Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the Director Generals of Police conference in 2024, suggested replacing “danda with data” so India can place “citizens, dignity and justice first” through jan vishwas (trusting citizens). Since then, the policy project to review unjust jail prescriptions has articulated the Jan Vishwas Siddhant (principles), passed the Jan Vishwas Bill, notified the labour codes, identified obsolete laws, and amended the Companies Act. This combined interrogation of jail provisions across 950-plus laws represents the world’s largest decriminalisation of compliance — more than 12,500 across citizens and enterprises.
Should India be the only country to make ticketless travel on trains a jailable offence? Should cattle straying onto private land, publishers failing to deposit books with government libraries, court fee defaults, unpaid electricity bills, statistical reporting, and drying clothes in public view attract imprisonment? Should the law prescribe jail for employers who do not have their canteen within 15 m of the latrine, who do not have taps conveniently placed, who do not have a spittoon, who do not meet the canteen committee, and who do not keep physical records within 3 km of the factory? Should the sale of cosmetics be subject to the same jail provisions as medicines? Should the first offence of driving above the speed limit be jailable? Thankfully, these are all now gone. But our 5-crore case backlog in courts is unsurprising; one act of policy irrationality — prescribing jail for cheque bouncing — accounts for 43 lakh cases.
The importance of Jan Vishwas requires recognising that a few jail provisions in laws can cascade into thousands of compliance requirements with criminal consequences, because laws passed by Parliament authorise the government to draft and notify rules and regulations. In constitutional theory, elected legislators deeply interrogate any jail provision (the most frequently encountered manifestation of the state’s monopoly on violence). But in practice, the unelected bureaucracy multiplies compliance obligations with jail penalties through rules. For example, 8,500-plus compliance obligations with jail penalties nationwide arose from a single jail provision in the recently repealed Central Factories Act.
Criminalisation is amplified by the 21 instruments invented by the administrative state (notifications, public notices, guidelines, circulars, orders, policies, directions, guidance notes, schemes, SOPs, etc.) to create 41 unique types of compliances (licences, displays, registers, filings, reporting, certification, payments, committees, inspections, meetings, notices, standard processes, etc.). For example, the poultry farm guidelines of 2021 use one jail provision of the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986 to create more than 20 criminal consequences, including for not having a tyre dip for every vehicle, not protecting manure from runoff water, and not maintaining a register for every chick moving through the process.
Jail is an essential tool for protecting the rule of law. But it’s a deterrent only if cases are filed (Indian Railways only filed eight cases for putting ticketless passengers in jail last year out of their 741 crore travellers; I bet there are eight such offenders on every Indian train) and prosecutions are obtained (not a single person in independent India has gone to jail under the law that prescribes imprisonment for making a gamcha on a power loom; I bet that handlooms account for less than 10 per cent of those sold). For too long, threatening jail time has been part habit, part intention, and part malice; cutting enabling provisions reinforces our constitutional morality that liberty should not be casually curtailed.
The argument that Jan Vishwas doesn’t help because people aren’t in jail for the decriminalised offences is arrogant and ignorant. Unenforced jail provisions are toxic because they breed inequality (they are a thorn in the flesh of the powerful or wealthy but a dagger in the heart for the unconnected and poor), informality (a sense of humour about the rule of law), and corruption (transmission losses between how the law is written, interpreted and enforced). The Vishnu Sahasranamam anticipated the corruption possibilities; Saha-srarchi sapta-jihvah saptai-dha sapta-vahanah, Amoorti ranagho chintyo bhaya-krudbhaya-nashanah (amateur translation: Fear is created so it can be taken away). The inequality possibilities were identified by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, who said, “Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime.” And the informality consequences of regulatory cholesterol are that only 10 lakh of our 7 crore enterprises pay social security, and we rank 128th in per capita GDP.
The decriminalisation vector of the broader Jan Vishwas project had three phases. The first — and quiet hero — was the adoption of principles guiding which offences to decriminalise; whether the provision involved procedural compliance, omnibus provisions, potential for serious harm, malicious intent, externalities, cases filed and prosecuted, punishment proportionality, coverage under other laws, or whether civil penalties are more appropriate. The second phase compiled an inventory of such provisions, and the third phase applied these principles to the inventory.
Decriminalisation is hardly over. Some ministries have retained “personal” jail clauses for offences covered by the BNS, such as impersonation of a civil servant, obstruction of a civil servant from performing duties, and filing a false document. But Jan Vishwas is inspiring because it shows that ideas matter (research by Rishi Agrawal and Gautam Chikermane and Vidhi Legal), that the state can learn (the difference between Jan Vishwas 1.0 and 2.0 is principles-based reform), and that the state can reimagine itself (decriminalising is more than tidying up books; it is a conscious choice to step back).
In the 1940s, US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter counselled Benegal Narsing Rau that India’s constitution would be better off by substituting “due process” with “procedure established by law”. This wedge between niti (policy) and nyaya (justice) created excessive criminalisation. The best counter to power’s natural tendency to expand is voluntary restraint. In a system that equates power with control, this is a quiet but meaningful shift. By prioritising nyaya over niti, the state is not stepping away; it is adjusting its grip. Now onto the next four phases of Jan Vishwas: Digitisation, deregulation, a single source of truth for laws and rules, and replication by chief ministers.
The writer is co-founder of Teamlease Services and co-author of Made in India
