Government to weed out over 1,000 archaic laws

NEW DELHI: More than a thousand archaic laws are likely to be part of the obsolete laws bill being prepared by the law ministry to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament seeking their repeal. Some of these had lost relevance immediately after Independence and many appropriation and repeal acts became redundant after notification of provisions in the principal acts.

The Law Commission has been of the opinion that at least 350 laws need to be immediately revoked. It has already identified at least 200 such obsolete acts so far. The commission is likely to submit its second report to the law ministry on Tuesday recommending repeal of at least 113 laws.

Earlier, the commission had suggested deleting 72 such archaic laws. The commission is yet to submit its final report which may carry over 150 outdated laws that need to be removed from the statute books.

The law ministry too has identified at least 287 amending and appropriation acts that remain in the statute books even after their provisions were incorporated in the principal acts. These are to be deleted too.

While the law ministry is preparing a comprehensive bill, a prime minister-appointed panel is looking into all such recommendations, even those made during the previous governments, to put them together and incorporate them in the bill. All these recommendations will be vetted by a two-member committee appointed by the PM in August which is to submit its final report within three months.

A committee appointed during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998 had recommended repeal of 1,382 Acts out of which only 415 have been repealed so far. PM Narendra Modi has now tasked the new committee for a focused and result-oriented exercise to systematically weed out archaic laws and rules.

The committee will also examine acts and rules which may have become obsolete over the last 10 to 15 years.