Quality control can't be culturally relative

T S Eliot could well have been Indian when he wrote in his 1923 poem, The Hollow Men: 'Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow.' The latest 'Shadow' falling between 'in theory' and 'in practice' comes in the form of acting Bombay High Court chief justice Ravindra Ghuge's reaction this week to Maharashtra FDA's suspension of licence of a 4-star hotel after inspectors found cockroaches - the real kind - in the hotel's kitchen. Ghuge quashed the suspension citing 'Be realistic, we're in India', the 'solitary finding... of two insects' deemed par for the course in hotel kitchens in this country. Never mind what non-Indian guests with a different set of cultural-hygienic expectations would make of such tolerance, but to literally brush hygiene issues under the carpet as 'India mein ye chalta hai' opens a whole range of Pandora's boxes that the quest for 'Viksit Bharat' is apparently trying to shut.

Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has a set of rules, norms and standards. Hygiene relativism along cultural lines doesn't feature in them - as it shouldn't. A 'We are like this only' loophole upends this system, sneaking subjective notions of what's fine and what's not into the picture. And it's not just FSSAI that will wonder what's the point in laying down 'suggestions', but every regulatory body handling infractions from opposite-lane driving to building construction standards.

Quality control is a serious challenge for India. In his maiden Independence Day speech, Narendra Modi introduced the 'Zero Defect, Zero Effect' (ZED) plan for action for manufacturers. This also applies to our service industries. Let that slide, and we'll be changing the very definition of 'quality' too.