Maharashtra has given traders who sell cooking oil by the litre from open tins another year to keep doing it. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the one-year exemption on September 1, days after the state Food and Drug Administration ordered an immediate halt to loose edible oil sales across the whole supply chain. Two committees will work out what happens when the year runs out.

How a compliance order became a political problem in ten days

FDA Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe issued the order on August 20 and announced it at a Mumbai press conference the next day. It covered everyone: expeller and solvent extraction units, blenders, packers, importers, supermarkets, e-commerce platforms and the neighbourhood kirana. Groundnut, mustard, sunflower, rice bran, palm, coconut and maize oil all had to move in sealed, tamper-proof, labelled food-grade packaging.

Mundhe backed the order with the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, prosecuting under Chapter IX. Business Today reported penalties running to seven years in prison and fines of Rs 10 lakh for unsafe food, with liability extending to directors and partners.

His argument was traceability. Oil ladled from an unlabelled drum carries no batch number and no record of where it came from, so a failed sample leads nowhere. FDA inspectors had found cheaper undeclared oils blended into mustard oil, acid values and trans-fat levels above permitted limits, near-expiry stock repackaged and relabelled, and oil held in containers never meant for food.

None of the underlying rules were new. Packaging and labelling requirements have sat on the books for years, and mustard oil has been barred from blending since June 2021. Mundhe began enforcing them at scale, and the trade found out how far it had drifted. Within days oil traders reached the Chief Minister, and Fadnavis told the FDA to look for a middle path.

The numbers behind the climbdown

Maharashtra licenses 2,103 loose edible oil traders, along with 370 repackagers and 489 manufacturers, according to figures reported by the Free Press Journal. Those are licensed counts. They leave out the informal end of the trade, the small shops that decant from a supplier’s tin and sell 200ml at a time to customers who cannot spare the price of a sealed litre.

Fadnavis framed the pause as a question the state had not answered rather than a rule it had dropped. "Many poor people purchase loose oil," he said, adding that a solution needed to be found. One committee, of FDA officials and trade representatives, will study what compliance costs a small trader. The second will map what sellers, manufacturers and repackagers need to get there. Both report within a month.

What this means if you buy oil loose

Nothing changes at the counter for the next twelve months. The shop that sold you half a litre in your own bottle can keep doing so.

The rest of food safety law still stands. The exemption covers the packaging requirement and not adulteration. Selling substandard, misbranded or unsafe oil remains prosecutable, and the FDA has not called off the inspection drive that turned up these findings. For a household, the useful habits are dull ones: buy from a shop willing to show you the sealed source tin, treat mustard oil priced well below the market with suspicion, and stop using oil that smells off or has thickened in storage.

For small traders, the deadline is the point. The government says it will not renew this extension. A shop that spends the year sorting out its licence and moving to packers who label their tins will stand somewhere different next September from one that waits.

What to watch

The committee reports, due by early October, decide this. The likely landing point is a standard operating procedure that allows small-quantity sales under conditions: sealed source containers, documented supply chains, perhaps a volume threshold. Whether that works for a shop turning over a few tins a week is the question the committees exist to answer, and the answer determines whether September 2027 brings enforcement or another extension the government has promised not to grant.

Sources: Free Press Journal, Business Today, Medical Dialogues

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.