Over the second half of July 2026, Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration issued three orders that, on the surface, have nothing to do with each other. It banned a fake version of paneer sold across the state. It suspended the licence of a beloved, century-old Mumbai dairy over mould and broken drains. And it barred junk food from being sold within fifty metres of a school. Look a little further back and a fourth thread joins the picture: a ban on two DEG-contaminated cough syrups that Maharashtra actually issued nine months earlier, in the days after a poisoned syrup killed roughly twenty children in Madhya Pradesh. None of these four actions happened because of each other. Together, though, they say something clearer than any single one of them could about how food and drug safety actually gets enforced in India: mostly after the damage is already done.
The Paneer That Was Never Really Paneer
Start with the paneer, because the story behind it is almost absurdly simple once you hear it. Indian law defines paneer as a specific dairy product made from milk fat and milk solids. What some manufacturers have been selling as paneer is something else entirely: a look-alike in which that milk fat is quietly swapped out for cheap vegetable oil, because there was, until this order, no legal definition of an analogue product to catch them at it.
The scale of it only became clear once Maharashtra’s FDA actually went looking. A year-long surveillance drive running from April 2025 to March 2026 tested 308 samples of paneer and dairy analogues from across the state. Of those, 109, more than a third, failed to meet the standard, including 79 rated substandard and 30 flatly unsafe for people to eat. Laboratory tests on the fat itself showed the telltale signs of vegetable oil standing in for milk fat. Citing that data, Food Safety Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe ordered a one-year, statewide ban on manufacturing, storing, transporting or selling anything sold as paneer that is not actually paneer, covering everyone from big producers down to the neighbourhood restaurant plating it at the table.
A Hundred and Ten Years, Undone by a Broken Drain
The very same enforcement sweep that produced that paneer data also caught, almost accidentally, one of Mumbai’s most trusted dairy names. Between July 14 and July 16, FDA teams fanned out across the state and seized food products worth more than one point nine crore rupees. One stop was Parsi Dairy Farm, a Mumbai institution that has been selling milk and paneer under the same name for a hundred and ten years. What inspectors found at its Princess Street facility had nothing to do with adulteration. It was a checklist of neglect: a damaged raw milk dock, cracked storage and production areas, a heavy fly infestation, broken flooring and drains, no effluent treatment plant at all, incomplete medical records for staff handling food, and products missing their mandatory expiry dates. The FDA suspended the dairy’s licence immediately.
There is a small irony sitting inside that story worth pausing on. Reporting from a year earlier had noted that Parsi Dairy’s own paneer sales had actually risen during an earlier bout of adulteration panic, precisely because customers trusted its reputation for purity over less established brands. A brand whose whole identity rested on being the safe, honest choice next to the fakes was the one that ended up losing its licence, not over what was in its paneer, but over the state of the building the paneer was made in. Trust in a brand and cleanliness in its kitchen, it turns out, are two entirely separate things, and regulators are only equipped to check one of them by tasting the product.
The One Order Built to Prevent, Not Punish
The third order, arriving within days of the other two, looked forward rather than back. On July 28, the FDA banned the sale, advertising and free distribution of food high in fat, sugar and salt within fifty metres of any school in the state, for every child from twenty-two months old up through Class 12. Commissioner Mundhe framed it as a straightforward swap: chips, carbonated drinks, burgers and packaged sweets out, and vegetables, protein, fruit and milk products in, with schools now required to hold food safety inspections and have at least one sample tested every year. It is a large undertaking on paper, touching something like 1.08 lakh schools and two crore students, and it followed on from awareness campaigns the FDA says it had already run in more than three thousand schools. Unlike the paneer ban or the Parsi Dairy suspension, this order was not a response to any single scandal. It was preventive, aimed at a slower and less visible kind of harm, the sort that shows up as childhood obesity and diabetes years down the line rather than in a lab report the following week.
The Cough Syrup Story Is Older, and That Is the Point
The cough syrup story belongs in this same account, but it deserves an honest correction rather than a tidy fit. It did not happen in the same few weeks as the other three; Maharashtra issued that ban back on October 7, 2025, nearly nine months before the paneer and dairy actions. What ties it to the rest of this story is not the calendar. It is the pattern.
That ban came days after Maharashtra’s FDA had put out an urgent alert on a different product entirely, Coldrif Syrup, after reports that it had killed children in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Laboratory testing found the syrup contained diethylene glycol, DEG, an industrial solvent with no place anywhere near a children’s medicine, at concentrations reported to run into the tens of percent against a permissible limit of a tenth of one per cent. The nationwide toll from that single batch eventually reached roughly twenty children dead, seventeen of them in Chhindwara district alone. In the scramble that followed, testing widened to other cough syrups on the market, and two more, Respifresh TR and Relife, both manufactured in Gujarat, turned up with DEG contamination of their own. Maharashtra banned them within days, and so did several other states.
None of this was India’s first encounter with this exact poison in this exact place. In 2022, cough syrups made by Indian manufacturers were linked to the deaths of around seventy children in The Gambia and close to twenty more in Uzbekistan, in both cases traced back to the same chemical, diethylene glycol, standing in for the glycerine a syrup is supposed to contain. The 2025 deaths in Madhya Pradesh were not a new kind of failure. They were the same failure recurring, in a different state, in a different product, three years after the world had already been shown, twice, exactly what this contamination does to a child’s kidneys.
A Regulator That Reacts
Set side by side, these four actions describe a single regulator built to respond rather than to anticipate, and worth judging honestly on those terms. Nobody caught the paneer fraud before a year of statewide testing produced the numbers to act on. Nobody caught the conditions inside Parsi Dairy’s kitchen until a routine sweep happened to walk through its doors. Nobody caught the DEG in Respifresh TR or Relife until children had already died from a different, similarly poisoned syrup and testing widened out from there in the panic that followed. The one order in this entire set that got ahead of an actual harm, rather than cleaning up after one, is the school food ban, and it is telling that it is also the only one built on the mildest kind of evidence: not a body count or a lab-confirmed adulterant, but a well-established, slow-moving link between diet and disease that nobody in public health seriously disputes anymore.
That contrast is the real finding buried in a month that otherwise looks like unrelated headlines. Enforcement in India tends to arrive once harm has already been measured, whether in failed lab samples or in a hospital’s mortality count, and rarely much before. The one place it moved early was the one place the evidence was already old, settled and impossible to argue with. If there is a lesson in watching a single state regulator handle paneer, a heritage dairy and a poisoned cough syrup within the space of a year, it may be this: acting before the numbers exist is the exception in Indian food and drug safety, not the rule, and the numbers, when they finally arrive, tend to arrive at a cost that was avoidable all along.
References
- Business Standard: “Maharashtra bans manufacture, sale of analogue paneer: What did FDA find?” https://www.business-standard.com
- The Hitavada: “Adulteration concerns: Analogue paneer banned across State for a year.” https://www.thehitavada.com
- Business Standard: “FDA suspends licence of Mumbai's famed Parsi Dairy Farm over hygiene issues.” https://www.business-standard.com
- ParsiCuisine.com: “Mumbai's 110-Year-Old Parsi Dairy Farm Loses Food Licence After FDA Hygiene Crackdown.” https://www.parsicuisine.com
- ThePrint: “Sale of food and beverages high in fat and sugar banned near premises of schools in Maharashtra: FDA.” https://theprint.in
- News on Air: “Maharashtra FDA Issues Alert on Coldrif Syrup Linked to Child Deaths.” https://www.newsonair.gov.in
- Gulf News: “Telangana issues public alert for two more cough syrups as toll rises to 20.” https://gulfnews.com
- Health Policy Watch: “Toxic Cough Syrup, Weak Oversight: India's Unending Drug Safety Crisis.” https://healthpolicy-watch.news
- Partnership for Safe Medicines: “Industrial solvents in medicated syrups: A recurring nightmare.” https://www.safemedicines.org