New Delhi, September 30, 2026
Damit Gahlot left Bikaner on foot on September 4. Twenty days later he was sitting at Jantar Mantar, announcing that he would take nothing but water until the government acted on food adulteration. A week into that fast, he has met no minister and no senior official from the food regulator. What he has met, according to his own videos, is the Delhi Police.
Mr. Gahlot, who posts as @foodreality07 on Instagram, is not a household name outside social media. For months, he has been putting out short videos about what goes into everyday food, questioning ingredient lists, labels and product quality. In September, he took the campaign off the screen and walked roughly 700 km from Bikaner to Delhi, reaching Jantar Mantar on September 24.
A march, and then a fast
The walk was not uneventful, by his account. He has said some people tried to stop him near Sikar and that he received threatening calls on the way. No authority has confirmed this.
On the evening he reached Delhi, he posted a video announcing an indefinite fast. In it, he said he would be proud to die fighting what he calls the "food mafia", and held the government and the companies he says have filed cases against him responsible for whatever happened to him. He also said that even 21 days on the road had not got the government's attention.
What happened at Bangla Sahib
The protest later moved from Jantar Mantar to the area near Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. A video posted on his account earlier this week shows police personnel detaining him there; Delhi Police had not confirmed the detention when it was first reported.
His supporters put the number of detentions since he arrived in Delhi at more than eight. They also say he has lost about 11 kg and that his blood sugar has dropped sharply. This newspaper has not been able to verify any of these figures, and neither the police nor any doctor has spoken publicly about his condition.
The right he is exercising is not in doubt. In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India (2018), the Supreme Court set aside a complete ban on protests at Jantar Mantar and asked the Delhi Police Commissioner to frame a mechanism to regulate them instead. The police can regulate the time, place and manner of a protest. What remains unanswered in Mr. Gahlot's case is which rule a single man on a water-only fast is said to have broken.
Twelve demands
His charter runs to 12 points. Among them: a tougher law and harsher punishment for adulteration, a ban on artificial colours, mandatory ingredient lists in Hindi on packaged food, regular testing of milk and paneer, more inspections, accountability for officials of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), and food-safety lessons in schools.
Some of this would take years and fresh legislation. Some of it would not. Printing ingredients in Hindi, for example, is a labelling change, and it would matter to a large number of buyers who cannot read an English-only label.
What the government's own data shows
It would be easy to write this off as one influencer's campaign if the official numbers told a different story. They do not.
The Health Ministry told the Lok Sabha in July that 40,023 of the 2,23,808 food samples analysed in 2025-26 did not conform to standards. That is close to 18 per cent, and the figures are still provisional. The year before, 34,388 of about 1.7 lakh samples failed, against 33,808 in 2023-24.
The failure rate has eased slightly because far more samples are now being tested. The number of failed samples, however, keeps going up. Over the ten years from 2014-15 to 2024-25, an average of a quarter of all samples tested were non-conforming.
There is a catch in these numbers. The Ministry does not say how many of the failed samples were actually adulterated, as opposed to substandard, contaminated or wrongly labelled. So the one figure Mr. Gahlot is most concerned about is not published at all.
Testing capacity is thin too. The regulator relies on 259 accredited laboratories and 24 referral laboratories. Inspections did go up, from 3,57,072 in 2023-24 to 5,20,566 in 2025-26, but a little over two lakh samples a year is a very small slice of what 140 crore people eat.
A strong law, rarely used
The law itself has teeth. Under Section 59 of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, selling unsafe food can mean up to six months in jail where nobody is hurt, rising to a minimum of seven years and up to life imprisonment, with a fine of at least ₹10 lakh, if it causes a death. The general criminal law is far softer. Section 274 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita caps punishment for adulterating food at six months in prison or a ₹5,000 fine.
The problem is how often the tougher law is actually used. State-wise figures placed before Parliament show Telangana recorded no food-safety convictions over five years, while Tamil Nadu recorded the most. Most cases end in civil penalties, which amounted to ₹74.12 crore in 2023-24, ₹35.74 crore in 2024-25 and ₹109.11 crore in 2025-26.
The courts are pressing too
Mr. Gahlot is not the only one losing patience with the regulator. The Supreme Court is hearing a petition on front-of-pack warning labels. FSSAI has proposed a red hexagon on packs that are high in fat, sugar or salt. It then asked for four months to finalise the rules and a further year of voluntary compliance; the Bench said the timeline appeared unreasonable and has reserved its order. An opinion piece in The Indian Express has tied the labelling fight to India's obesity problem.
The court case and the fast are about different things. The point underneath both is the same: people buying food in India still find it hard to know what is in it.
Where caution is due
Mr. Gahlot's videos have named products, and his campaign speaks of a "food mafia". Claims against any company have to stand up to laboratory testing and due process; a reel is not proof. Campaigns built on social media can inform people, and they can also mislead them.
That is a reason for FSSAI to engage with him and answer his points in public. It is not a reason to keep moving a fasting man off the pavement without explaining why. As of this writing, neither the police nor the Health Ministry has said anything on record about him.
What is your view? Should the government meet Damit Gahlot, or should food safety be left to regulators and courts rather than protests? Tell us in the comments.
The number of detentions, his weight loss and his medical condition are based on statements by Mr. Gahlot and his supporters and could not be independently verified at the time of publication.
