New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Friday approved a Bill that seeks to repeal 71 laws that officials say are no longer relevant. Of these, 65 are amendment Acts and six are principal laws. According to officials, at least one of the laws proposed for repeal dates back to the British period.
An official clarified that the objective is not specifically to target colonial legislation but to streamline the statute books.
“Once an amendment is passed by Parliament, it gets subsumed in the principal law. It then only clutters the statute books. Its use has ended but it still exists, creating confusion,” the official said.
The government has so far removed 1,562 archaic laws. With Parliament’s approval of the new repeal and amendment Bill, the total number of scrapped laws will rise to 1,633.
Since May 2014, the Modi government has undertaken a sustained effort to discard colonial-era, obsolete and outdated legal provisions to simplify the legal framework. Union law ministers over the years have stated that such redundant laws hinder the routine functioning of citizens and no longer serve any purpose in contemporary governance.