We’re grateful to Dr. Mahesh for this collaboration. He has spent more than 25 years studying the immunological landscape of allergic disease in India — running large-scale epidemiological studies, leading India’s arm of the EU-funded EuroPrevall consortium on food allergy prevalence, and publishing over 150 papers. If someone has spent a career seriously thinking about what food allergy means on Indian soil, it is him. Having that depth of clinical knowledge inform this report made it substantially more honest.

Read the report →

The central question was calibration: which food allergens actually matter for an Indian population, and what does the evidence say about each one?

To answer that, we reviewed the clinical and epidemiological literature, examined the molecular characterisation of India-specific allergens, and worked through the FSSAI mandatory declaration framework — including where it aligns with Indian evidence and where it was inherited from international frameworks built on different populations. Understanding the shape of the current list required understanding how it was made.

We close with an extended allergen recognition list for Indian food systems, with seventeen foods placed across two evidence tiers and three foods flagged where the current data cannot yet support a placement. That list is the output the whole review was building toward.

iSRL-2026-04-R-Allergen is published under CC BY 4.0 on Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19877561

The grant supports iSRL’s ongoing work on the Indian Food Informatics Data (IFID) project — a deterministic ingredient identity substrate for India’s packaged food ecosystem, grounded in FSSAI regulations, ITC-HS nomenclature, and Indian judicial reasoning. IFID is published under CC BY 4.0 as an open research commons, designed to be freely used, extended, and built upon.

We are sincerely grateful to Thejesh GN for organising this micro-grant programme and to the FOSS United Foundation for their significant support. The Nagarathna Memorial Grant recognises work at the intersection of public data infrastructure and open-source values — a space iSRL is committed to building in.

Read more about the 2026 grant results.