This week, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), prodded by the Supreme Court, proposed a simple but overdue idea. Packaged foods high in fat, salt, or sugar should carry a bold red warning on the front of the pack , not buried in fine print on the back. This is a welcome step. It is also, on its own, nowhere near enough.
Someone picking up instant noodles, a breakfast cereal, or a “health drink” will finally be told, at a glance, that it is not as wholesome as its advertising claims.
The number of children presenting with morbid obesity and diabetes has climbed sharply within just a few years. The standard objection — that such a tax would hit the poor the hardest — is not wrong, but it is only half the argument. Unregulated, cheap sugar already extracts a heavy price from the poor, who bear the brunt of the diabetes, hypertension and childhood obesity epidemic that sugar heavy diets drive, with the least means to treat it. Doing nothing is not neutral; it is a slower, costlier tax, paid in ill health rather than rupees at the till. The FSSAI’s proposed red label is a genuine, if belated, first step. What India needs now is the resolve to finish what it has started — mandatory food standards; limits on how unhealthy food is marketed to children; rules that reach the unorganised sector; and an honest debate on taxing sugar in a way that protects families with the least room to absorb either cost, the tax, or the disease.
Because children are eating more; it is about what they are being sold, this is not just. The answer is to design the tax calibrated to sugar content so that it nudges reformulation, with part of the revenue set aside to make healthy food cheaper. The World Obesity Atlas 2026 bears this out — 41 million Indian children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 are now overweight or obese. In 2024, a leading multinational was found adding sugar to infant food sold in India and other lower income countries; sugar was left out of the same product in Europe. When a health drink, popular in Indian homes, turned out to be nothing more than flavoured sugar syrup, it took a social media storm, and not a regulator, to force the company to prescribe a 15% cut in its added sugar.
Breakfast cereals, sweetened yoghurts, and “health drinks” are marketed to parents as filling gaps in a child’s diet, emphasising “energy” and vitamins while saying little about the sugar content inside.
