File Photo: Parliament House (Reuters)
Carrying on with the exercise of repealing irrelevant laws clogging statute books, the government today approved a bill seeking to annul another set of 295 obsolete Acts.
The Repealing and Amending (Fourth) Bill, 2015 will be introduced in Lok Sabha for annulling 295 Acts which have been declared as redundant by respective central ministries.
The bill is one of the periodical measures by which enactments which have ceased to be in force or have become obsolete or their retention as separate Acts has become unnecessary are repealed. Such bills are also used to correct defects or flaws detected in laws.
According to the data compiled by the Legislative Department of the Law Ministry, with the passage of two similar bills in Parliament, 125 archaic laws have been repealed.
Another two bills are pending parliamentary approval.
Once these bills are cleared, another 945 laws will be repealed.
The Law Ministry has identified 1,871 more laws which have lost relevance today.
This is the first time since 2001 that such an exercise is being undertaken by the Law Ministry in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's agenda to do away with "archaic" laws which were "hindering efficient governance".
Between 1950 and 2001, over 100 Acts were repealed. A bill to repeal 758 Appropriation Acts, including Railways (Appropriation) Acts, which have lost relevance and are clogging the statute books, was introduced in Lok Sabha recently.
A large number of Appropriation Acts passed in the past several years have lost their meaning but these are still shown on statute books. Appropriation Acts are intended to operate for a limited period of time - authorising expenditures for the duration of one financial year.