A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF INDIA’S DECRIMINALISATION REFORM UNDER THE JAN VISHWAS (AMENDMENT OF PROVISIONS) ACT, 2026

Abstract

India’s regulatory framework has long relied on criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, for minor, technical, and procedural non-compliance—a legacy of colonial-era drafting that has contributed to judicial backlog, discouraged formalisation of businesses, and imposed disproportionate burdens on small enterprises and ordinary citizens. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2026, represents the most expansive phase of the government’s multi-stage decriminalisation programme. Building on the 2023 Act and substantially widened by the recommendations of a Select Committee, the 2026 legislation amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts administered by 23 ministries, converting 717 of them from criminal to civil or administrative liability through a graded-enforcement model of advisories, warnings, improvement notices, and escalating monetary penalties.

This paper offers the first sustained critical evaluation of the expanded 2026 Act. Drawing on responsive-regulation theory (Ayres and Braithwaite) and comparative analysis of the United Kingdom’s Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008 and Australia’s civil-penalty regimes, it examines whether the shift from punitive to trust-based, compliance-oriented enforcement genuinely advances proportionality and ease of doing business. The analysis identifies three interconnected structural gaps that qualify an otherwise theoretically grounded reform: a calibration risk arising from the largely uniform application of the graded template across sectors with markedly different public-harm profiles (most acutely in pharmaceutical regulation); a due-process gap created by the transfer of adjudicatory authority to administrative bodies without a uniformly embedded appellate or independence safeguard; and a monitoring-and-evaluation gap stemming from the absence of any statutory mechanism for structured post-implementation review. The paper argues that the long-term success of the reform depends on closing these gaps through sector-specific risk recalibration, minimum due-process guarantees, and mandatory periodic legislative review, thereby ensuring that the move from punishment to compliance does not inadvertently dilute regulatory protection in higher-risk domains.