India targets 10,000 geographical indication tags by 2030.
Food GIs link biodiversity, local livelihoods and cultural heritage.
Current system faces gaps in governance, equity and sustainability.
GI 2.0 urges producer power, traceability and ecological accountability.
At the India Today GI Samagam in New Delhi on 22 January 2025, Commerce & Industry Minister Piyush Goyal set a bold target of 10,000 Geographical Indication (GI) tags by 2030.
As of January 2025, India had 605 registered GIs, of which 242 (around 40 per cent) were food-linked, combining the agricultural (197) and food products (45) categories.
A GI protects names tied to origin, land, technique, and community know-how. Only authorised users — local producers registered and compliant with the product specification — may use the GI; others risk infringement.
India’s food GIs read like a living atlas of diversity, each tag rooted in a local ecology, a regional method, and a distinct cultural palate. Think Gobindobhog rice from West Bengal or Palakkadan Matta rice from Kerala, all shaped by farmer-preserved indigenous varieties that lend each grain its own aroma and character.
In the finished platter, this becomes Darjeeling first-flush brews, Naga chilli condiments, or Odisha’s kai (red weaver ant) chutney. Together, such foods make biodiversity visible and keep dignified livelihoods in motion for smallholders, women and forest-edge communities who steward the seed, soil, and craft of the nation.
Well-governed food GIs unlock layered sustainability benefits across the system: production anchored in local ecologies, on-farm and forest biodiversity, nutrition, and dignified, local value addition for smallholders and women’s groups.
They keep Indian traditional knowledge in active use — from seed preservation to seasonal foraging calendars and fermentation protocols that shape taste and resilience.
The recent millet revival offers a climate-proof point: low-input dryland grains such as Mangalwedha jowar thrive with less water, while dryland livelihoods and landscapes in Maharashtra strengthen together.
At home, credible labels boost consumer awareness, trust, and pride, widening circulation of diverse foods — whether as everyday staples, occasional indulgences, or distinctive gastronomic experiences.
Thus, the result is a whole-system payoff that compounds over time. As these practices travel through finished foods and credible labels, place becomes reputation and reputation becomes soft power, without losing the landscape that made it possible.
Abroad, Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA)-facilitated GI consignments — Darjeeling tea, Tripura Queen Pineapple, Kashmir saffron, Alphonso and Malda mangoes — show that when traceable origin is paired with quality certificates, batch records, and consistent grading, border clearances are smoother and prices fetch a premium.
Yet the ground reality can jar with the promise. Small producers face forms, fees and jargon. GI boundaries are often mapped far from the villages they cover.
For marginal farmers, tribal producers, and forest foods, consent and benefit sharing are easy to promise and hard to secure. After Odisha’s kai chutney received a GI in January 2024, demand rose and new buyers entered, yet community consent and benefit sharing remained unclear.
After registration, new twists appear. Authorised users trickle in. Big brands help tell the story and grow demand, but without strong governance the premium leaks to intermediaries.
“GI-style” lookalikes crowd shelves because checks and consumer awareness are thin. Quality systems wobble under export-lab scrutiny. Even celebrated GIs can falter at the border, as India’s Basmati did with EU residue-based rejections in 2024.
Payments come late, demand is stop–start, and a hotter, more variable climate outgrows yesterday’s specifications. In some forest and dryland regions, new buyers can push harvests from careful to extractive.
Two risks drive this volatility: Hype without committed buyers, with no anchor contracts or prompt payments, pushing producers from glut to drought; and extractive sourcing, where surges in demand without harvest rules strip landscapes and weaken community control.
None of this is inevitable. It points to the need for a GI 2.0 — where the tag is the start of governance, not the end of the story.
GIs should carry the burden of sustainability, protect reputation, and advance food diplomacy, aligning GI governance with national goals. A credible GI is a compact that signals quality, authenticity, and ecological care.
Think how Korea has built soft power around kimchi and gochujang; closer to home, Araku Valley’s tribal cooperatives cultivate shade-grown coffee in agroforestry systems, maintaining traceability and ecological benefits.
So, what should GI 2.0 entail? Power should shift to producers at chokepoints. One workable approach is self-help groups (SHGs) and farmer producer organisations running processing and packaging hubs with clear quality bands, transparent pricing, time-bound payments, and revolving working capital. This ensures more value stays upstream and the GI premium reaches the first mile.
Ecology should anchor GI 2.0. Since GI tags span farm produce, processed foods, and beverages, eco-criteria should be product-appropriate: build on good practices where they exist or set credible transitions if they are missing.
For forest foods, systems should include non-destructive harvest rules, extraction caps, and seasonal closures. In tribal and forest chains, governance should be rights-inclusive by aligning with the Forest Rights Act (FRA), Free, Prior and Informed Consent and Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS), with a small royalty flowing to community welfare.
Hubs should track what matters: seed and varietal diversity, soil cover and mulching, rainwater harvesting with a rainfed share, pollinator habitat, and residue or moisture thresholds. Where field metrics are less visible, simple safeguards on water and energy use, residue compliance, and responsible sourcing can carry the intent.
The aim should not be extractive scale but place-based excellence that earns its niche in both domestic and international markets.
Authenticity must be easy to check and costly to fake. GI 2.0 should mainstream pack-level QR codes that display producer, batch, hub, and manufacturing date details transparently.
Retail and e-commerce should face regular checks with simple pass–fail dashboards funded by a small traceability levy, and non-compliant sellers should face proportionate penalties.
Recent pilots, such as cooperative Unique Identification (UID) seals for Alphonso mangoes in 2025, show feasibility. The upgrade in 2.0 is to make these measures standard across GI-tagged foods and products, write them into contracts, and link them to customs, intellectual property rights (IPR) cells, as well as routine lab tests.
The traceability and audit loops should align with Food Safety and Standards Authority of India norms and APEDA export testing requirements, so that pack-level QR, batch records, and residue or hygiene labs speak the same language across domestic and export channels.
Further, GI 2.0 should standardise labelling: every pack and listing should clearly display the GI mark (place and governance), the trademark (brand), and certification marks (standards), making provenance visible and compliance easy to verify.
When demand is uncertain, cash flows stall, surpluses are wasted or distress-sold, counterfeits fill gaps, audits fail because batches are not scheduled, and harvest pressure shifts to the wrong times and places.
GI 2.0 should make demand predictable through multi-year agreements by identifying the priority buyers inside the food system — hotels, restaurants and catering, premium retail, e-commerce GI shelves, corporate food gifting, railways and airlines catering, duty-free food sections, and public sector undertakings / Canteen Stores Department canteens where eligible.
Placing pre-agreed orders in set windows ensures that the volumes and timing of product orders are known. This can lock in stable cash flows and confident planning for harvest and processing, while safeguarding community rights and ecological limits.
Annual summary briefs — covering producer earnings, payment speed, safety and compliance results, action on counterfeits, and institutional uptake — from existing records can give buyers, lenders, and regulators quick confidence and grow institutional demand.
GI 2.0 should treat the label as a living system, not a sticker. Branding can guide market choice with common sense: Distinctive, reliable products go to buyers who value them most, while other lines grow steadily in domestic markets without straining people or places.
Authenticity stays easy to verify and stories stay honest, so trust travels with every pack.
Framed this way, the GI becomes a transformative tool that moves more value to the first mile, safeguards ecology, fosters sustainability and builds India’s food reputation in kitchens, markets and memories.
Manisha Mallick is a climate adaptation researcher and PhD scholar at the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.