Bill introduced in LS to send 71 laws to the chopping board

A bill to repeal 71 laws which have outlived their utility in the statute books was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Monday. While 65 of the bills are amendment Acts, which were brought to tweak existing laws, six are principal laws that have become outdated.

At least one law, proposed to be repealed, is of the British era — The Indian Tramways Act of 1886. The law was brought to facilitate the construction and to regulate the working of tramways in British India.

The proposed repeal and amendment Bill is not aimed at striking off colonial laws but to remove Acts which have outlived their utility. “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,” an official explained.

So far, 1,562 old archaic laws have been repealed. Once the proposed Bill gets Parliament’s nod, the total number of laws to be repealed will stand at 1,633. Since May 2014, the Modi Government has been consistently repealing colonial-era, archaic and obsolete laws to declutter statute books.

Successive Union law ministers have maintained that obsolete laws are impediments in the normal life of common people and do not have relevance in the present time, nor deserve to remain in the statute books. Clause 4 of the Bill contains a precautionary provision which it is usual to include in a Bill of this kind.

It states that the repeal by the proposed Act of any enactment will not affect any other enactment in which the repealed enactment has been applied, incorporated or referred to.