The Great Repeal

The plan

1. AI Law Review Office (day 1). A Cabinet resolution creates one office shared by the Legislative Department, the Law Commission and NITI Aayog. It is led by a named Chief Law Reviewer, a mission head of cabinet-minister rank who reports to the Prime Minister (Chapter 12).

2. Review everything in 30 days. AI reads every central Act, rule, regulation, circular, master direction, guideline, SOP, FAQ and compliance item. It tags each provision in one of four buckets: repeal, merge (into one code per sector), jail-to-fine, or keep. Each tag cites the exact section and gives a one-line reason. Two independent lawyers check every flag. Every tag is published on a public tracker within 24 hours, and every item gets at least 14 days of public comment.

3. A closed protected list. These are never in scope:

   • the Constitution;
   • the criminal codes (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam);
   • the Indian Contract Act;
   • laws that protect fundamental rights and personal safety, such as the RTI Act, POCSO and the atrocity offences, which are kept and extended to protect every citizen equally under the Equal Opportunity Act (Chapter 23);
   • national security laws;
   • the tax laws that remain: the bank transaction tax, property tax, GST with its fixed per-unit levies, and the Customs Act that carries the single 5% import duty (Chapters 1 and 7). The Income-tax Act and the stamp duty and registration-fee laws are repealed under Chapter 1 and count toward the cut. The list is a named schedule capped at 5% of the total stock. Adding anything to it needs a joint committee report and a vote of both Houses.

4. One Great Repeal Act, one session, within 90 days. One omnibus Bill carries the whole list in four schedules:

   • Schedule A: Acts and rules repealed outright.
   • Schedule B: Acts merged into about 40 sector codes.
   • Schedule C: jail clauses turned into civil fines, with a warning first for a first lapse, as in Jan Vishwas.
   • Schedule D: regulator regulations and circulars withdrawn. Each regulator (RBI, SEBI and others) withdraws its listed items within 30 days, or the Act repeals them itself on day 31.
   • Target: 90% of non-protected Acts, compliance items and jail clauses removed, counted three ways from the day-30 baseline and certified by the CAG.

5. A sunset on day 365 for the rest. Every non-protected law that is not repealed is listed in a published sunset schedule. Each one lapses on day 365 unless Parliament re-enacts it, after review, in one Laws Continuance Act.

6. A 10-year sunset on every law. From day 366, every central Act, rule and regulation, old and new, lapses 10 years after it was last enacted or renewed unless Parliament (for rules, the issuing authority with Parliament's approval) renews it. The Constitution is outside the rule.

   • Staggered dates: laws re-enacted in the Laws Continuance Act get sunset dates spread across years 2 to 11, about a tenth each year, so review is a steady annual habit, never a cliff.
   • Review before renewal: a joint parliamentary committee reviews each law 12 months before its date, publishes what it costs, what it achieved and public comments, and recommends renew, amend or let lapse.
   • Protected laws: the criminal codes, rights and safety laws and national security laws on the protected list also carry the 10-year date, but Parliament holds a renewal vote; if the vote is late, the law runs on for at most 1 year.
   • States adopt the same rule in their own Great Repeal Acts.

7. One-in-one-out for the future. Every new law or rule must remove an equal or larger compliance load. The rule starts on day 366. The new duties this book itself creates in year 1, such as pollution sensors, open books for not-for-profits and the feed-design rule, are counted against the Great Repeal Act's cut, which removes far more than they add.

8. Every law looks forward. A new constitutional clause (Article 20(4), Chapter 28) provides that no civil, tax or regulatory law, rule or notification imposes a duty, tax or liability for any period before the day it is made. Clarificatory amendments that add a burden count as new law. One narrow exception covers blatant abuse:

   • What counts: an arrangement whose main purpose is to defeat the stated purpose of a law, in the sense of today's General Anti-Avoidance Rule, whose test the Great Repeal Act keeps as a standalone rule when the Income-tax Act is repealed (Chapter 1).
   • Who decides: an Anti-Abuse Tribunal of three retired High Court or Supreme Court judges, picked by lot from a standing panel, never the tax department or a ministry.
   • The bar: clear and convincing evidence, with the burden on the government; a decision within 6 months; one appeal to the Supreme Court within 30 days.
   • The reach: back to the date the closure was publicly announced (in a Budget speech or a Gazette notice), never earlier; only the gain from the scheme is recovered, with no penalty, no interest and no prosecution for the past.
   • Never for revenue: the exception cannot be used in any Finance Act, cannot be counted in any revenue estimate, and every finding is published in full with reasons.
   • Good faith protected: anyone who followed the law and published official guidance or a binding advance ruling is fully protected.

9. A single register. Any instrument that imposes a duty and is not listed on the public compliance register within 90 days of issue cannot be enforced. Emergency instruments are listed automatically when notified in the Gazette.

10. States join on the same model. Each state passes its own Great Repeal Act using the same tracker and the same two-lawyer check. The Centre pays ₹5 lakh per state compliance item removed, CAG-audited and capped at ₹1,000 crore a year (Chapter 28 covers the wider move to one country, one law).

11. How the work is bought. The Office publishes the tagging spec and a 1,000-provision test set. Any Indian AI firm, startup or established, whose model passes with an error rate of 2% or less is certified and paid a fixed price per verified provision (How the government buys). At least two certified models tag every provision. A model that fails an audit is de-certified within 7 days. Prompts, test sets and outputs are public. The models run on servers in India and look up the actual section before answering.

Cost and return

• State grants: up to ₹1,000 crore a year, paid from the Centre's existing discretionary grants under Article 282, so nothing is added to the Chapter 1 balance.
• Savings (estimate): 1 crore formal businesses × ₹50,000 a year saved on filings and consultants = ₹50,000 crore a year. That is about 290 times the ₹170 crore cost (₹50,000 ÷ ₹170 ≈ 294).
• Wider gains: fewer jail clauses means fewer petty cases in magistrate courts (Chapter 6). Compliance staff move to productive work, and legal-tech firms build on the open legal dataset.

Timeline

First 30 days:

• Day 1: the Office is set up by Cabinet resolution, the Chief Law Reviewer is named, and the public tracker and comment portal open.
• Days 1 to 14: AI tags every central instrument. Each tag is public within 24 hours.
• Days 3 to 25: two lawyers check every flag.
• Days 1 to 30: public comment runs alongside, at least 14 days for each item.
• Day 30: the full list and the baseline count are published with reasons, and the draft Great Repeal Bill is generated from them.

Within 1 year:

• Day 31: ministries withdraw every listed circular, notification and executive rule by order. No Act is needed for these.
• Day 35: the Bill is introduced in a special session (the President summons Parliament under Article 85). A joint committee of both Houses reports within 30 days and debates by schedule, not line by line.
• By day 90: the Great Repeal Act is passed. If the Rajya Sabha rejects it, the President calls a joint sitting under Article 108.
• Months 4 to 9: the joint committee reviews every law on the sunset schedule. The Laws Continuance Bill is introduced by month 9, so two sessions are available to pass it.
• By month 11: the Laws Continuance Act is passed.
• Day 365: the sunset takes effect on everything not re-enacted.
• Day 365: at least 10 states have passed their own Great Repeal Act, and the CAG publishes the verified before-and-after count of Acts, compliance items and jail clauses.

Guardrails

• AI only flags; humans decide. Two lawyers check every flag and Parliament votes on the whole list. A model with an error rate above 2% on the public test set has its flags stopped until it is fixed.
• Every repeal names the harm the law prevented and what covers it afterwards (a general law, a civil fine or a regulator). Safety and environment rules can move to fines, but cannot simply be deleted. Laws that implement treaties (Article 253) are tagged "merge" or "keep", never plain repeal.
• Savings clause. Pending cases, rights and liabilities survive repeal (Section 6, General Clauses Act 1897). Licences, registrations and contracts made under a repealed law stay valid.
• Rules continue until replaced. Rules, appointments and notices under a merged law continue under the new code for up to 1 year, until replaced (Section 24, General Clauses Act).
• Nothing gets stricter. The Act only removes or softens duties. Every change is shown by sector on the tracker at least 14 days before the vote.
• 6-month revival window. A provision repealed by mistake is revived by Gazette notification within 7 days of a verified report, in its exact text as on repeal day. The notification is laid before both Houses within 7 days and lapses after 6 months unless Parliament approves it.
• Forward-only, audited: the Law Ministry certifies on every Bill and rule that it has no backward effect; any backward clause is void unless it sits within the anti-abuse exception, and the CAG reports every year on each use of the exception.
• Sunset calendar: every law's sunset date is published on the compliance register; the list for each year is published 2 years ahead, and a law cannot lapse without its 12-month review having been published.
• Regulatory-gap hotline (portal and phone, 24×7). Every report is verified within 72 hours, and every report and outcome is published.
• The count is audited. The baseline is published on day 30, the CAG certifies the result on day 365, and every item kept carries a published reason.

Limits to know

No Parliament can bind the next one, so the sunset rule and one-in-one-out last only while Parliament keeps them; writing both into the Act and reporting on them every year makes reversal visible. Most business laws in force on the ground are state laws, so each state must pass its own Act; the per-item grant and a public state ranking give them the reason to do it.

Sources: Deccan Herald: what is retrospective tax and why the Centre buried it · TeamLease RegTech: Jailed for Doing Business · ORF: Jailed for Doing Business · Repealing and Amending Act 2025, Drishti IAS · Repealing and Amending Act 2025, PIB · Rajya Sabha passes Jan Vishwas Bill 2026, All India Radio · Jan Vishwas Bill 2026, PRS · UAE Regulatory Intelligence Office, Mondaq · South Korea's regulatory reform, Brookings · UK retained EU law sunset dropped, about 600 laws revoked, Pinsent Masons · Australia's Repeal Day 2014, Mining Weekly · Australia: Legislation Act 2003, sunsetting after 10 years · Sardar Inder Singh v State of Rajasthan (1957), Legal Authority