Reform in Practice: Alok Prasanna Kumar (Vidhi) on Decriminalizing India’s Laws

What is one area of regulation in India that should be deregulated?

So the one thing that I think India needs to deregulate is its criminal legislations. And it's not as if we need less criminal laws, we just need to decriminalize some things which should not be crimes. We shouldn't have to send people to jail for very basic things which are otherwise can be addressed through a penalty or an administrative fine.

What criminal law does is it effectively clogs up the courts. You have to follow much more detailed procedure because you're imposing such harsh penalties. And given the low rate of conviction, you're probably not even going to succeed in it being a deterrent in any real way.

So what India really needs to do is to rethink whether a criminal punishment is what is necessary to make a law enforceable. A law is enforceable in many different ways. Sometimes just the fact that it's a law is what makes people follow it.

We should not assume that people only follow laws because of the threat of punishment. So in that context, I would urge all the union and the state governments in India to reduce the number of offenses on the books, to think carefully before they penalize someone with jail or with a fine of some sort, and to think of more interesting and innovative ways to have the regular population follow the laws.