Don‘t need 47 labour laws at the Centre, says Ajay Dua

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set up a committee to identify ‘obsolete laws’ so that the government can weed out archaic rules. The committee, chaired by R Ramanujam, secretary in the prime minister's office will submit its report within 3 months so that a comprehensive bill can be introduced in the winter session of parliament. The newly constituted panel will examine recommendations that had been made by a similar committee during the Vajpayee government's tenure. A press release said the prime minister has expressed concern that out of the 1382 acts recommended for repeal by that committee, only 415 have been repealed so far.To throw more light on what those archaic laws are CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan interviewed former DIPP Secretary, Ajay Dua.

Below is the transcript his interview on CNBC-TV18Q: Not much by way of clarity on which potential laws could be repealed or could be reviewed by this committee whether they are talking essentially about improving business confidence and so on and so forth which has been key theme as far as this government is concerned, but in your assessment if I were to look at it from a business confidence point of view top of my mind would be the Industrial Disputes Act, would it not?A: Certainly, that is one act which needs to be revisited and we have been talking about it for as long as one can remember over 20 years but in addition to that there are large number of laws. The labour law itself there are 47 of those in the central government laws and over 200 in the state governments. Similarly, if you look at the Land Acquisition Act, we may have brought about a new act last year but there are 14 acts of the central government. Central government’s different ministries operate under different rules for land acquisition. There is a separate act for the defence lands, there is a separate act for railways, there is an act for postal and transmission rules, transmission requirements etc.There are more than the central laws where the changes necessary is in the provincial law, particularly laws which are in the concurrent list of responsibility of the central and the state. If there are 47 labour laws of the central government there are over 200 laws dealing with the labour of the state governments. You just mentioned Industrial Dispute Regulation Act, there also we have been concerning ourselves with one section for so long that we are not looking at the other sections which need to be amended and what is the section which has been exciting most people, that is raising the limit for retrenchment from an establishment. As of today, it says 100 workers and what has been agreed to by the industry or what the government wants I don’t think the industry and the government want is 300 labours as threshold limit.You mentioned about the 1,300 odd acts which had been identified about 12 years ago. Since then 400 odd acts may have been repealed but probably as many new acts have been enacted. We just have 30 legislatures in our country, 29 state governments, one federal. 30 of them even if they passed five laws a year or amended five provisions in these acts you have five multiplied by 12 multiplied by 30 which equals 1,500 new laws which have come about.Q: What should the starting point be? Yes, under the Vajpayee government there was 1,300 acts that needed to be repealed were identified but if this government is now talking about putting forward a comprehensive report in three months and perhaps moving these changes in the winter session of parliament let us be realistic, what should this government go after on a priority basis?A: The central government can concern itself only with the central laws. If there are 700 or 800 of those remaining to be repealed probably that can be done by the central government by one stroke going to the parliament with a comprehensive proposal. But they may like to also add the acts like the companies act for instance. The desire may be good but it has become a very onerous responsibility.Q: The Land Acquisition Act; we have just seen a new act, we have seen a new companies act, so while we can quibble about what more needs to be done to make those acts more business friendly perhaps the effort on the part of this committee is going to be to go after archaic, obsolete laws, laws that go back to the 1800s?A: You are absolutely right, but what we need to be doing for the next three or four years is average repealing of a law a day. That means if there is five years of this government at the end of five years it should be 1,500 laws.