Sanjeev Sanyal calls for Transparency of Rules Act to empower citizens, businesses

New Delhi: Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, on Tuesday pitched for the enactment of a Transparency of Rules Act to make all norms, regulations and citizen-facing requirements easily accessible through a dedicated centralised portal.

The move will help promote ease of doing business and ease of living.

He said one of the major inefficiencies in the system is that while there are numerous rules and regulations, nobody knows which version is the latest.


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The proposed Act, he said, will state that all rules and regulations that citizens and businesses are supposed to follow should be clearly placed in one place on a website.

"There is a need to enact the Transparency of Rules Act (ToRA). It should have three elements that I have been pushing for a while...But it requires public pressure to do. Support me in doing this because this is an important reform that we need to do," Sanyal said here at an Assocham's India Business Reform Summit 2026.

Under this, he proposed that all laws, rules, regulations, forms, and other citizen-facing requirements should be easily accessible on a dedicated centralised portal and that of the relevant department/agency.

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Once a government agency is declared ToRA compliant, officials should not be allowed to impose rules until they are explicitly published on the agency website and unified portal.

He also said that the rules and norms placed should be presented as a whole and not as a series of endless circulars.

This is quite easily done by the Reserve Bank of India through a master circular, Sanyal said, adding that the proposed ToRA should also mandate that the portal and websites clearly time-stamp every change made.

This will help citizens know from which point in time a rule came into existence or when it was removed.

"...not knowing any law is no protection...but every citizen or business should have a fair chance to find out what the law is," he added.

He also said that though India is a services exporting country, there are no Indian Big Four consultancy firms, even though worldwide this business is dominated by Indians.

"Why...Our own professional bodies have all kinds of restrictions...We ourselves have restrictions on advertising and brand building... We do not allow branding by our own consultancies," he said.

They are mapping the entire government as there are dozens of agencies and bodies, which can be closed or merged, he added.