Manufacture, Sale or Storage of Adulterated Products: Punishment under Section 90

Adulteration is the oldest consumer crime, the product corrupted for profit, and Section 90 punishes its whole chain, manufacture for sale, storing, selling, distributing and importing, on a scale graded by the harm the product caused: fine-level where no one was hurt, and seven years to life where the adulterated product killed. This note examines the definitions, the four grades, the cognizability and licence consequences, and the section's relationship with food and drug law.

1. The Definitions and the Conduct

• Adulterant (Section 2(3)): any material, including extraneous matter, which is employed or used for making a product unsafe, the water in the milk, the industrial dye in the spice, the substituted solvent, with 'unsafe' doing the legal work: the adulteration the section punishes is the kind that endangers.
• The conduct: manufacturing for sale, storing, selling, distributing or importing an adulterated product, the whole commercial chain, so the warehouse and the importer stand with the maker; private, non-commercial possession is not the target.
• The product frame: 'product' carries its Section 2(33) width, foods, medicines, fuels, cosmetics, inputs, any article with intrinsic value in trade, overlapping the special statutes (food, drugs) whose regimes run alongside.

2. The Four Grades of Punishment

• Harm as the measure: the section grades by result, not by intention: the same act of adulteration is a six-month wrong or a life-imprisonment crime according to what the product did, strict grading that places the risk of the outcome on the adulterator.
• Grievous hurt: carries its general criminal-law meaning (the penal code's catalogue, fractures, permanent impairment, endangering injuries), the bridge between the one-year and seven-year grades.
• Cognizable and non-bailable: the offences in the two aggravated grades, grievous hurt and death, are cognizable and non-bailable: police may register and arrest without warrant, and bail is the court's discretion, not the accused's right.
• Licence consequences: on first conviction, the court may suspend any licence issued to the person under any law for up to two years; on second or subsequent conviction, cancel it, the trade that adulterates can be taken away.

3. The Section Beside the Special Statutes, and the Civil Track

Adulteration is also the territory of the food-safety law (the FSS Act's unsafe-food offences, with its own graded imprisonment rising to life where unsafe food kills) and the drugs law (adulterated and not-of-standard-quality drugs), each with dedicated analysts, procedures and courts. Section 90 does not displace them, the Act is in addition to other laws (Section 100), and prosecution policy ordinarily routes food and drug adulteration through their special regimes, with Section 90 covering the products those statutes do not reach and supplying the consumer statute's own sanction where invoked; the double-jeopardy discipline governs where the same facts could be charged under more than one law. On the civil side, the same adulterated product grounds the consumer's remedies without any conviction: the defect complaint (adulteration is the classic quality defect), the unfair trade practice of knowingly selling non-compliant goods, the product-liability action for the injury with its strict Section 84 bases, and the CCPA's recall power for the dangerous batch, the prosecution punishes, while the civil track compensates and clears the market.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• Spurious goods under Section 91 (Topic 92): the counterfeit counterpart
• Offences and penalties complete notes (Topic 88): the chapter in one place
• Defect in goods (Topic 13) and product liability (Topic 52): the civil track beside the prosecution
• CCPA recall powers (Topic 27): clearing the dangerous batch from the market