Sanjeev Sanyal is working on THIS big reform: ‘Every citizen should have a fair chance of…’

Sanjeev Sanyal, economist and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s key advisor, on Wednesday opened up on the next big reform he is working on. The reform is aimed at making the country’s laws and regulations easier for citizens and businesses to access and understand.

Speaking at Assocham’s India Business Reforms Summit 2026, the economist said one of the biggest inefficiencies in India’s system was that people were expected to comply with laws and regulations even though the latest versions were often unclear or difficult to find.

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“Here is a reform that I want to propose, and I’ve been working on. Essentially, one of the major inefficiencies of our system is that we have all these rules and regulations, but nobody knows what the latest version of it is at any time,” Sanyal said.

“Now, you go to any court, or you go to any government body, they will tell you that not knowing the law is no protection. It’s no defense to not know what the rules and regulations or laws are. But every citizen, every business should have a fair chance of finding out what the law is. And that is entirely unclear in this country,” added. 

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Sanyal, who is a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, said even basic rules, such as traffic fines, were not always easily accessible. “Till I made a fuss about it, it was not possible in Delhi to find out what is the fine, for say, missing a red light. So how are we supposed to follow laws if we don’t know where they are?”

To address the issue, Sanyal said he was pushing for a proposed “Transparency of Rules Act”. “I am trying to push for something called the Transparency of Rules Act, which will state that all the rules and regulations that a citizen is supposed to follow should be clearly in one place on the website.”

He said the proposal would establish that whatever version of the law appears on the official website at a given time would be treated as the applicable law. “If for whatever reason, the wrong law has been updated till it is changed, that is the law that applies.”

The noted economist illustrated the point with a hypothetical example. “If the law by mistake is that to get a driving license, I need to learn Bharat Natyam, and I have learned Bharat Natyam, then you have to give me my driving license till you change the law.”

He said every change should also carry a timestamp so citizens know exactly when a rule came into force. “All changes on that website have to be timestamped so that I know that at 12:00 on the 15th of May 2025, this was the law. Even if it has changed at 1:00, I’m not expected to have followed it because you didn’t tell me to follow it. I should have a fair chance of knowing what the law is.”

Sanyal, who has been cleaning up the system for ease of doing business, also criticised India’s reliance on multiple circulars and amendments spread across different documents. He said the law should be presented to people as a whole, not as a series of circulars. “That circular business belongs to the print era. But today, you just have to amend the law. It’s on a website. These are the three elements of what I have been pushing for a while,” he added.

Acknowledging that implementing such a reform would require overcoming institutional resistance, he said he’ll have to convince a lot of people. “It will cost almost no money to do, but will require public pressure to get it done. Because it will remove from the bureaucracy a major power.”