A surprise inspection at a Navi Mumbai hotel found two insects in the kitchen, and that single finding was enough for the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration to suspend the hotel's food safety licence the very next day. Park Inn by Radisson had its FSSAI licence suspended on 3 July 2026, a day after the inspection, over what the FDA described as serious lapses in hygiene, sanitation, food storage and food handling. The hotel, acting through its authorised signatory Sanjay Baburao Nirbhavne, went to the Bombay High Court to challenge the suspension.
The Division Bench of Acting Chief Justice Ravindra Ghuge and Justice Gautam Ankhad looked past the headline language of the FDA's order to what the inspection report actually recorded. The report rated the establishment overall as compliant and satisfactory. Against that backdrop, the solitary finding of two insects did not, in the court's view, support shutting down the hotel's food business entirely. The bench held that this single observation, set against an otherwise satisfactory compliance picture, did not justify a continued suspension of the licence.
The court's reasoning carried a notably practical tone. It observed that a realistic standard has to govern how minor lapses are treated, rather than a zero-tolerance approach that treats any deviation, however small, as grounds for shutting an establishment down. One report quotes the bench remarking that the authorities needed to take a realistic stand given conditions in India, rather than hold food establishments to a standard of absolute perfection that even well-run kitchens would struggle to meet on every single inspection.
The litigation did not end cleanly with that observation, however. A later inspection, conducted after the suspension was already in place, turned up boxes and cans dated 9, 10 and 11 July, dates that fell after the 3 July suspension order. The FDA argued that it could not simply lift the suspension at that stage given this later finding, since fresh stock appearing to move through a supposedly suspended kitchen raised its own separate question about compliance with the suspension itself. The court nonetheless proceeded to restore the licence, while directing a fresh inspection of the premises to address the FDA's residual concerns.
The order's direction for a fresh inspection reflects an attempt to balance two things that are in tension: giving the hotel back its licence promptly, since the original ground for suspension did not hold up, while not simply waving away the FDA's newer concern about dated stock found after the suspension began. Restoring the licence did not mean the court accepted that every question about the hotel's compliance had been resolved; it meant only that the particular basis the FDA had relied on, two insects against an otherwise compliant report, was not enough to keep the business shut.
The ruling arrived alongside a string of similar Bombay High Court decisions through 2026 pushing back on indefinite or disproportionate FSSAI licence suspensions by the Maharashtra FDA, each turning on whether the underlying inspection record, taken as a whole, actually supported the severity of the enforcement action taken. Courts across these cases have been consistent in asking regulators to weigh an isolated deficiency against the overall compliance picture rather than treating any single defect as automatically fatal to a food business's licence.
For hotels, restaurants and other food businesses facing a suspension order after an inspection, the case offers a concrete argument: point to what the inspection report says about overall compliance, not just the specific defect cited as the trigger for suspension, and argue that a single minor finding against a broadly satisfactory record cannot sustain an indefinite shutdown. For regulators, the lesson cuts the other way: an enforcement order needs to explain why the specific defect found justifies the severity of the action taken, rather than relying on the existence of any deficiency, however isolated, to support a suspension that a court will later be asked to review.