On 17 October 2026, the Health Ministry announced two draft food standards from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), published a day earlier. Both remain proposals.
What each proposal covers
One would prohibit adding sucrose and fructose to products for infants up to six months old. This is a defined restriction, rather than a ban on every sugar in all baby food.
The infant-nutrition consultation allows 60 days for comments from public availability of the Gazette copies. The announcement does not establish that starting date; an exact deadline needs separate verification.
For tea, proposed maximum residue limits are 20 milligrams per kilogram for acetamiprid and 50 for imidacloprid. These concern two specific pesticides and remain subject to finalisation.
What a residue limit measures
A maximum residue limit, or MRL, measures pesticide residue per kilogram of a food commodity. The international Codex food-standards glossary expresses it in milligrams per kilogram.
This differs from dietary intake. Codex defines acceptable daily intake relative to body weight. Assessing exposure also requires information about the food people consume; the residue limit alone cannot supply that answer.
The proposed tea figures are regulatory benchmarks, not measurements from tested packets. They cannot establish the residue present in a particular product.
The Crunch
Check the product, the measurement and the regulatory stage before drawing a conclusion.