When remedies become regulation: The Karnataka High Court’s intervention in food licensing and street vending

This article examines the Karnataka High Court’s September 2025 decision in Karnataka Pradesh Hotel & Restaurants Association v. Union of India, in which the Court, while upholding the validity of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, went on to direct the Union to classify restaurants by size and frame separate rules for each category, and ordered the State to introduce fresh health and safety rules for street vendors and food trucks under strict oversight. The authors argue that these directions cross the line from statutory adjudication into regulatory design. The Court issued new prescriptions without first diagnosing any failure of the existing framework. It overlooked the Street Vendors Act, 2014 and its treatment of vendors as rights-holders. And it assumed a state capacity that the evidence does not support, pointing to severe Food Safety Officer shortages that make selective, rent-seeking enforcement likely, a burden that falls hardest on informal workers at the economic margin. Drawing on the literature on implementation capability and Lon Fuller’s account of polycentric problems unsuited to adjudication, and noting that affected vendors were never heard, the article cautions that remedial ambition must be matched by remedial discipline.

CITATION

 Prashant Narang, Aryan Pandey and Indira Unninayar, 2026. “The Leap Blog: When remedies become regulation: The Karnataka High Court’s intervention in food licensing and street vending,” The Leap Blog

ARTICLE