India’s federal regulator, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has just directed provincial Food Safety Commissioners to eliminate redundant documentation for the purpose of licensing or registration of food businesses.
“A list of documents required for each kind of business is already available on the Food Licensing and Registration System and licensing authorities may limit their queries only to those documents.” Dr Shobhit Jain, Executive Director, Compliance Strategy, was in receipt of cases of licensing authorities demanding FBOs to submit documents or information not relevant or required under the Licensing and Registration of Food Business Regulations.
“Many a time, these additional documents have no direct relevance to the kind of business applied for and sometimes they are quite irrelevant like asking for in-house laboratory in food business where it is not mandatory or recall plan in case of transporter etc. this causes inconvenience to and harassment of FBOs and undue delay in processing of the applications and therefore the directions have been issued,” he said.
