Context:

• India’s remarkable achievement in mass democracy has not translated into mass prosperity.
• The regulatory cholesterol—the lack of transparency, consistency and trust in law enforcement—prevents entrepreneurs from combining land, labour and capital to generate productive, innovative and high-wage jobs.
• Following the decriminalisation of thousands of offences under the Jan Vishwas initiative, India must undertake three further reforms -
  • Siddhant (principles of trust),
  • Sangreh (a single source of legislative truth) and
  • Ashwasan (certainty of enforceable obligations). 

The Economic Imperative - From Employment to High-Wage Jobs:

• The challenge of mass prosperity:
  • India ranks 128th globally in per-capita GDP, despite its remarkable democratic achievements.
  • The problem is not the absolute scarcity of land, labour or capital, but their inefficient utilisation.
  • Nearly one-third of India's workforce remains trapped in employed poverty.
  • India's equity and debt-to-GDP ratios are broadly comparable to sustainable global benchmarks.
  • The central challenge is not merely creating jobs, but creating productive employment that pays higher wages.
• The India-China economic divergence:
  • China's per-capita GDP is approximately five times India's, despite the two economies being comparable in 1991.
  • The difference is not necessarily attributable to superior intelligence or work ethic, but to the institutional environment that enables enterprises to grow, innovate and compete globally.
  • Regulatory cholesterol discourages formalisation and traps workers in informal wage employment and low-productivity self-employment.

Siddhant - Establishing the Philosophy of Trust-Based Regulation:

• Six toxic regulatory mindsets:
  • Prior approval: Activities are prohibited until explicitly permitted, restricting entrepreneurial freedom.
  • Enforcing the unenforceable: Regulations are imposed without assessing the state's actual enforcement capacity.
  • Process as punishment: Excessive procedural requirements penalise even compliant citizens and businesses.
  • Compliance and instrument blind spot: Regulators focus on more than 25 categories of non-legislative administrative instruments instead of examining the overall legislative framework.
  • Writing laws for edge cases: Exceptional instances are used to justify restrictions on entire sectors, such as using drunk driving to argue against automobiles.
  • Excessive criminalisation: Imprisonment becomes ineffective when cases are rarely filed or prosecution is delayed.
• A new regulatory philosophy:
  • Jan Vishwas must institutionalise -
    • Freedom: Presume that citizens and enterprises should be free to act.
    • Necessity: Regulate only when a genuine public purpose requires intervention.
    • Proportionality: Ensure that regulatory burdens and penalties are proportionate to the harm addressed.
  • This requires intellectual, institutional and behavioural transformation among India's civil servants, numbering over 30 million.

Sangreh - A Single Source of Legislative Truth:

• The state's duty to make law knowable:
  • The principle of Ignorantia juris non excusat means that ignorance of law is no excuse.
  • However, this principle presupposes that the government makes laws accessible, understandable and publicly available.
  • Secret, scattered or unpublished obligations undermine the legitimacy of the rule of law.
• Judicial recognition of legal accessibility:
  • Harla v. State of Rajasthan (1952): Secret laws cannot bind citizens who have no knowledge of them.
  • B.K. Srinivasan v. State of Karnataka (1987): Laws must be made reasonably knowable to those they govern.
  • Viraj Impex v. Union of India (2019): Laws become operative only after proper publication and public notice.
• Global best practices - Centralised legal repositories:
  • US: Has Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations.
  • UK: legislation. gov. uk
  • European Union: EUR-Lex.
  • Singapore: Statutes Online.
  • Australia: Federal Register of Legislation.
• Sangreh as India's legal digital public infrastructure (DPI):
  • Sangreh must become the authoritative, searchable and machine-readable national platform for legal rights and obligations.
  • Its architecture would involve -
    • Institutional integration: Consolidating existing legal repositories, including physical gazettes, the e-Gazette and India Code.
    • Legal standardisation: Developing a common legal language, syntax and architecture through initiatives such as Bharat Niti Lipi.
    • Technological integration: Establishing a unified, open and API-enabled platform through DPI protocols.
  • Ministries and State governments may maintain their official repositories, while Sangreh aggregates and indexes them into a unified national view.

Ashwasan - Guaranteeing Certainty of Obligations:

• Beyond a digital repository:
  • Earlier attempts to create a single source of legal truth faced multiple challenges -
    • Fragmented institutional authority.
    • Weak technological capacity and poor design.
    • Lack of sustained political and administrative attention.
    • Resistance arising from institutional interests.
  • However, the fundamental problem was the absence of a guarantee that obligations not listed in the repository would not be enforced.
• Transparency of Rules Act (TORA):
  • The proposed law would require every enforceable legal obligation—whether arising from an Act, rule or administrative instrument—to be published on Sangreh.
  • This would ensure -
    • Legal certainty: Citizens and businesses know their compliance obligations.
    • Predictability: Enterprises can plan investments and expansion with confidence.
    • Administrative credibility: Governments become more accountable.
    • Reduced corruption: Hidden rules and discretionary enforcement become harder to sustain.
  • Sangreh would thus evolve from a repository into a legally guaranteed source of enforceable obligations.

Way Forward - Reconciliation of Liberty and the Rule of Law:

• Both (Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the Indian Constitution) advance the idea that democratic governments should expand human freedom rather than unnecessarily constrain it.
  • Adam Smith emphasised liberty, competition and the rule of law as foundations of enterprise and prosperity.
  • The Constitution derives legitimate governmental authority from the consent of the governed.
• The three interventions of Jan Vishwas reconcile these traditions by making regulation transparent, proportionate and predictable.

Conclusion:

• Together, these reforms can promote formalisation, improve labour productivity, encourage investment and create high-wage employment.
• By replacing regulatory discretion with transparent and predictable governance, India can convert its democratic strength into mass prosperity.