PM sets up committee to identify 'obsolete' laws

Moving ahead with his resolve to weed out archaic rules and procedures as part of reforms process, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today set up a committee to identify "obsolete" laws which he believes hamper governance by creating "avoidable confusion".

The committee will submit its report in three months and on the basis of its recommendations a bill will be introduced in Parliament in the winter session of parliament.

The committee will examine "Acts and Rules which may have become obsolete within the last 10 to 15 years".

The decision to set up the committee is a follow-up to Modi's first major statement after becoming Prime Minister that archaic laws hamper governance and need to be identified and weeded out.

"The Prime Minister has approved the constitution of a Committee to carry out a review to identify obsolete laws," a PMO statement said here today.

"The newly-constituted Committee will examine all Acts recommended to be repealed by the Committee on Review of Administrative Laws", which had been appointed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998," it added.

The PMO said Modi has expressed concern that out of the 1382 Acts recommended for repeal by that Committee, only 415 have been repealed so far.

"He (Modi) has called for a focused and result-oriented exercise to systematically weed out archaic laws and rules," the statement said.

The committee will submit its report within three months, so that a comprehensive Bill can be introduced in the sinter session of Parliament, based on its recommendations, it added. The Committee will be chaired by R. Ramanujam, Secretary in the PMO. V.K. Bhasin, former Secretary, Legislative Department, will be its other member.

Modi, while laying thrust on speedy delivery systems, had in his first meeting with all Secretaries of the union government said archaic rules and procedures should be done away with. "There may be rules and processes which have become outdated and instead of serving the process of governance, they are leading to avoidable confusion", he had told the bureaucrats on June 4 and stressed the need to "identify and do away with such archaic rules and procedures".