Cabinet nod to repeal 71 laws that outlived utility; most are amendment laws

The Union Cabinet on Friday cleared a Bill to repeal 71 laws which have outlived their utility in the statute books, officials said.

Out of the 71 laws, 65 are amendments to principal Acts and six are principal laws.

At least one law proposed to be repealed is of the British era, the officials said.

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

“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So far, 1,562 old archaic laws have been repealed.

Once the proposed Bill gets Parliament’s nod, the total number of laws to get repealed will stand at 1,633.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.