.
Fairness cuts in several directions. A consumer who buys a protein powder that contains no protein, or a fertility supplement that contains none of what it advertises, has been defrauded in the plainest sense, and a regulator willing to test contents deserves credit. Against that, enforcement depends on laboratories, and Mundhe himself has spoken of expanding FDA lab capacity, which implies the testing machinery is still being built. Compliance costs also fall unevenly: the spice order has already drawn objections from traders warning of higher prices, and a small manufacturer with an honest label can be squeezed harder than a national brand with a legal department.
What remains unanswered is the order itself. Until its text is public, nobody knows whether it will mandate testing, restrict sales without a doctor's advice, or reach the influencer economy that moves most of this product. Nor do we know which brands failed, because the commissioner has described the findings without naming a single product. A crackdown that announces its disturbing discoveries but withholds the evidence invites the suspicion that it is built for headlines, and the burden is now on the FDA to publish what it found.
For the reader holding that bottle, the practical question is simple. The law has treated your supplement as food, so nobody was obliged to prove it did anything. If Maharashtra's order forces even one company to show what is inside the capsule, that will be the first time many of them have had to.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.