The Economic Survey of India, released recently, has begun treating nutrition and food systems as economic infrastructure rather than just a public health side note. One of its quieter but most consequential
observations is the rapid expansion of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in Indian consumption patterns.
The Survey links this shift in food consumption patterns to rising obesity, diabetes and non-communicable diseases — a warning that dietary transitions are unfolding faster than our understanding and any subsequent policy imagination. India is being reorganised by the industrial food environment and is eating differently.
When millions of people are making the “wrong” food choices at the same time, the problem is not addressed by the adjectives used for someone with the disease and personalised fixes. It is how the country’s food ecosystem is structured.
Food choices and their impact on one’s health are often framed as a story of personal failure. People lack discipline. Families have abandoned traditional diets. Children are glued to screens and junk food. Reports across various platforms in the recent past across India have pointed out that close to 40 per cent of the population in some cities like Indore suffer from high cholesterol in the age group of 18-30. Other reports cite that 40 per cent of Indians are at risk of liver disease linked to obesity.
Therefore, when obesity is observed across income groups, regions and generations, individual explanations of obesity collapse; people have obesity, they are not obese. Millions of people do not suddenly lose willpower in synchrony. They are responding to a system designed around them.
The Indian food environment today is engineered for convenience, not by design or choice, but by constraints that define an individual’s life. Ultra-processed foods are produced industrially; they are cheaper per calorie, aggressively marketed, hyper-palatable and easily accessible from urban metros to small-town kirana shelves. They have a longer shelf life and are produced for profit maximisation. Packaged food, even though unhealthy, is an adaptation to time scarcity and other constraints around which many double-income households design their lives in dense cities across the country. Time saved in a society with long working hours, brutal commutes and shrinking domestic schedules is an attempt to address individual fatigue and well-being.
Fresh produce in a city is volatile in cost and quality, subject to seasonal variations and supply chain issues. In large cities, this is restricted to markets in noisy, dense areas, making it hard to rationalise the time spent procuring fresh produce. On the contrary, processed foods benefit from scale, longevity on shelves, perceptions of cleanliness, embedded subsidies in commodity systems and logistical advantages. When the healthier option is less predictable, less accessible and sometimes more expensive, consumers are optimising within constraints by choosing accessible but unhealthy options.
Other systemic factors further accentuate the issue, and advertising completes the loop by targeting various customer segments. Children are targeted early, youth are engaged with vibrancy, brand loyalty is cultivated through repetition, and emotional associations are built around celebration, aspiration and belonging rather than healthy choices. This creates a negative feedback loop of reinforcement, which is profitable for food corporations and their associated players but harmful to consumers.
Consumers across segments become hooked on ultra-processed foods, boosting sales volumes for food companies. Subcultures form around food products for specific segments, and companies focus on expanding their subscriber base by creating various hooks. UPFs, by definition, are industrially manufactured and have a very negative impact on human health.
Exposure to such marketing shapes preference formation; taste is a socially and commercially manufactured phenomenon, not a fixed biological destiny. The Economic Survey notes that such marketing is not neutral.
This is further compounded by urban design: our cities are expanding in ways that separate living, working and shopping into distinct areas, resulting in longer commutes. This design has replaced walkable neighbourhood food ecosystems with delivery apps and convenience outlets. The effort required to access fresh food has increased, while that required to access processed foods has decreased.
Each player in the mix attempts to optimise its own benefits. Policy often does not factor in these incentives. In the case of ultra-processed foods, different players are driven by different incentives: families seek affordability and convenience, firms seek growth, cities seek efficiency, and individuals seek ease of access. These interactions collectively produce a landscape in which unhealthy eating becomes the default. Human behaviour follows the path of least resistance, thus adapting to new realities that shape lives.
All these forces interact — price, advertising, time scarcity, urban layout — and generate a pattern that no single actor in the system intends, yet everyone participates in. The result is emergent: obesity, therefore, is assembled by the environment and not chosen in isolation.
A delivery worker choosing cheap packaged snacks during his 12-hour shift is not irresponsible; a parent relying on a ready-to-eat meal after a two-hour commute is not negligent. The moral narrative under this light is reframed. Individuals are acting rationally inside a broken system.
Their choices are a response to incentives in a system which they did not create. Blaming them is analytically lazy, and politically convenient solutions, such as wellness campaigns, even if well-meaning, which put the responsibility on the individual alone, are not enough and do not often work. These interventions avoid confronting the architecture that structures their options.
Now, if the problem is architectural, the solution must also be architectural. This is where a new class of research tools becomes crucial. Agent-based modelling, increasingly used in economics and public policy, allows researchers to simulate how millions of individual decisions interact under different rules. Instead of assuming a representative consumer, these models create virtual populations where each agent responds to prices, advertising exposure, labelling, peer influence and availability.
In such simulations, small policy shifts can produce large population effects. For example, introducing a modest tax on ultra-processed foods might cascade through social networks as norms change, rather than just impacting sales linearly. Taking a cue from countries like Japan in advertising, front-of-pack labelling can alter retailer stocking strategies beyond direct sales. Restrictions on child-directed advertising can reshape long-term preference formation. These models capture feedback loops that traditional spreadsheets would miss.
For a country of India’s scale and diversity, this is important. Policies that are siloed and tested in isolation often do not work because they fail to account for behavioural changes in response to new constraints. An agent-based approach would allow policymakers to run experiments in silico before implementing them in the real world. It would provide a laboratory for understanding how food systems behave as dynamic networks rather than static markets.
India has demonstrated its capacity for structural design in transforming digital payments. This was not achieved by lecturing about financial discipline; it was achieved by building a robust architecture — UPI and Aadhaar — establishing interoperability across platforms and thus creating digital public infrastructure. This made the desired behaviour easier than the alternative. Adoption of fintech platforms exploded once the architecture was in place, and systems redesign directed behavioural change.
Just imagine the following: healthy food becomes the default option in school and workplace canteens; supply chains for fresh produce are as logistically efficient as those for packaged snacks; urban zones treat access to food as essential infrastructure; and labelling is as intuitive as traffic signals. These are questions for systems redesign, not sermons on individual self-control. Policy on food systems requires national ambition.
The Economic Survey’s warning should therefore be interpreted as a system brief; India is at a nutritional inflexion point. The choice is between medicalising the consequences — expanding healthcare to treat obesity and diabetes after the fact — or redesigning the upstream environment that produces them. The former is an expensive, endless spiral; the latter is difficult yet achievable and transformative.
Public discourse on obesity now has to mature beyond blaming citizens; the pattern has become national and, as the Economic Survey also highlights, it is structural. Health has become collateral damage in a society that has engineered convenience, speed and profit into its food ecosystem. The task is to realign incentives so that rational choices and healthy outcomes coincide — not to shame citizens back into discipline.
The question is whether we are willing to classify and treat obesity as a failure of design rather than a failure of will, and to respond with the same structural imagination that has powered our most successful reforms in recent years. India redesigned its payments architecture and unlocked a digital revolution. It can redesign its food architecture and avert a public health catastrophe.
Aditya Trivedi, Director, Rashtram School of Public Leadership, Rishihood University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
