By Shri Piyush Goyal
For decades, India’s regulatory architecture dealt with citizens with deep mistrust, and regarded them as criminals for minor, procedural violations, or mere suspicion by a person in authority. In a refreshing change, the Modi government has made policies rooted in trust and compassion for the common man.
PM Modi has taken significant steps towards improving India’s legislative landscape to support citizens and businesses, simplify compliances, and acknowledge the practical difficulties businesses face. Whether through reducing compliance burdens, digitisation, or single-window clearances, the broader shift has been towards making governance more reasonable and efficient.
The PM’s mantra of governance based on trust and compassion is clearly visible in the in the Jan Vishwas Act, 2026, and a similar law in 2023.
Citizen friendly – To create a citizen-friendly regulatory environment and encourage compliance, the new law deals with minor offences with clear principles: Warning before punishment, making penalties proportional to the severity of the offence, swift and transparent resolution, and a dynamic penalty framework with periodic revision to ensure that enforcement remains effective, relevant, and responsive over time.
This represents a major shift in regulatory approach, compliance, and enforcement in line with the PM’s view that India’s 21st-century aspirations cannot be realised through governance tools of the bygone colonial era.
The scale of the reform is unprecedented. The Jan Vishwas Act amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts administered by 23 Ministries. It decriminalises 717 provisions and rationalises another 67 to improve ease of living. It is the largest decriminalisation exercise in independent India’s legislative history.
It rationalises more than 1,000 offences, removes outdated and redundant provisions, omits obsolete colonial-era offences, and strengthens adjudication and appeal mechanisms outside criminal courts.
Welcome Changes – Earlier, anybody could be imprisoned for three months for merely being present in a house, building, or vehicle between sunset and sunrise without a “satisfactory explanation”. This reflected the colonial-era, suspicion-based approach that treated ordinary movement as potentially criminal. The reform abolishes this offence altogether, aligning the law with modern principles.
Under the previous framework, if a person’s driving license expired, the next day a driver faced criminal charges for being on the road. The new law provides a 30-day grace period.
Consider also a small manufacturer who fails to update registration details under the Apprentices Act. Earlier, this was a criminal lapse but now strong action is allowed only for repeated non-compliance.
Similarly, a procedural lapse in documentation by a mining company could earlier lead to imprisonment. Today, such cases attract civil penalties. Criminal liability remains for illegal mining, fraud, wilful harm, and serious violations of public interest; not for paperwork.
12 Years of gains for all – The Jan Vishwas legislation is a symbol of PM Modi’s effort to ease life for all our citizens. This has been the key mission of PM Modi in his 12 years of service to the nation as Prime Minister, and earlier as Chief Minister of Gujarat.
Jan Vishwas 2026 builds on an important foundation. In 2023, India decriminalised 183 provisions across 42 Acts through the first Jan Vishwas Act. That effort demonstrated that decriminalisation could improve governance without weakening enforcement. The 2026 legislation expands the exercise nearly fourfold, signalling that this is not a one-time initiative but a continuing reform direction.
Larger mission – The new law is actually a part of the larger mission of PM Modi to improve the lives of Indians. In this mission, the PM has strived to provide roti, kapda aur makaan to every citizen and ensured that welfare expenditure is transferred directly to beneficiaries, unlike the days of Congress rule when the then PM Rajiv Gandhi said that only 15% of the money spent on welfare actually reached the poor.
Replacing low-value criminal provisions with administrative and monetary frameworks is a welcome move not just for the ordinary citizen, it also helps small businesses. It allows enforcement agencies to focus on serious violations rather than routine technical breaches. Courts can devote their attention to cases that genuinely require judicial intervention.
Economy and Investment – The benefits extend beyond governance. In an increasingly competitive global economy, regulatory credibility matters. For years, concerns about criminal prosecution for technical lapses were among the most frequently cited deterrents to investment. India has witnessed a 143 per cent increase in FDI between 2014 and 2025, and the trend of increasing FDI continues. Regulatory reform has been an important part of this growth. Jan Vishwas 2026 is designed to strengthen that momentum by making India a more predictable and reliable destination for investment and enterprise.
The reform also offers relief to the justice system. Many of the more than 5.5 crore pending cases, including approximately 4.9 crore in district and subordinate courts, involve minor regulatory matters, which are now decriminalised. Moving such cases to administrative adjudication is not merely a business reform, it is a judicial reform that allows courts to focus their limited time and resources on serious disputes and questions of justice.
Serious violations will continue to attract serious consequences. The law remains firm where firmness is necessary. What changes is the approach. Governance has moved from suspicion to trust, from prosecution to correction, and from fear to freedom.
(The author is Union Minister of Commerce and Industry.)
