Front and centre: On the front-of-package labelling issue Politics & News

In a further instalment of its continuing engagement with regulating processed food products, the Supreme Court of India has, once again, staked out for the right of citizens to health. In a recent judgment, a Bench directed the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to consider introducing mandatory front-of-package warning labels on packaged food products high in sugar, salt and saturated fat. Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan directed the FSSAI to file its response to the proposal within four weeks. There is adequate evidence available to associate these sugar, salt and saturated fat additives in processed foods with non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases, all of which are inching up their way up to epidemic proportions in India. The petitioner, the NGO 3S and Our Health Society, informed the Court that such disclosures would enable consumers to make informed decisions and choices and could help with stemming the tide of rising deaths due to diabetes and heart ailments. Earlier, in 2025, the Court had directed an expert committee under the FSSAI to submit its recommendations on the amendments required to be made to the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020, to implement front-of-package labelling. On the count of holding consultations with all stakeholders across the country, an extension was sought and secured, but in February 2026, the Bench expressed unhappiness at the regulator’s compliance report, noting that the exercise undertaken thus far had failed to yield any “positive or good result”. One of the elements of contention between the FSSAI and the petitioner was the former’s proposal to introduce an Indian Nutrition Rating model, an indigenous system of rating a product; the latter opposed it on the grounds that this was not in line with globally accepted standards.

The Court’s persistent intervention on the issue of front-of-package labelling should lean on the massive ultra-processed food industry to implement these universally endorsed safeguards, to inform consumers of the content and additives in the packaged food, to guide choices, ultimately. Non-communicable diseases have already swept through vast swathes of the population in the country: the 2023 ICMR-INDIAB study found that 101 million people in India (11.4% of the population) have diabetes, with an additional 136 million suffering from prediabetes. Other concomitant factors including hypertension (35.5% national average), abdominal obesity (39.5%) and high cholesterol (24%) were also estimated to be high. Introducing front-of-package labelling is an essential part of establishing a continuum of care that begins with prevention.