The Union Cabinet on Friday approved a new Bill to repeal 71 laws that officials say have outlived their relevance. Of these, 65 are amendments to principal Acts, while the remaining six are standalone principal laws. According to officials, at least one of the laws proposed for repeal dates back to the British era.
Clarifying the purpose of the move, an official said the Bill is not specifically targeted at removing colonial-era legislations but is focused on discarding laws that no longer serve any practical purpose. “Once an amendment is passed by Parliament, it automatically gets absorbed into the principal Act. Its standalone use ends at that point, but it still remains on paper, adding unnecessary clutter to the statute books and causing confusion,” the official explained.
So far, the government has scrapped 1,562 old and archaic laws. With Parliament’s approval of the newly proposed repeal Bill, the total number of abolished laws will rise to 1,633.
Since May 2014, the Modi government has consistently worked toward eliminating obsolete, outdated and colonial-era laws to streamline governance. Successive Union law ministers have repeatedly stressed that such laws hinder the daily lives of ordinary citizens and hold no relevance in contemporary times, making their presence in the statute books unnecessary.