Moving to weed out archaic laws, government has identified at least 323 Acts to be repealed and bills in this regard would be pushed during the next session of Parliament. It is also working to junk 700 Appropriation Acts passed by Parliament over the years, which have no relevance anymore as they have one-time use of enabling withdrawal of funds by the government. "While a bill is pending in Parliament to repeal 32 amendment Acts and four principal Acts, we plan to bring another bill to repeal 287 similar Acts," Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters here.
The bill introduced in Lok Sabha during the Budget session to repeal a total of 36 Acts is now with a Parliamentary Standing Committee which is expected to give its report ahead of the Winter session likely to begin in November. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, soon after taking over in May, had identified repeal of "archaic" laws and rules as one of his priorities. During his address at Madison Square Garden in New York yesterday, he again emphasised on this.
The Law Ministry, based on the recommendation of the Law Commission, is also planning to carry out "legal scavenging" to repeal 700 Appropriation Acts which remain on statute books though they have lost relevance. "We are consulting the Finance Ministry. I have asked my department to take a considered legal view on repealing these Appropriation Acts," Prasad said. The Law Commission has said that repealing Appropriation Acts whose terms have ended will in no way cause any negative impact on actions that were validly taken under these Acts.
This itself would result in the repeal of more than 700 laws, the law panel had said. This is the first time since 2001 that such an exercise is being undertaken by the Law Ministry. While the Law Ministry had mandated the Law Commission to recommend laws that can be repealed, Modi had last month constituted a separate committee to identify "obsolete" laws which, he believes, hamper governance by creating "avoidable confusion".
