Time to wield the broom

The law is an ass -- and sometimes a very old ass at that. The Indian statute books are replete with prohibitions and prescriptions of ev...

The law is an ass 8212; and sometimes a very old ass at that. The Indian statute books are replete with prohibitions and prescriptions of every description which have long lost any relevance they may once have had to the lives of the country8217;s citizens. Many of these regulatory instruments are observed more in the breach of course. And thankfully so, otherwise every child who flies a kite today would be hauled up before the courts since flying a kite is, strictly speaking, unlawful activity.

Then there is the Fort William Act, long after Fort William has ceased to play the role it once did, and the Bengal Warehouses Act of 1838 still exists although the old warehouses don8217;t. There are, in fact, 17 wartime ordinances promulgated under British rule which still grace the books long after the wars they were promulgated for have passed into history.

Clearly, these antiquarian laws serve no useful purpose. The four-member commission set up in May to scrutinise administrative legislation has done yeoman service byholding confabulations with 45 ministries and departments and coming up with the recommendation that 1,300 of the 2,500 Central laws currently in existence be repealed forthwith. Not only did the commission demonstrate the necessary urgency by writing its report in record time, it also demonstrated a rare pragmatism.

There was the recognition that unnecessary pieces of legislation, far from helping governance, only serve to clog up and corrupt the administrative and judicial processes besides causing untold harassment to ordinary people. The fact that there are at present some 28 million cases pending before the courts reveals how unwieldy the whole legal regime has come to be.

In some instances, laws promulgated decades ago seem to have lost their teeth or there is an unnecessary duplication of enactments. For instance, under Section 272 of the IPC a person convicted of a food adulteration offence is only liable to a fine of Rs 1,000 and a three-month jail term at worst.

Under the Prevention of FoodAdulteration Act, on the other hand, the same criminal could be landed with life imprisonment. For starters, the commission has suggested three important measures to expedite this process of pruning. One, that the 1,300 laws found redundant must be repealed through a single Act of Parliament. Second, that all pre-Constitution laws must be reviewed for their relevance.

Finally, laws must be provided with sunset provisions which render them automatically infructuous after a specified period. Clearly, wielding the broom is not going to be easy and the Law Commission by itself may not be equipped to handle the job singlehanded. It is therefore crucial to recognise the complexity and urgency of the task and create the necessary systems to achieve it. Each ministry must now set up its own group of experts to vet the application of the laws that govern its functioning and come up with redrafted legislation. At the very least, this will ensure that before India enters a new century, it would have weeded out theunnecessary legislative shackles of the previous one.