Jan Vishwas 2.0: Strengthening Regulatory Certainty and Ease of Doing Business

Context

A proposed reform framework for India identifies three priorities—Siddhant (trust-based governance), Sangreh (single source of legislative truth) and Ashwasan (certainty of enforceable obligations)—to reduce regulatory cholesterol and promote high-wage job creation.

Jan Vishwas: Progress So Far

1. Jan Vishwas Act, 2023: Decriminalised 183 provisions across 42 Central Acts, replacing jail terms for minor technical lapses with financial penalties or formal warnings.
2. Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2026: Amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts, including 717 provisions for decriminalisation (Ease of Doing Business) and 67 provisions to enhance Ease of Living.
3. Key Limitations: Decriminalisation reduces harsh punitive actions but does not guarantee regulatory clarity or predictable compliance enforcement.
4. Next-Stage Institutional Framework: To bridge these compliance gaps, three structural pillars—Siddhant (principles-based regulation), Sangreh (a unified regulatory repository), and Ashwasan (predictable, graded enforcement)—are being developed.

Economic Rationale for Regulatory Reform

1. Low Prosperity Level: India ranks around 128th in per-capita GDP, with nearly one-third of workers living in working poverty (employed but earning below subsistence thresholds).
2. Core Structural Bottleneck: Inefficient allocation and friction in land, labour, and capital markets severely limit the creation of high-productivity, high-wage jobs.
3. India–China Development Gap: While both nations shared comparable income levels in 1991, China’s per-capita GDP is now nearly 5x that of India, a divergence driven by differing business regulatory environments.
4. Regulatory Cholesterol: Complex, volatile, and opaque compliance requirements discourage formal corporate growth, pushing the workforce into low-productivity informal work and distress self-employment.

Siddhant: Philosophy of Trust-Based Regulation

1. Six Flawed Regulatory Mindsets:

• Prior Approval Culture: Forcing businesses to seek state permission before starting operations, choking economic enterprise.
• Unenforceable Rules: Framing regulations without considering the state’s actual administrative capacity to enforce them.
• Process as Punishment: Complex procedural red tape burdens law-abiding enterprises, turning compliance into a penalty.
• Instrument Blind Spot: Ignoring the hidden compliance load created by circulars, notifications, and executive guidelines.
• Laws for Edge Cases: Imposing restrictive regulations on an entire industry to control isolated or rare violations.
• Over-Criminalisation: Imposing jail terms for minor technical lapses, which dilutes real deterrence when enforcement is delayed.

2. Three Guiding Principles:

• Freedom: A foundational presumption of trust, assuming citizens and businesses are free to operate unless explicitly restricted.
• Necessity: Regulating only when there is a clear, genuine public interest to serve.
• Proportionality: Ensuring regulatory controls and penalties match the exact scale of harm being addressed.

3. Implementation Challenge: Requires a deep administrative mindset shift across nearly 30 million public officials to move from control to facilitation.

Sangreh: A Single Source of Legislative Truth

1. Legal Basis & Jurisprudence: Rooted in the principle Ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of law is no excuse), which requires laws to be publicly accessible. In Harla v. State of Rajasthan (1951), the SC (Supreme Court) ruled that an unpublished law cannot bind citizens.
2. Global Benchmarks: Inspired by centralized legal portals like the US Federal Register, UK’s legislation.gov.uk, EU’s EUR-Lex, and Singapore Statutes Online.
3. Proposed Architecture (Legal DPI): Envisioned as Legal Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) through a searchable, machine-readable national platform.

• Institutional Integration: Unifies the physical Gazette, e-Gazette, and the India Code repository into a single continuum.
• Legal Standardisation: Uses a standardized drafting framework, proposed as Bharat Niti Lipi, for clear legal coding.
• Technological Integration: Built as an open, API (Application Programming Interface)-enabled platform indexing Union and State laws.

Ashwasan: Certainty of Obligations

1. Need & Context: Fragmented legal databases and weak enforcement create severe uncertainty, as businesses can be penalised for unlisted administrative instructions or ambiguous rules.
2. Transparency of Rules Act (TORA): Proposed legislation stipulating that any compliance obligation (in an Act, rule, or circular) must be published on the Sangreh portal to be legally enforceable.
3. Expected Benefits:

• Legal Certainty: Provides complete clarity so citizens and businesses know their exact statutory obligations.
• Predictability: Fosters a stable regulatory climate, encouraging long-term business investment and expansion decisions.
• Accountability: Eliminates “hidden rules,” curbing administrative harassment, arbitrary enforcement, and corruption.

Way Forward for Regulatory Reforms

1. Liberty & Rule of Law: Balance economic freedom and fair competition with an accountable government operating under the rule of law.
2. Expected Outcomes: Drive formalisation of the economy, boost labour productivity, attract long-term investment, and spur high-wage job creation.
3. Key Implementation Steps:

• Enact the TORA (Transparency of Rules Act) to make rule publishing legally binding.
• Build the Sangreh platform through Centre–State cooperation (cooperative federalism).
• Systematically review all existing subordinate legislation and train public officials in trust-based regulation.

FAQs

Q1. What is “regulatory cholesterol”?
Ans. Excessive, opaque and inconsistent regulations that hinder economic activity.

Q2. What are Siddhant, Sangreh and Ashwasan?
Ans. Three proposed reforms covering trust-based regulation, a single legal repository and certainty of enforceable obligations, respectively.

Q3. What does ignorantia juris non excusat mean?
Ans. Ignorance of law is no excuse, assuming laws are publicly accessible.

Q4. What is the Transparency of Rules Act (TORA)?
Ans. A proposed law requiring all enforceable obligations to be published on Sangreh.

Q5. Why is Sangreh described as legal DPI?
Ans. Because it proposes an open, API-enabled and machine-readable platform for accessing laws.