JOIN USIndia’s statute books are cluttered with many obsolete and irrelevant laws which should have been retired long ago. It was decided last month to repeal 36 of them and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced that more of them would be scrapped later. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked various ministries to identify such laws and now he has constituted a committee to examine the recommendations of an earlier panel which had gone into the matter. The Law Commission had also suggested that many archaic laws which continued to burden the system needed to be weeded out. An exercise conducted some years ago had shortlisted 1382 of them. About 100 laws had been repealed between 1950 and 2001. The A B Vajpayee government had shredded about 400 of them. The UPA government had also planned to continue the process but not much was done during the last two terms of the Lok Sabha. There is the need for a purposeful effort to address the task.
Some of the laws are of colonial vintage and it is ridiculous to keep them alive. There are legal provisions whose origin can be traced to 1861 but are still valid. One law mandates that all decisions of Indian provincial courts may be reviewed by the British monarch. Another demands that any treasure found which is worth more than Rs 10 should be reported to the district collector. There are many laws which were made to deal with the specific needs which arose after the Partition but have no relevance now. There are cases where some recently enacted legislations are at variance with existing old laws. This creates confusion and may make the new law ineffective in application.
A guillotining of archaic and unnecessary laws might ensure that there are no conflicting interpretations of law on the same subject. Even the same provision in the same law is sometimes interpreted differently. Two laws on the same subject can make things worse. There is danger of harassment also because a little known law can be mischievously invoked to create inconvenience. Even otherwise, a simple and compact body of laws is best for comprehension and easy for citizens to follow and the government to enforce. The government plans to introduce legislation for scrapping unnecessary laws in the next session of parliament. But the review and repeal of old laws should be a continuous process and it will keep the statute book modern, lean and more meaningful.