Introduction

The Eat Right India (ERI) movement has been launched by FSSAI to protect the health of the people and the planet by transforming the food ecosystem of the country through a systems approach. It is based on three key themes- Eat Safe, Eat Healthy, and Eat Sustainable. It is inspired by the focus on preventive and promotive healthcare through convergence with various flagship programmes like Ayushman Bharat and POSHAN Abhiyaan. .

Eat Right India is a people’s movement that adopts a judicious mix of regulatory, capacity building, collaborative and empowerment approaches. It adopts a 'whole of the government' approach since it brings together food-related mandates of the agriculture, health, environment and other ministries. Furthermore, it takes a ‘whole of society’ approach, bringing all stakeholders from consumers to community organizations, academia etc. together on a common platform.

ERI encompasses a bouquet of initiatives that targets food businesses to supply safe, healthy and sustainable food and consumers to make the right food choices. As part of the core regulatory functions, FSSAI focuses on strengthening food safety through science-based, robust and high-quality standards at par with global benchmarks, effective enforcement drives and efficient (or risk-based) compliance checks through judicious as well as innovative use of resources. This would include bringing all food businesses under the licence and registration regime, conducting periodic risk-based inspections and/or third-party audits, conducting robust checks on imported food, increasing the level of surveillance, sampling and testing drives and building capacities for food-testing through innovative approaches such as public-private partnerships, mobile food-testing vans, rapid food-testing kits etc. Further, to build capacities of food businesses on food safety, FSSAI has initiated Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) programme to ensure a trained and certified Food Safety Supervisor (FSS) on every food business premises.

Several benchmarking and certification schemes to improve food safety and hygiene standards are in place for clusters such as street food hubs, vegetable markets, stations etc. and the Hygiene Rating scheme targets individual food service establishments like restaurants, bakeries and food retail shops. Consumers are targeted through initiatives such as Eat Right Campus for workplaces Eat Right School for school children. For consumers, the ‘Eat Right India’ movement is propagated through awareness generation in the form of large-scale social and behaviour change by engaging consumers and educating them on eating right. To educate consumers, a lot of IEC activities are organised to disseminate right messaging about safe and healthy eating practices in the interest of public in the form of videos, TVCs, flyers, brochures along with offline activities like Eat Right Melas, Walkathons etc. FSSAI also uses various communication tools including social media to disseminate scientific and accurate information around food safety, personal hygiene practices, healthy eating habits and other valuable tips for citizens.

Salient Features

Actionable under the Eat Right Challenge for Districts have been categorized under 5 areas as defined below:

1. Robust Food Regulatory System: This section includes efforts of the State machineries to improve and strengthen the functioning at the ground level including surveillance, enforcement and necessary compliances by facilitating ease of doing businesses through adoption and utilization of technology. Through this challenge, the aim is to broaden the reach of registration/ licensing, enforcement and surveillance activities, digitalization and enabling ease of business through FoSCoS, among other core regulatory activities of FSSAI. Surveillance drives covering the entire district are helpful in identifying key hot-spot areas of food safety issues so that they can be addressed in a timely manner

2. Benchmarking and Certification: Various settings based environment needs to be targeted covering street vendors, fruits & vegetables markets, food-kiosks, hawkers and petty food vendors to improve overall infrastructure as well as food safety and hygiene levels across food establishments. Hygiene Rating certification for catering establishments including restaurants, sweet shops and meat shops ensures food safety compliances. This section aims to inculcate the concept of self-compliances by food businesses through benchmarking and certification schemes.

3. Training and Capacity building of food businesses: This section ensures selfcompliance by food businesses through training and certification of food handlers for large, mid-sized and micro food businesses as well as unorganised vendors. To build capacities of food businesses on food safety, FSSAI has initiated Food Safety Training and Certification (FoSTaC) – a unique program to ensure a trained and certified Food Safety Supervisor on each food business premise.

4. Changing Food Environment: As food is a common thread linking citizens everywhere, the Food Authority ‘s approach is to transform the ‘food environment’ in the country to ensure every citizen get access to safe, healthy and sustainable diets. This section focuses on targeting settings-based environment like schools, colleges, campuses and workplaces where people spend a considerable amount of their time. These programs ensure behavioural change in a settings-based approach through training & capacity building of all food handlers followed by the third party audits. Encouraging consumers to adopt fortified foods with +F symbol and millets in their diets would ensure healthy citizens, which in turn, reduces the disease burden in our country. Through this Challenge, the aim is to get maximum number of clusters certified by FSSAI to inspire trust in consumers.

5. Social and Behaviour Change: Citizen Engagements extremely crucial for the success of any large-scale program. To enable mass mobilization, districts should organise large-scale citizen centric campaigns to bring about social and behavioural change. Consumer awareness drives and a series of IEC activities targeting both online/ offline mediums like TV/ Radio/ Cinema/ Billboards/ Hoardings etc. should be organised to generate mass awareness. The aim of this Challenge is to widen the reach of these campaigns and engage as many people as possible.

Expected outcomes