Private member Bills stand at one end of the legislative process and the repeal of obsolete statutes stands at the other, and the two ends have more in common than their distance suggests. At the first end, a member of Parliament who holds no ministerial office drafts a complete law, gives notice of it, waits for a ballot to favour the notice, and hopes for time on a Friday afternoon to persuade the House to take the proposal seriously. At the second end, a government that commands the House assembles long schedules of enactments nobody has used in decades and removes them from the statute book in batches of dozens or hundreds at a time. The first exercise produces almost no law. The second exercise produces almost no change. Each is conducted in proper form, each consumes real legislative time, and each leaves the working statute book very nearly where it found it.

That symmetry is the subject of this article, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset because both exercises are usually described in terms that conceal it. The private member Bill is conventionally praised as the conscience of the House and conventionally pitied as a wasted effort. The repeal drive is conventionally announced as deregulation and conventionally measured by the height of the pile of Acts it removes. Neither description survives contact with the record. The record on private member Bills, kept by the secretariats of the two Houses and analysed by PRS Legislative Research, is that fourteen such Bills have been passed by Parliament since 1952 and that the most recent of them completed its passage in 1970. The record on repeal, kept by the Legislative Department of the Ministry of Law and Justice and stated in answers to Parliament, is that the mass repeal exercises have removed enactments that were spent, superseded or obsolete, while the statutes this series has documented as raising live questions, statutes whose mechanisms were switched off by notification or whose repeal was enacted in a Code and then left unnotified, remain exactly where they were. A reader who understands why both ends of the process are largely symbolic, and who can name the exception at each end, understands something real about how the Indian Parliament allocates its scarcest resource, which is time on the floor of the House.

The treatment that follows is built on attributed figures throughout. Private member statistics are stated with the source that published them, because the numbers are quoted loosely in public discussion and the same figure is made to carry different meanings by different speakers. Repeal statistics are stated with the instrument and the period that produced them, because a repeal count without its basis is a number about nothing. Where a figure could not be verified against a named source of standing, the article describes the position in durable terms and says so. That discipline costs some colour. It buys the only thing this subject cannot do without, which is figures a reader can repeat.

The private member Bill: what the mechanism is

A private member Bill is a Bill introduced in either House of Parliament by a member who is not a minister. The definition turns entirely on the office of the mover and on nothing else. A Bill introduced by a minister is a government Bill, drafted within the executive, vetted by the Legislative Department, approved by the Cabinet, and backed by the majority that sustains the government. A Bill introduced by any other member, whether that member sits with the ruling party, with the opposition, or with no party at all, is a private member Bill, and it travels through the House under a separate and far more constricted set of procedural arrangements than the government Bill it may resemble clause for clause. The Constitution draws no such distinction. Articles 107 to 111 prescribe how a Bill becomes an Act, and they prescribe the same stages for every Bill that is not a Money Bill. The distinction is the work of the rules of procedure of the two Houses and of the conventions that have grown around them, and it is decisive in practice precisely because the Constitution leaves the management of legislative time to those rules.

The rules of the Lok Sabha allot the last two and a half hours of the sitting on every Friday to private members’ business, and the rules of the Rajya Sabha allot a corresponding block on Friday afternoons, with the allotted time divided between private members’ Bills and private members’ resolutions in a settled rotation. A member who wishes to introduce a Bill must give one month’s notice of the intention to move for leave to introduce it, a notice period far longer than the seven days that suffices for most government Bills, and the notice must be accompanied by the text of the Bill and a statement of its objects and reasons. Because far more members give notice than the allotted Fridays can accommodate, precedence among notices is settled by ballot. The ballot, conducted under the authority of the Speaker in the Lok Sabha and the Chairman in the Rajya Sabha, determines the order in which Bills may be introduced and, for Bills that have been introduced, the order in which they may be taken up for consideration. A member whose Bill stands low in the ballot may wait through an entire session without the Bill being reached, and a Bill that is introduced but not reached for discussion simply waits, session after session, in a queue that the calendar rarely shortens.

Each House maintains a Committee on Private Members’ Bills and Resolutions, a committee of the House chaired in the Lok Sabha by the Deputy Speaker, which examines Bills after introduction, classifies them by their nature, urgency and importance into categories, and recommends the time that should be allotted for their discussion. The committee’s classification is the House’s own admission that the queue cannot be served in full. It ranks proposals so that the limited Friday hours are spent on the Bills the committee judges most significant, and in doing so it converts a formal equality among members into a managed order of access. A Bill classified in the lower category may never receive time at all, and its mover knows this when the classification is announced.

The stages after introduction are, in form, the stages every Bill must pass. There is a motion for consideration, a clause by clause examination, a motion for passing, transmission to the other House, and presentation to the President for assent under Article 111. In practice the private member Bill almost always ends at the first of these stages, and it ends in a manner peculiar to itself. When a Bill is taken up for consideration and debated, the minister in charge of the subject replies at the end of the debate, and the reply conventionally contains an assurance that the government will examine the matter, or that the government proposes to bring its own legislation, together with a request that the member withdraw the Bill. The member, in the great majority of cases, withdraws. Withdrawal after a debate and a ministerial assurance is the standard terminus of the private member Bill, recorded so routinely that it passes without remark in the proceedings. A member who refuses to withdraw and presses the Bill to a vote faces the arithmetic of the House, in which the government commands a majority and the majority votes as the government directs. A division on a private member Bill is therefore rare, and a division won against the government is rarer still, a point the events of April 2015 illuminate and which a later section of this article examines in detail.

What else counts as private members’ business besides Bills?

Resolutions count alongside Bills. A private member may give notice of a resolution on a matter of general public importance, and the allotted Friday time in each House alternates between Bills and resolutions, so that a member who cannot move a Bill may still place a proposition before the House and obtain a debate and a ministerial reply on it.

The resolution route matters because it shows what the Friday institution is actually for. A resolution creates no law and binds nobody. It tests opinion. A member who moves a resolution on, say, the state of a public service or the treatment of a class of citizens is asking the House to declare a view, and asking the government to state its own view in reply, on the record, in a form that journalists and constituents can quote. Many members who understand that a Bill of theirs will never be reached prefer the resolution, which at least guarantees a hearing if it survives the ballot for resolutions. The two devices share the same allotted hours, the same ballot discipline and the same fate at the hands of the calendar, and between them they exhaust what the rules mean by private members’ business. Motions on matters of urgent public importance, questions to ministers and the debates raised under the calling attention procedure belong to different parts of the rules and to different days, and a reader who keeps those categories separate will read the proceedings of a session without confusion.

There is one further feature of the mechanism that examination candidates and practitioners alike tend to miss, and it concerns the drafting of the Bill itself. A government Bill is drafted by professional legislative counsel in the Legislative Department, and its clauses arrive in the House already reconciled with the existing statute book. A private member has no such machinery. The member drafts the Bill personally, or with the limited assistance the secretariat of the House can offer, and bears the whole burden of making the text workable: definitions that do not collide with existing enactments, amendment clauses that amend the correct sections, commencement and savings provisions that a court could apply. The consequence is visible in the record. Private member Bills are often short, often confined to a single amendment of an existing Act, and often open to the ministerial objection, deployed in debate after debate, that the proposal however worthy is defectively drafted and would create more legal difficulty than it resolves. That objection is sometimes a pretext. It is also sometimes correct, and its occasional correctness is one of the structural reasons the mechanism produces debate rather than law.

The gate before the gate: money, expenditure and the President’s recommendation

Before a private member Bill can fail in the House it must survive a constitutional filter that removes a large part of the legislative field from private initiative altogether. The filter is the financial procedure of the Constitution, and it operates not through any decision of the House but through the requirement of the President’s recommendation, which in the working of the parliamentary system means the recommendation of the Council of Ministers. A private member who drafts a Bill in the territory the filter covers is not proposing legislation that the House may accept or reject. The member is proposing legislation that cannot be introduced, or cannot be passed, unless the government of the day agrees to recommend it, and a government that agrees has no need of the member’s Bill because it can introduce its own.

The filter has three layers. The first is Article 110, which defines a Money Bill by an exhaustive list of contents: the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax; the regulation of borrowing by the Government of India; the custody and flow of the Consolidated Fund and the Contingency Fund; the appropriation of money out of the Consolidated Fund; the declaration of expenditure charged on the Consolidated Fund; the receipt of money on account of the Consolidated Fund or the public account; and matters incidental to those subjects. A Bill that contains only provisions dealing with those matters is a Money Bill, and under Article 109 it may be introduced only in the Lok Sabha. Article 117(1) then supplies the operative bar in general form: a Bill or amendment making provision for any of the matters specified in clauses (a) to (f) of Article 110(1) shall not be introduced or moved except on the recommendation of the President. Since the President acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers, the recommendation is the government’s to give or withhold, and it is not given to private members. The entire field of taxation and appropriation, which is to say the field in which a very large share of the legislation that changes citizens’ material lives is located, is closed to private initiative at the point of introduction.

The second layer reaches further, into Bills that are not Money Bills at all. Article 117(3) provides that a Bill which, if enacted and brought into operation, would involve expenditure from the Consolidated Fund of India shall not be passed by either House unless the President has recommended to that House the consideration of the Bill. The provision does not bar introduction. A private member may introduce a Bill creating a new authority, a new benefit, a new subsidy or a new service, and may obtain a debate on it. The Bill simply cannot be passed without the recommendation, and the recommendation must come before the House takes the Bill into consideration for passing. In practice the minister’s reply to the debate states that the recommendation has not been given and is not proposed to be given, and the Bill’s journey ends at that sentence. The third layer, Article 274, applies the same technique to Bills varying a tax or duty in which the states are interested and to a small class of related financial measures, again requiring the President’s recommendation before introduction. Taken together the three layers reserve the initiative in public finance to the executive as completely as any constitutional text can reserve it.

The standard defence of this arrangement is a serious one and should be stated in its strongest form, because it is the foundation on which the whole treatment of private member Bills rests. Financial initiative is reserved to the executive in the Westminster-derived systems because the government is accountable for the finances of the state in a way no individual member is. A legislature in which any of several hundred members could commit the Consolidated Fund to new expenditure, by a majority assembled for an afternoon, would be a legislature in which budgets cease to cohere: each commitment might be attractive, and their sum might be impossible. The recommendation requirement forces every proposal with a price tag through the single office that must find the money, reconcile the proposal with the year’s appropriations and answer for the deficit. That is the argument, and within its own terms it is sound. The question the record poses is not whether the argument is sound but how much of the legislative field the filter, the Friday allotment and the withdrawal convention between them leave standing, and the answer given by seven decades of practice is: a field confined almost entirely to proposals that cost nothing.

This is why the private member Bills that reach debate cluster where they do. They propose amendments to the criminal law, declarations of principle, changes to personal law, new offences, new commissions expressed in general terms, and constitutional amendments, which stand outside the financial filter altogether because Article 368 prescribes its own procedure and no recommendation requirement attaches to the introduction of an amendment Bill. H. V. Kamath’s private member Bill of 1966, which sought to amend the Constitution so that only members of the Lok Sabha could hold the office of Prime Minister, is a fair specimen of the genre: a proposal of real constitutional interest, carrying no expenditure, debated on its merits, and defeated by the structure of the institution rather than by any defect in its drafting. Members keep returning to the constitutional amendment form precisely because it is the one form in which a private proposal can reach a vote without passing through the executive’s financial gate, and the regularity with which such Bills are introduced and lost is itself evidence of how narrow the unfenced ground is.

The texts members actually produce: form, drafting and the financial memorandum

The private member Bills that fill the lists of notices fall into recognisable families, and a reader who can sort them can predict each family’s fate. The largest family is the single-amendment Bill: a proposal to add one section, substitute one clause or omit one provision of an existing Act. Such Bills are short because the member’s drafting resources are short, and they concentrate on the criminal law, on personal law and on the statutes governing elections, citizenship and public order, where a single clause carries the whole controversy. A second family is the new-principle Bill, a complete short statute creating a right, a benefit or an institution where none exists: the Siva Bill was of this family, and it is the family most likely to collide with Article 117(3), because a new institution with a staff and a budget is expenditure in legislative form. A third family is the declaratory or aspirational Bill, which enacts a principle without machinery, and a fourth, already noted, is the constitutional amendment Bill, which travels under Article 368 and is exempt from the financial filter. The families face different obstacles, and the habit of discussing private member Bills as a single phenomenon conceals the fact that the first family fails mainly for want of time, the second mainly at the financial gate, and the fourth mainly on the arithmetic of the special majority, which a private mover can almost never assemble in both Houses.

The drafting of each family is governed by requirements that apply to Bills generally and bite harder on members without the Legislative Department behind them. Every Bill must carry a statement of objects and reasons sufficient to tell the House what mischief it addresses. A Bill that involves expenditure from the Consolidated Fund, whether as a government or a private measure, must be accompanied by a financial memorandum estimating the recurring and non-recurring expenditure the Bill would involve if enacted, so that the House knows the price of what it is being asked to consider. For a private member the memorandum is a trap inside a courtesy: preparing it requires figures the member has no department to supply, and the memorandum’s existence concedes the Article 117(3) point that will end the Bill at the passing stage, since the expenditure it estimates cannot be authorised without the President’s recommendation. A Bill delegating legislative power must likewise carry a memorandum on the delegation, explaining its scope and character. These annexures are examinable detail because they show the procedural system treating the private Bill with full formal respect while surrounding it with conditions whose satisfaction lies outside the member’s power.

The introduction stage has one more formality that distinguishes the private route and that examination answers frequently garble. Leave to introduce must be sought and granted; where a Bill is opposed at introduction on the ground that it lies outside the legislative competence of Parliament, the Speaker may permit a full discussion of that question before the motion for leave is put, a procedure the rules provide for Bills generally. In practice, competence objections to private member Bills are rare, because the financial filter and the calendar dispose of the Bills that would raise them before competence is reached. What the introduction stage produces, in the ordinary case, is a printed Bill, a line in the bulletin of the House, and a place in the queue for consideration days whose number the member cannot know. The Bill is, at that point, a public document of some value to its mover’s constituents and to the associations that campaigned for it. It is not yet, in any meaningful sense, legislation in progress, and the honesty of the analysis requires that distinction to be kept.

The record: fourteen enactments in seven decades

The statistical record of the private member Bill is short enough to be stated in full, and it deserves to be stated with its sources attached, because the figures circulate in examination guides and newspaper columns with varying degrees of care. PRS Legislative Research, in its published analyses of the institution, states the central fact as follows: only fourteen private member Bills have been passed by Parliament since 1952, and the last of them was passed in 1970. Passed, in this count, means passed by both Houses and assented to, which is to say enacted. The count is of laws made, not of debates held or of Bills approved by one House, and the distinction matters when rival figures appear, because a count that includes Bills passed by a single House will be larger and is measuring something else.

The fourteen are concentrated in the first two decades of the Republic, and the earliest of them shows what the institution looked like before the conventions hardened. The first private member Bill to be enacted was the Muslim Wakfs Bill, introduced by Syed Mohammed Ahmad Kasmi and enacted in 1952, in the First Lok Sabha, when the boundary between government and private legislation was still being drawn by practice rather than by habit. The best known of the fourteen is the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Bill introduced by Feroze Gandhi and enacted in 1956, which protected the publication of substantially true reports of parliamentary proceedings and whose substance was later carried into the Constitution itself as Article 361A, an instance of a private member’s proposal graduating into constitutional text. The Orphanages and other Charitable Homes Bill, moved by Uma Nehru, was enacted in 1960 and placed charitable institutions housing women and children under a regime of supervision and control. The Indian Marine Insurance Bill was enacted as the Marine Insurance Act of 1963. The last of the fourteen, the Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, was introduced by Anand Narain Mulla, an independent member of distinction as a jurist, and completed its passage in 1970, widening the Supreme Court’s criminal appellate jurisdiction in capital cases. No private member Bill has been enacted in the years since.

Set against the count of enactments is the count of attempts, and the contrast is the finding. PRS Legislative Research counted the experience of the Fourteenth Lok Sabha and reported that of the more than three hundred private member Bills introduced in that House during the term, roughly four per cent were discussed at all, the remainder lapsing without a single hour of debate. The pattern is not an accident of one term. Introduction is cheap: it costs a member a month’s notice, a place in the ballot and a drafted text. Discussion is the rationed commodity, rationed by the Friday afternoon slot, by the competing claims of resolutions on the same hours, and by the readiness of governments to absorb Friday afternoons into extended sittings on government business. PRS data on the Seventeenth Lok Sabha, in which the time given to private member Bills in the Lok Sabha was measured at a little over nine hours across the entire term, shows the ration tightening rather than loosening. A mechanism in which several hundred proposals are formally introduced in a term and the enacted product across seven decades is fourteen statutes is not malfunctioning in any simple sense. It is producing what its incentives select for: introduction as a public act of position-taking, and enactment as a function reserved in practice to the executive.

How many private member Bills are introduced in one Lok Sabha term?

PRS Legislative Research counted more than three hundred private member Bills introduced in the Lok Sabha during the Fourteenth Lok Sabha’s term and found that roughly four per cent of them were discussed. Introduction requires only notice and a place in the ballot; discussion requires Friday time, and Friday time is the scarcest commodity in the institution.

The four per cent figure repays a moment’s attention, because it identifies the point at which the mechanism actually fails, and the point is not the vote. A Bill that is discussed and withdrawn after a ministerial assurance has at least performed the deliberative part of the legislative function: the subject has been aired, the government has answered, the answer is on the record. A Bill that is never discussed has performed none of it. Its mover has a line in the list of notices and nothing else. When roughly ninety-six of every hundred introduced Bills end in that condition, the bottleneck is not ideology, drafting quality or the financial filter, each of which operates at later stages. The bottleneck is the supply of hours, and the supply of hours is fixed by the same rules that allot the last two and a half hours of a Friday and then permit those hours to be taken, week after week, by the spillover of government business, by adjournments, and by the early departure of members for their constituencies that empties the benches on Friday afternoons. The physical condition of the Friday sitting, a House thinning from the moment the allotted time begins, is not a detail of parliamentary colour. It is the mechanism’s operating environment, and any account of the private member Bill that leaves it out has explained everything except the result.

Read as a group, the fourteen share a profile that predicts their success better than any account of their individual merits. Each was narrow in scope, amending or supplementing a confined field rather than constructing a new regime. None carried significant expenditure, so none struck the Article 117 barrier. Each addressed a gap the government of the day had no programme of its own to fill and no reason to defend, so the ministerial reply could afford to be receptive rather than protective. Several were later absorbed into larger settlements, as the publication protection of 1956 was absorbed into Article 361A and as marine insurance was gathered into the codified law of insurance. The profile amounts to a selection rule: a private member Bill could become law, in the decades when the institution still produced law, when it asked for something small, free and uncontested in territory the executive had left vacant. The conditions describe a legislature in its early, fluid years, when the government’s programme did not yet occupy the whole field and when party discipline had not yet converted every unmanaged vote into a question of survival. Their disappearance is the institutional story of the succeeding decades, and it is not a story about the quality of members’ proposals, which the lists of notices show to have remained as various and as serious as the fourteen themselves.

One more distinction completes the record and protects the reader against a common error in the secondary literature. A private member Bill that is passed by one House is news, and it is reported, reasonably enough, as a breakthrough. It is not an enactment. The Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, examined in detail below, was passed by the Rajya Sabha in April 2015 and was described in the reporting of the day, in terms this article does not repeat, as a landmark. It never became law. Figures for private member success that are compiled from press reports of single-House passage will therefore always overstate the institution’s legislative output, and the only count worth using is the count of enactments, which stands, on the PRS figure, at fourteen, with the last in 1970.

Why the slot fails: time, precedence and the convention of withdrawal

The private member Bill fails, when it fails, for reasons that are structural rather than personal, and they can be arranged in the order in which a Bill encounters them. The first is time. Legislative time is the one input the Parliament cannot manufacture, and the competition for it is asymmetric: government business has constitutional deadlines behind it, in the form of the budget cycle, the expiry of ordinances and the end of sessions, while private members’ business has behind it only a rule allotting Friday afternoons, a rule that yields whenever the government of the day asks the House to sit longer on its own Bills or to take up a discussion it regards as urgent. The scrutiny end of the process feels the same pressure, since the hours in which parliamentary committees and Bill scrutiny can be fitted around sittings are drawn from the same finite stock of parliamentary days, and a House that is short of time is short of it for every purpose at once. The predictable result, visible in the term statistics quoted above, is that the Friday allotment is honoured in the breach as often as in the observance, and that whole sessions pass in which private member Bills are introduced in batches and discussed not at all.

The second reason is precedence within the allotment itself. A Friday afternoon must serve every member who has given notice, and the ballot spreads that service by lot rather than by merit or seniority. The ballot is fair in the way a lottery is fair, and it has the same consequence for planning: a member cannot build support for a Bill whose discussion date is unknowable, cannot brief the press or the affected interests for a sitting that may never arrive, and cannot hold a coalition together across the sessions a low ballot place imposes. The Committee on Private Members’ Bills and Resolutions mitigates the lottery by classifying Bills and recommending time for the more significant among them, but classification cannot create time, and a committee recommendation in favour of a Bill that the calendar never reaches is a commendation without an audience.

The third reason is the convention of withdrawal, which converts debate into a substitute for decision. The convention is not written in any rule. It is a practice, sustained because it serves every participant except the statute book. The member obtains a debate, a ministerial reply and, frequently, an assurance that the government will act or will consider acting, which the member can report to constituents as the fruit of the effort. The minister obtains the removal of the Bill without the embarrassment of defeating it in a division, and obtains it cheaply, because an assurance costs the government nothing that a vote would not also cost and commits it to less. The House obtains the clearing of its Friday list. The only party not served is the proposal itself, which dies unrecorded by any division and leaves no measure of the support it commanded. Practitioners of the institution defend the convention on the ground that the assurance is frequently genuine, that governments do absorb private proposals into their own subsequent Bills, and that the career of a subject, traced across a decade, often runs from a private member’s notice through a ministerial assurance to a government Bill. The defence is true as far as it goes, and the transgender legislation discussed below is its best exhibit. What the defence cannot show is that the convention is a legislative mechanism. It is a pressure mechanism wearing legislative dress, and the distinction is the whole argument of this part of the article.

The fourth reason operates on Bills that survive everything else, and it is dissolution. A Bill does not lapse on prorogation of a session; Article 107(3) says so expressly. Dissolution of the Lok Sabha is different. Under Article 107(5), a Bill pending in the Lok Sabha lapses on dissolution, and a Bill passed by the Lok Sabha and pending in the Rajya Sabha lapses as well. A Bill passed by the Rajya Sabha and pending in the Lok Sabha is, for this purpose, pending in the Lok Sabha, and it lapses too. Article 107(4) preserves only the converse case, a Bill pending in the Rajya Sabha that the Lok Sabha has not passed. The private member Bill, which advances at a pace measured in sessions rather than weeks, is exposed to dissolution risk for far longer than a government Bill, and a Bill that has achieved the rare feat of passage in the Rajya Sabha can be, and in the leading modern instance was, extinguished by the ordinary expiry of the Lok Sabha that never found time to consider it.

Why do members keep introducing Bills that stand no chance of passing?

Because introduction is itself the product. A notice in the list of private member Bills puts a subject into the parliamentary record under the member’s name, arms the member’s speeches and questions with a drafted text, and frequently forces the government to state a position it would prefer to leave unstated. Enactment is the least of what the device delivers.

There is a professional logic to this that outsiders underestimate. A member’s standing in a constituency and in a party is built from visible positions taken on subjects constituents care about, and a Bill is the most concrete form a position can take: it has clauses, it can be printed, it can be sent to the affected association or union or residents’ body with a covering note saying that their case has been placed before Parliament in legislative form. The member who introduces a Bill to amend a rent law, to recognise a category of workers, or to create an offence that the criminal law lacks, has done something a speech cannot do, even when every participant knows the Bill will lapse unconsidered. The institution therefore fills with proposals whose function is exhausted by their introduction, and the queue lengthens for reasons that have nothing to do with any expectation of enactment. Reform proposals that ignore this, and assume members would welcome a procedure that traded hundreds of introductions for a handful of guaranteed debates, mistake what the participants are buying.

The assurance tracked: the Committee on Government Assurances

One institutional detail rescues the withdrawal convention from pure futility, and it is routinely omitted from accounts of the private member Bill. When a minister, replying to a debate, assures the House that the government will examine a proposal or will bring forward its own measure, the assurance is not left to the memory of those who heard it. Both Houses maintain a Committee on Government Assurances, charged with examining the assurances, promises and undertakings given by ministers on the floor and reporting on the extent to which they have been implemented. Assurances are culled from the proceedings by the secretariat, transmitted to the ministries concerned, and pursued through statements of action taken laid before the committee, which reports to the House on assurances fulfilled, on assurances dropped with reasons, and on assurances outstanding beyond the period the committee regards as reasonable.

The existence of the committee changes the description of a withdrawal, though it does not change the outcome for the Bill. A member who withdraws on an assurance has obtained something the committee system can process: a recorded commitment, attributable to a named minister on a named date, whose implementation the ministry must report. An assurance to legislate is, of course, the weakest species of the genus, since a ministry can report, truthfully and repeatedly, that the matter remains under consideration, and the committee has no power to convert consideration into a Bill. The Siva episode shows both the value and the limit in sequence: the assurance given in April 2015, that the government would bring its own measure on transgender rights, was an assurance of the kind the committee exists to track, and it was in fact honoured, four years later, by a government Act whose contents departed from the private Bill in respects its mover protested. The member obtained the subject’s legislation and lost the legislation’s substance, and the assurance machinery records that outcome as implementation. That is a precise measure of what the convention of withdrawal can deliver at its best, and it belongs in any honest account of why experienced members accept withdrawals that look, from outside, like surrender.

The resolution: the debate that substitutes for law

The private members’ resolution deserves treatment in its own right, because it is the half of the Friday institution that functions closest to its description, and because its operation explains what members believe the institution is for. A resolution is a declaration of opinion by the House on a matter of general public importance, moved by a member after notice, selected by ballot in the same manner as Bills, and debated in the Friday hours allotted to resolutions in alternation with Bills. It creates no legal obligation. The government is not bound to act on a resolution the House adopts, and most resolutions are not adopted: the debate ends, as debates on Bills end, with a ministerial reply and, in the ordinary case, the withdrawal of the resolution by leave of the House after the reply has been recorded.

What a resolution produces, and a Bill cannot produce more cheaply, is an authoritative statement of the government’s position extracted under pressure of publicity. The mover frames a proposition the government would prefer not to address in terms. The minister must answer it in terms, defending the existing position or qualifying it, before the House and the press gallery. The answer is then available to every questioner, committee and journalist who takes up the subject afterwards, because a ministerial statement on the floor binds the government politically in a way a press release does not. Members who have served through several terms learn to value this product accurately. A resolution debated and withdrawn has moved the record; a Bill introduced and never reached has moved nothing but the list of notices. That is why the alternation between Bills and resolutions in the Friday allotment is not resented by experienced members as a dilution of the legislative half of the institution. For many of them the resolutions are the institution, and the Bills are its ceremonial dress.

The comparison also clarifies the one genuinely legislative ambition the Friday hours still serve. When a subject raised by resolution over successive sessions accumulates ministerial concessions, the ground is prepared for legislation, and the government Bill that eventually arrives frequently follows the lines the private debates marked out. The mechanism is slow, indirect and wholly dependent on executive goodwill, and it should not be confused with a power to legislate. It is, instead, the residue of the deliberative function in an institution whose enactment function has contracted to the fourteen statutes of the record, and it is the strongest available evidence for the defenders’ claim that the device earns its Friday hours even on the occasions when it produces no law.

The exception of April 2015: the Siva Bill

The modern history of the institution contains exactly one episode in which a private member Bill completed passage in a House against the wishes of the government of the day, and it deserves detailed treatment because it tests every structural claim made so far. The Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2014 was a private member Bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Tiruchi Siva, a member of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. It proposed a statutory framework of rights for transgender persons, with national and state commissions, welfare measures and protection against discrimination. When the Bill came up for consideration on 24 April 2015, the government, speaking through the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, Thawar Chand Gehlot, urged withdrawal on the familiar ground: the subject was accepted in principle, the drafting raised practical difficulties across several ministries, and the government would bring forward its own measure. The Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, intervened in support of the request, while indicating that the House should not divide on such a subject.

Siva refused to withdraw. The refusal is the hinge of the episode, because the convention of withdrawal depends on the mover’s consent and a mover who withholds consent forces the House to choose. An initial voice vote produced confusion about its result, Siva demanded a division, and the government, unwilling to be recorded defeating a rights measure in a House where it lacked a majority, allowed the Bill to be passed, which it was, unanimously, by voice vote. The Rajya Sabha Secretariat’s record and the reporting of the day agree on the scale of the event: it was the first private member Bill passed by the Rajya Sabha in forty-five years. The arithmetic behind the figure is simple. The Rajya Sabha had last passed such a Bill in 1970, the year of the Mulla Bill’s enactment, and in the intervening decades no private proposal had survived the combination of the financial filter, the Friday ration and the withdrawal convention to reach a successful vote in that House.

What happened next is the second half of the lesson. The Bill went to the Lok Sabha, where it was introduced in February 2016 in the charge of another private member, Baijayant Panda, the Rajya Sabha’s mover having no standing to pilot it in the other House. It was never taken up for consideration and passing in the Lok Sabha. The government in due course introduced its own legislation on the subject, the measure that became the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, a statute whose content differed from Siva’s Bill in respects that the welfare cluster of this series examines in its own place. The Sixteenth Lok Sabha was dissolved in 2019, and the Bill, pending in the Lok Sabha after passage by the Rajya Sabha, lapsed under Article 107(5). The episode therefore ends with the rarest event in the institution’s modern history, passage in one House, producing no law at all, while the subject it raised was legislated by the government in a form of the government’s choosing.

Both readings of that outcome are available, and the stance this series takes on contested questions requires each to be put at its strongest. The favourable reading is that the mechanism worked exactly as its defenders describe. A private member identified a subject the legislative programme had neglected, drafted a Bill, survived the ballot, refused the offered assurance, and used the one lever the institution gives a determined mover, the threat of a division, to obtain a vote that placed the subject beyond neglect. The government’s own Act followed within the same parliamentary cycle. On this reading the point of a private member Bill is not enactment but compulsion, and April 2015 is the device operating at its ceiling. The unfavourable reading is that the episode proves the ceiling is the point. The Bill passed only because the government calculated that a division was more costly than a voice vote it could afford to lose in a House whose product still required the other House’s agreement and the government’s own time to complete. Every condition that made passage possible, an opposition majority in the initiating House, a subject on which a recorded defeat was embarrassing, a mover willing to break the withdrawal convention, was exceptional, and the sequel, lapse without consideration, was entirely normal. A mechanism whose single modern success required that conjunction, and still ended in lapse, is not a route by which laws are made. It is a route by which subjects are forced onto an agenda that the government then owns.

The two cases on private member Bills, stated fairly

The case for the present position rests on three propositions, each of which a reasonable legislator can hold. The first is the financial argument already examined: legislation is properly a governmental function in a system where the executive is accountable for public money and for the coherence of the statute book, and the recommendation requirement is the constitutional expression of that accountability rather than an obstruction placed in the member’s path. The second is a proposition about majorities. A government is elected on a programme and is judged on its delivery; a procedure that allowed ad hoc majorities to enact measures outside that programme, on Friday afternoons, before thinning benches, would produce law for which nobody answers at the next election, and would do so in proportion to the accidents of attendance rather than the merits of proposals. The third is a proposition about function. The value of the private member Bill, on this view, lies in raising an issue in legislative form and extracting a stated government position, and by that measure the institution is not failing at all: it processes hundreds of subjects a term, produces debates and assurances, and occasionally, as in 2015, forces an issue into the government’s own programme. Those who hold this view point out, correctly, that the enactment count measures the institution against a purpose its surviving functions do not include.

The case against rests on the same facts read in the other direction. A mechanism that has produced no enacted law in more than five decades is not performing a legislative function in any sense the word can bear, and to describe it as deliberative machinery is to rename the failure. The allotted time is routinely lost: the Friday sitting is the first casualty of extended government business, of adjournments and of the exodus to constituencies, and a House that wished the institution to function would protect the allotment as it protects the budget timetable, which it does not. The comparison with the British Parliament, from which the institution was inherited, is regularly made by PRS Legislative Research, which has noted that the House of Commons enacted seventeen private member Bills in the three years following the 2010 general election, a period in which the Indian Parliament enacted none, and has argued that members cannot be made legislators in fact while every route from their drafts to the statute book runs through the executive’s timetable and the executive’s financial consent. The remedies proposed in that commentary and in parliamentary debate over the years are procedural rather than constitutional: a protected weekly allotment that government business cannot absorb, an obligation to bring classified Bills to a vote within a stated period, and drafting support for members from the legislative counsel’s office. None requires the financial filter to be touched.

This article adjudicates neither case, because the brief of the series on a contested institutional question is to state the positions at full strength with their evidence and leave the weighing to the reader. It records only the arithmetic on which both cases depend, since arithmetic is not a position: fourteen enactments, the last in 1970; discussion reaching roughly four per cent of introduced Bills in the term PRS counted; and one single-House passage in forty-five years, ending in lapse. Arguments about what those figures mean are the reader’s to conduct. The figures themselves are the record.

The Westminster comparison: the same institution under kinder conditions

The Indian institution was inherited from the British Parliament, and the comparison is instructive because the British version labours under recognisably the same handicaps and produces law anyway. Private members at Westminster also depend on a ballot for their principal route, also sit on Fridays, and also face a government that controls the timetable and can talk a Bill out or refuse it time. Yet the House of Commons enacts private member Bills in every session, seventeen of them in the three years after the 2010 general election on the PRS Legislative Research comparison quoted earlier, and some British private member Bills, on subjects from homicide law reform to the abolition of capital punishment’s surviving forms, have carried large public consequences. The differences that account for the divergent output are specific rather than atmospheric. The British ballot produces a small, known list of Bills with a realistic claim on the allotted Fridays, and the successful ballotees are courted by departments and drafting help is available through the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel in a way the Indian member’s unaided drafting is not. The British government, when it finds a ballot Bill congenial, adopts it in substance, lends it time and steers it, treating adoption as ordinary business rather than as a concession extracted under threat of a division. And the British private member labours under no equivalent of the Indian financial filter’s full width, because the Commons’ own financial initiative rules, which reserve money resolutions to ministers, are worked around by departmental cooperation in the cases the government favours.

The comparison should be handled with care, because the two legislatures differ in size, in party discipline and in the anti-defection regime that, in India, converts every division into a test of the government’s majority and so raises the price of letting a private Bill live. An Indian government that allowed a private Bill to pass against its wishes would not merely have lost a clause; it would have advertised a crack in the discipline on which its survival arithmetic rests, and the whips’ interest in the Friday institution is correspondingly absolute. The lesson the comparison supports is therefore narrow but real: the sterility of the Indian device is not written into the idea of private member legislation, which functions elsewhere under similar forms. It is written into the surrounding conditions, the width of the financial filter, the insecurity of the allotted time, the absence of drafting support and the party discipline that makes every unmanaged vote a confidence event. Reform addressed to those conditions has a coherent object. Reform addressed to the device alone, to exhorting members to take their Bills seriously, addresses the one element of the system that is not broken.

Why statutes accumulate: the other end of the process

The statute book at the other end of the process has the opposite problem from the private member’s queue. Nothing in the queue can get out; nothing on the book can get off. An Indian statute, once enacted, remains in force until it is repealed, and the legal system supplies almost no mechanism by which age, disuse or the disappearance of its subject matter can remove it. The starting point is Article 372(1) of the Constitution, which continued in force all laws in force in the territory of India immediately before the commencement of the Constitution, subject to adaptation and to repeal or amendment by a competent legislature. The provision was necessary in 1950, since the alternative was a legal vacuum, and it carried the entire colonial statute book, from the Bengal Districts Act of 1836 onward, into the Republic in a single sentence. What the provision could not do was discriminate. Enactments that were load-bearing and enactments that regulated sarais, hackney carriages and tolls on the Ganga crossed into the Republic together, and each has required an individual act of legislative attention to remove ever since.

Indian law recognises no doctrine of desuetude by which a statute lapses through long disuse. The point has been made repeatedly by those who have studied the condition of the statute book, among them the economist Bibek Debroy, who wrote extensively on the accumulation of obsolete law: in the common law tradition India follows, a statute does not die of neglect, however complete the neglect, and however absurd the survival. A nineteenth-century enactment regulating a trade that no longer exists, or prescribing a procedure by beat of drum, continues in the eyes of the law to be available for use, available in principle for enforcement, and available in practice for the occasional harassment that an unrepealed prohibition makes possible against a citizen who has never heard of it. The Law Commission, in the first of its 2014 reports on obsolete laws, added a second cause of accumulation that operates even on statutes everyone agrees are finished: the absence of sunset clauses. An Appropriation Act authorises expenditure for a single financial year and is spent by its nature within months, yet Indian Appropriation Acts were enacted without self-repealing provisions, and so they accumulated on the book by the hundred, each one legally alive and practically inert, until a repeal exercise removed them in bulk.

A third cause is quieter and accounts for a large share of every repeal count ever announced. When Parliament amends an Act, the amending Act is a separate enactment with its own number and its own place on the book, even though its entire substance is absorbed into the principal Act the moment it commences. The law, as any practitioner reads it, is the principal Act as amended. The amending Act as a standalone document has no further operation, but it has never been repealed, and so it sits in the lists of extant central Acts alongside its parent. A statute book counted by enactments rather than by operative laws therefore overstates itself by the whole population of spent amending Acts, and a repeal exercise that clears them away is performing textual hygiene of a genuinely useful kind while changing no rule by which anyone lives. The point matters for the assessment of the repeal drives, because when the Repealing and Amending Bill of 2025 was introduced to repeal seventy-one enactments, sixty-five of the seventy-one were amending Acts of exactly this character, a composition the government’s officials stated openly and which any honest reading of a repeal count must take into account.

What filled the schedules of the first repeal Acts of the drive?

Spent Appropriation Acts and exhausted amending Acts filled them. The Appropriation Acts (Repeal) Act of 2016 alone removed seven hundred and fifty-eight Appropriation Acts whose authority had expired with the financial years they funded, and the two repealing and amending Acts of 2015 between them removed one hundred and twenty-five enactments, most of them long superseded.

The bulk composition of the early schedules is not a criticism in itself. A book that lists seven hundred and fifty-eight dead Appropriation Acts is a book that misleads every reader who tries to establish what the law is, and the Ramanujam Committee’s census, discussed below, found that the central statute book as it stood in October 2014 contained two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one enactments, a figure nobody could interpret without exactly the sorting the repeal exercises performed. The criticism, where it is made, is about presentation rather than performance: about counts that aggregate the removal of a spent Appropriation Act, an absorbed amending Act and a substantive colonial prohibition into a single headline figure for laws repealed, as though the three operations were of the same legal weight. The sections that follow keep the categories separate, and the reader who keeps them separate will be able to assess the drives without assistance from either the government’s publicity or its critics’ rhetoric.

Repeal before the drive: a century of intermittent exercises

The exercises of 2014 did not invent statute book revision in India; they revived it at a new scale, and the earlier history matters because it explains why the lists the committees inherited were so long. The colonial legislature had confronted the same accumulation in the nineteenth century and had answered it with the same instrument, the repealing Act carrying schedules of dead enactments, modelled on the statute law revision Acts by which the British Parliament periodically cleared its own book. Indian repealing and amending Acts were enacted at intervals from the eighteen seventies onward, and the form the modern drive uses, a first schedule of repeals and a savings clause of precaution, descends from those exercises in an unbroken line. What the nineteenth century established, and what every later exercise has confirmed, is that repeal is not a continuous function of the legislative system. It happens in campaigns, when a government or a commission decides to spend attention on it, and between campaigns the book grows by accretion exactly as before.

The twentieth-century record after Independence follows the campaign pattern. The Law Commission returned to the subject in report after report across the decades: its Eighteenth and Eighty-first Reports recommended the repeal of particular colonial enactments, its Ninety-sixth Report addressed a substantial body of obsolete law, and its One Hundred and Forty-eighth and One Hundred and Fifty-ninth Reports, the latter submitted in 1998, the year of the Jain Commission, recommended repeal and amendment across a further range of statutes. The action taken on those recommendations was partial and slow, a fact the Commission itself documented when it opened its 2014 exercise by recording that two hundred and fifty-three laws which its own earlier reports and the Jain Commission had already recommended for repeal were still standing on the statute book. Between 1950 and 2001, one published estimate quoted in the legal press put the total of Acts repealed at over one hundred, a rate of about two a year against an enactment rate many times higher. A more concentrated exercise in 2001 and 2002 cleared a further body of enactments, and then the subject rested again until 2014.

Two lessons from that history discipline any assessment of the modern drive. The first is that identification has never been the binding constraint. The statute book has been read, listed and condemned in instalments for a century and a half, and the lists overlapped heavily: the Jain Commission in 1998 was in part re-recommending what the Law Commission had recommended before it, and the committees of 2014 worked from a book in which hundreds of enactments had already been pronounced dead by an authority of standing. The binding constraint has always been the willingness of a government to spend the concurrence process and the floor time that repeal, however uncontroversial, consumes. The second lesson is the corollary: a repeal drive’s achievement should be measured not against the size of the dead stock but against the system’s demonstrated tendency to leave identified dead law standing for decades after its identification. Measured that way, the post-2014 exercises, which converted identification into enacted repeal within months and repeated the conversion in successive years, are a genuine departure in administration, whatever discount is applied to their headline counts for composition.

The identification machinery: commissions, committees and counts

Mass repeal cannot begin until somebody has read the statute book and said which parts of it are dead, and the history of the exercise is a history of identification exercises whose recommendations waited, in some cases for a generation, for a government willing to spend legislative time on them. The first of the modern exercises was the Commission on Review of Administrative Laws, appointed in 1998 under the chairmanship of P. C. Jain. The Jain Commission reviewed the central statute book and, as the Ministry of Law and Justice later stated in answer to a question in the Lok Sabha in March 2017, recommended the repeal of one thousand three hundred and eighty-three Acts in its report of September 1998. Of those, the same answer recorded, four hundred and fifteen had been repealed by April 2014. Sixteen years consumed in acting on barely a third of a list is the baseline fact about repeal in India, and it explains why the exercises of 2014 were framed as a fresh start rather than as a continuation.

The fresh start had three components, and keeping them distinct is essential to the FAQ record of this subject. The first was the twentieth Law Commission’s series of reports on obsolete laws, four reports numbered 248 to 251, submitted between September and November 2014 under the title Obsolete Laws: Warranting Immediate Repeal. The reports recommended the repeal of seventy-two, one hundred and thirteen, seventy-four and thirty Acts respectively, two hundred and eighty-nine in total, a figure the government itself gave to the Lok Sabha when accounting for the exercise. The Law Commission worked statute by statute, giving reasons, and it added the caution that has shadowed the whole subject since: a pre-Constitution enactment whose subject matter has passed to the State List cannot be repealed by Parliament at all, and a part of every list consists of Acts that only state legislatures can remove, a category the Commission quantified in its own work and which no central repeal Act can reach.

The second component was executive rather than advisory. On 1 September 2014 the Prime Minister’s Office constituted a two-member committee chaired by R. Ramanujam, a former secretary in that office, with V. K. Bhasin, a former secretary in the Legislative Department, as its member. The Ramanujam Committee built the first complete census of the central statute book, recording two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one central Acts in existence as on 15 October 2014, of which three hundred and eighty had been enacted between 1834 and 1949. It identified one thousand seven hundred and forty-one Acts as fit for repeal. The census figure and the identification figure are the twin foundations on which every subsequent repeal count stands, and they are worth holding in the mind together: on the committee’s own arithmetic, close to two-thirds of the central statute book could be repealed without affecting governance, a finding that says as much about the book’s accumulation as about the committee’s severity.

A parallel identification ran outside government altogether, and its presence in the record is a reminder that the condition of the statute book had become a public question rather than a departmental one. The 100 Laws Repeal Project, conducted by the Centre for Civil Society in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy and the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, selected one hundred central enactments and argued the case for each one’s repeal on stated grounds, publishing its reasoning in a form ministries could adopt. Projects of that kind do not repeal anything. What they do is lower the cost to a government of beginning, by supplying a worked list with the argument already made for each item, and the sequence of 2014, in which an official committee, a Law Commission series and a civil society project converged on the same conclusion within months of one another, shows identification operating as a climate rather than as a single report. The government’s own sifting then proceeded on all the lists together: the Law Ministry told the Lok Sabha in December 2015 that, on examining the reports, the government had identified seven hundred and seventy-seven central Acts for repeal wholly or in part, a figure that represents the point at which recommendation had been converted into an administrative programme and against which the enacted repeals of the following years can be tracked.

The third component was the administrative machinery that turned lists into Bills. Identification by commission and committee produces recommendations; repeal requires the Legislative Department of the Ministry of Law and Justice to obtain the concurrence of the ministry administering each listed Act, to settle the savings each repeal requires, and to draft a Bill whose schedules a House can pass. Ministries do not always concur. An administering department may report that an apparently dead Act is still cited in some scheme, some cadre rule or some pending proceeding, and the Act drops off the schedule. The difference between the one thousand seven hundred and forty-one Acts the Ramanujam Committee identified and the smaller totals the repeal Acts have actually removed is in large part the product of that concurrence process, item by item, conducted inside the executive before any Bill is printed. A researcher assembling the three lists into a single briefing, often as slides for an internal presentation, works from the published reports of the Commission and the answers given to Parliament, and a standalone PowerPoint viewer is the practical tool for opening such presentation files when they arrive in slide form rather than as text.

Which ministry runs the repeal exercise?

The Legislative Department of the Ministry of Law and Justice runs it. The commissions and committees identify candidate Acts, but the Legislative Department obtains the concurrence of each administering ministry, drafts the repealing and amending Bill with its schedules and savings clause, and pilots the Bill through both Houses of Parliament.

The identification machinery has one limit written into the Constitution itself, and an account of the drives that omits it will mislead the reader about what a central repeal Act can finish. A pre-Constitution enactment whose subject matter falls within the State List can be repealed only by a state legislature, because the competence to repeal follows the competence to enact, and Article 372 continued such enactments under the authority of the legislatures to which their subjects were assigned. The committees of 2014 quantified the trapped residue rather than merely noting it: the Ramanujam Committee identified eighty-three central Acts that only state legislatures could repeal, and the Law Commission identified a further sixty-two statutes in the same condition, a combined residue of one hundred and forty-five enactments that no Bill in Parliament can touch. Successive governments have transmitted the lists to the states, and the states, which have their own accumulations and no equivalent drive, have acted on them slowly and unevenly. The centre’s statute book can therefore be cleaned only down to a floor set by the federal distribution of powers, and a part of every announced identification total was never within the announcing government’s gift. The same federal point explains a curiosity of the 2016 exercise, in which the bulk repeal of Appropriation Acts required separate handling for the hundreds of Appropriation Acts Parliament had enacted for states under President’s rule, whose repeal raised the same competence question in miniature.

The identification machinery also settles a question the public discussion usually leaves vague, namely who decides that a law is obsolete. The honest answer is that obsolescence in this exercise is an administrative judgment ratified by Parliament, not a finding made by the House itself. The committees apply working tests that recur across the reports: whether the Act’s subject has ceased to exist, whether a later Act covers the ground, whether the Act was spent by its own terms, whether its machinery has been abolished, and whether its retention serves any purpose a ministry is willing to defend in writing. The House debates the resulting Bill briefly, if at all, and passes schedules of dozens of repeals on the strength of the examination conducted elsewhere. That is not a scandal; no legislature could examine two thousand statutes seriatim. It is, however, the correct description of where the judgment in a mass repeal is exercised, and it locates the real safeguard in the quality of the committee work and the ministry concurrence process rather than in anything that happens on the floor.

The repealing and amending Act as an instrument

The vehicle of mass repeal is the repealing and amending Act, a device with a long pedigree in Indian legislation. Acts of this form have been enacted at intervals since the nineteenth century, when the colonial legislature first confronted the accumulation of its own output, and the form has changed little in a century and a half. A repealing and amending Act carries a short title that announces its double function, an Act to repeal certain enactments and to amend certain other enactments, and its operative content sits in schedules. The First Schedule lists the enactments repealed, each identified by year, number and short title, and states the extent of the repeal, which for a spent Act is the whole of it. A further schedule, where the Act also corrects the living statute book, sets out minor amendments to Acts that remain in force: a word substituted, a reference to a repealed provision updated, an obvious drafting error set right. The amendments in a repealing and amending Act are by convention textual and uncontroversial, since a device designed to pass without extended debate cannot be allowed to smuggle in policy.

One refinement of the schedule form deserves notice, because it qualifies what a repeal count enumerates. The extent column does not always record a whole Act. A schedule entry may repeal an enactment in part, striking specified sections of a statute that otherwise continues, where the identification process found a dead organ inside a living body: a spent chapter, a superseded schedule, a provision whose subject a later Act absorbed. The government’s own accounting recognised the category when it reported, in December 2015, that it had identified seven hundred and seventy-seven central Acts for repeal wholly or in part. Partial repeal is the drive’s most surgical instrument and its least visible, since an entry that removes three sections of a working Act appears in the totals identically with an entry that removes an entire code, and only a reader of the schedules can tell the two apart.

The second constant feature is the savings clause, and it is the clause that determines what the Act actually does to the world. The standard form, present in the modern repeal Acts as a matter of course, provides that the repeal of an enactment shall not affect any other enactment in which the repealed enactment has been applied, incorporated or referred to, and shall not affect the validity or operation of anything done under it. When the government introduced the repeal Bill of 2025, its officials described the corresponding clause in terms that have become formulaic for the genre: it is the precautionary provision which it is usual to include in a Bill of this kind. The formula is doing real work. It means that the repeal of an absorbed amending Act does not disturb the amendments it made, which live on in the principal Act; that the repeal of a spent authority does not reopen accounts settled under it; and that the exercise is, by its own text, confined to the removal of dead letters. A repeal Act that omitted the savings clause would be a dangerous instrument. With the clause, it is a tidying instrument, and the distance between those two descriptions is the distance between the publicity of the repeal drives and their legal content.

The sequence of the modern drive can be stated briefly with its figures attached to their instruments. The Repealing and Amending Act, 2015 repealed thirty-five Acts, and the Repealing and Amending (Second) Act, 2015 repealed ninety. The Appropriation Acts (Repeal) Act, 2016 removed the seven hundred and fifty-eight spent Appropriation Acts already mentioned. The Repealing and Amending Act, 2016 repealed two hundred and ninety-five Acts and made minor corrections to two others. Further repealing and amending Acts followed in 2017 and 2019, and the Repealing and Amending Act, 2023 repealed seventy-six enactments, among them the Land Acquisition (Mines) Act of 1885 and the Telegraph Wires (Unlawful Possession) Act of 1950. In the debate on the 2023 Act, the Minister of Law and Justice, Arjun Ram Meghwal, stated the government’s running total to the House: one thousand four hundred and eighty-six Acts had been repealed since 2014, and the seventy-six in the Bill before the House would take the total to one thousand five hundred and sixty-two. That statement, made on the floor and reported by the Press Trust of India, is the proper source for the aggregate figure in general circulation, and it should be quoted, as it is quoted here, as the government’s stated total for the drive since 2014 rather than as a count performed by any commentator. Later exercises have continued the sequence, on the same composition: the repeal Act of 2025 removed seventy-one enactments, sixty-five of them amending Acts, and the government has stated in a subsequent answer to Parliament that the total of obsolete and redundant laws repealed since 2014 stands at one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five.

The passage of a repealing and amending Bill through the two Houses displays the same economy of attention as its drafting. The Bill is introduced by the Minister of Law and Justice, its statement of objects and reasons recites the reports on which the schedules rest, and the debate, where there is one, is measured in hours rather than days, with the discussion ranging over the general policy of repeal and over individual items a member wishes to defend or to add. Members do succeed in adding items: the Bill that became the Repealing and Amending Act of 2023 was introduced in December 2022 as a Bill to repeal sixty-five enactments, and the government itself moved amendments in the course of passage that added eleven more, bringing the enacted total to seventy-six. Items are also dropped between introduction and enactment when an administering ministry withdraws its concurrence or a member makes a case for an enactment’s retention. The schedules that emerge are therefore negotiated documents in a modest sense, though the negotiation happens at the level of inclusion and exclusion and never at the level of the instrument’s design, which the savings clause and the schedule form fix in advance. For the practitioner the practical consequence is that the authoritative record of what was repealed in any year is the enacted Act and its schedules, not the larger Bill as introduced and not the larger list any committee recommended, and citations should be to the Act.

Two features of that sequence deserve emphasis before the assessment begins. The first is that the drive’s arithmetic is dominated, in every period, by enactments that nobody administered, nobody invoked and nobody will miss: spent Appropriation Acts in their hundreds, absorbed amending Acts in their hundreds, and principal Acts whose subjects vanished generations ago. The second is that the genuinely substantive repeals in the schedules are individual and identifiable, and they are the ones a serious account should name: a mines acquisition law of the nineteenth century, a telegraph wires law of 1950, the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act of 1911, carried away in the 2017 exercise. The drives earn their place in the legislative record on the strength of such items and on the hygiene of the book as a whole. They do not earn it on the headline totals, which measure the weight of dead paper removed rather than the weight of law changed.

What repeal does to rights already accrued

The practitioner question about repeal is not how many Acts have gone but what happens to the matters that arose while a repealed Act stood in force, and Indian law answers it in a provision so familiar that its importance is easy to miss: Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897. The section opens with a governing qualification, that its rules apply unless a different intention appears in the repealing Act, and it then states five preservations. The repeal does not revive anything not in force at the moment of repeal. It does not affect the previous operation of the repealed enactment or anything duly done or suffered under it. It does not affect any right, privilege, obligation or liability acquired, accrued or incurred under the repealed enactment. It does not affect any penalty, forfeiture or punishment incurred in respect of an offence committed against it. And it does not affect any investigation, legal proceeding or remedy in respect of any such right or liability, which may be instituted, continued or enforced as if the repealing Act had not been passed. Section 6A deals with the repeal of an Act that had itself made textual amendments, providing that the repeal does not undo the amendments, which continue in the amended text unless a different intention appears. Section 24 performs the corresponding service for subordinate instruments, carrying notifications, orders and rules issued under a repealed enactment across into its re-enacted successor so far as they are consistent with it.

The consequence for the repeal drives is direct, and it is the legal foundation of the claim that repeal is hygiene rather than substance. Because Section 6 preserves accrued rights and pending proceedings by default, and because a repealing and amending Act adds its own savings clause on top, the repeal of an obsolete statute almost never changes the position of any identifiable person. A prosecution properly begun under a repealed Act continues. A liability incurred under it remains recoverable. A benefit conferred by it is not clawed back. The repeal operates on the future citation of the statute and on nothing else, which is exactly what the administrators of a dead Act want and exactly what the critics of the drives point to when they say the exercise has been presented as reform when its legal content is archival. Both descriptions are accurate, and they are accurate about the same clauses.

Section 6 also governs the harder case that arises when a living Act is repealed and replaced, the second species of repeal the brief of this article distinguishes from the omnibus device. Where a new Act repeals the one it replaces, the repeal sits inside a substantive statute and travels with the new regime’s own transitional provisions, which displace or supplement the general rule. This series has traced that pattern repeatedly: a monopolies statute repealed by the competition statute that succeeded it, a consumer protection statute of 1986 repealed by the Act of 2019 that rebuilt the field, a colonial land acquisition law repealed by the Act of 2013. In each such case the repeal is the least interesting part of the event, because the successor Act’s savings and transition clauses, drafted for the specific migration, do the real work of deciding which proceedings continue, which authorities transfer and which accrued positions survive. Repeal by omnibus Act and repeal by successor Act are the same word for two different operations, and the counts quoted in public discussion almost always aggregate the first while the consequences readers care about almost always arise under the second.

The savings architecture repays worked illustration, because Section 6 is the provision a practitioner reaches for whenever any repeal, omnibus or substantive, is in play. Consider first a prosecution. An offence is committed against an enactment in a year when the enactment is unquestionably in force; the enactment is repealed in a later drive; the prosecution, pending or not yet begun, is unaffected, because Section 6 preserves the penalty incurred and permits the proceeding to be instituted or continued as if the repealing Act had not been passed. Consider second a licence or a benefit: a right accrued under the repealed enactment, a registration obtained, an exemption earned, survives the repeal on the same principle, and an administrator who treated repeal as wiping the slate would act unlawfully. Consider third the case Section 6A governs, which arises constantly in the schedules of the drives: an amending Act of, say, the nineteen seventies substituted a section of a principal Act and was then spent; when a repealing Act removes the amending Act, the substitution it made does not unravel, and the principal Act continues to read as amended, which is why the removal of hundreds of amending Acts changes no living text. Consider fourth the subordinate legislation under a repealed and re-enacted statute, where Section 24 carries notifications and rules across into the successor so far as they are consistent with it, sparing the administration the reissue of its entire body of orders on every statutory succession. The four cases together describe a legal system that treats repeal as an operation on the future only, and they explain, more completely than any argument about presentation, why the removal of even a genuinely substantive dead statute is an event in the statute book and not in the lives of those who once lived under it.

A statute can also end, or lose its operation, without repeal at all, and the reader should hold the full set of endings in view because the repeal drives address only one of them. A statute may expire by its own terms where it contains a duration clause. It may be held to be repealed by implication where a later Act on the same subject is so inconsistent with it that the two cannot stand together, a conclusion Indian courts reach reluctantly and only where the inconsistency is unavoidable, since the presumption of the law is against implied repeal. It may be struck down by a court as unconstitutional, which is annulment rather than repeal and raises its own questions about acts done under it before judgment. And it may remain in force on paper while its central mechanism is disapplied by executive action taken under powers the statute itself or a successor policy supplies, which is not an ending in law at all, though it is an ending in fact. That last category, the statute that lives formally and does not operate, is the one the repeal drives cannot reach, and it is the subject of the section after next.

The road not taken: sunset clauses and temporary legislation

There is an alternative to the whole apparatus of identification committees and omnibus repeal Acts, and the Law Commission’s diagnosis points at it: enact legislation with its death written into it. A sunset clause makes expiry the default and forces the legislature to decide, at a stated interval, whether a statute has earned renewal. Where the device is used, no committee need discover that a law is dead, because the law announces the date of its own death at birth and the burden of argument rests on whoever would keep it alive. Indian practice contains the device in pockets, and the pockets show both its power and the reason for its rarity. The Constitution itself legislates temporarily in Article 123, where an ordinance carries a maximum life fixed by the six-week rule after reassembly. Annual Appropriation Acts are temporary by subject if not by clause. The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was enacted with a limited duration, was renewed by amendment on successive occasions as its term ran out, and was at last allowed to lapse in 1995, ending by expiry a statute whose repeal, as a political act, no government of the period wished to own. The episode is the sunset mechanism working exactly as designed: continuation required repeated affirmative decisions, and when the decisions stopped, the statute stopped.

The rarity of the device elsewhere has institutional causes that mirror the causes of accumulation. A ministry drafting a permanent statute acquires a permanent instrument and need never return to Parliament for it; a ministry drafting a temporary statute books a future appointment with the legislature at which its record will be examined, and the renewal debate is an accountability event the drafting department has every reason to avoid. Legislatures, for their part, face crowded calendars in perpetuity and are reluctant to schedule the re-enactment of their own output. The result is a statute book written almost entirely in the permanent tense, serviced at intervals by the repeal campaign, when a fraction of the permanence is revoked in bulk. A drafting culture that attached presumptive durations to regulatory statutes, renewable on a showing of continued need, would convert repeal from a campaign into a routine, and would move the argument about a statute’s usefulness from the committees of a later generation to the House that enacted it and the House that must decide whether it continues. Nothing in the Indian record suggests that conversion is imminent, and this article does not predict it. It records the alternative because the diagnosis of the accumulation problem is incomplete without it: the book grows because its contents are born immortal, and the drives are the periodic price of that immortality.

What repeal reaches: the five categories

The argument of this article in its repeal half can be put in one sentence: repeal reaches the statutes that do not matter, and the proof is a classification. Every enactment on the central statute book falls into one of five conditions, distinguished by whether it still operates and by the route, if any, by which a repeal exercise could remove it. The table below states the five categories, whether a repealing and amending Act would reach an enactment in each, whether the drives have in fact reached it, and an example drawn from the statutes this series has examined in their own articles.

Category of statute	Would a repealing and amending Act reach it?	Has it been reached?	Example from this series
Spent by the passage of time	Yes, routinely, in bulk schedules	Yes, in the hundreds	Annual Appropriation Acts, removed by the Appropriation Acts (Repeal) Act of 2016
Superseded by a later Act	Rarely; the successor Act normally repeals it	Yes, but by the successor, not the drive	The monopolies statute, repealed by the competition statute that replaced it
Principal mechanism disapplied by notification	No; the Act remains formally in force and partly in use	No	The industrial licensing statute whose licensing mechanism was switched off in 1991
Listed for repeal in a Code whose repeal has not been notified	No; the listing waits on commencement	No	The provident fund statute named in the repeal schedule of the Code on Social Security
In force and in use	No; repeal would be a policy decision, not housekeeping	No	The statutes under which regulators, tribunals and funds operate every working day

The middle rows are the argument. The first row is dead paper and the fifth row is living law, and a repeal drive moves between them without touching either. The second row shows repeal happening, but by the substantive route, inside a successor statute, where the drive’s counts do not claim it. The third and fourth rows show the conditions in which the statutes this series has spent three hundred articles examining actually sit: formally alive, functionally suspended, or condemned by a repeal provision that has itself never been brought into force. A housekeeping exercise is designed for the first row. It has no tool for the third and fourth, because the third requires a policy decision to repeal a statute the government still finds convenient to keep in reserve, and the fourth requires the commencement of a Code, which is a political act of an entirely different order from the passing of a schedule.

The three exhibits behind the middle rows should be stated with the precision the series has established for them elsewhere. The industrial licensing statute is the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1951, examined in the article on the IDRA of 1951: its central mechanism, the licensing of industrial undertakings, was disapplied for the great majority of industries by the industrial policy of 1991 and the notifications under it, yet the Act has never been repealed and remains available, in residual applications and as the parent of institutions that outlived licensing itself. The monopolies statute is the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1969, whose history is told in the article on the MRTP Act and its repeal: the amendments of 1991 deleted the provisions controlling the expansion and establishment of large undertakings, which were the operative core of the statute, and the shell that remained survived that deletion by eighteen years before the Competition Act’s repeal provision was brought into force in 2009 and closed it. The provident fund statute is the Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, the subject of the article on the EPF Act of 1952: it stands listed for repeal in the Code on Social Security, 2020, a Code enacted and in force as an Act of Parliament, whose repeal of the provident fund statute awaits the notification that would carry the repeal into effect, a notification that has not been issued, so that the statute administers the savings of millions of employees under a sentence of repeal that has not been executed.

No criticism of the repeal drives is needed to make the point, because the point is about categories rather than effort. A drive that processed the third and fourth categories would have to decide whether industrial licensing should be abolished in law as well as in practice, and whether the labour Codes should commence with their repeals, and those decisions are contested questions of policy that no housekeeping Bill can carry. The drives do not fail to reach those statutes through oversight. They are built not to.

Decriminalisation is a different exercise

One confusion must be cleared before the assessment of the drives, because it infects nearly every public discussion of this subject: decriminalisation is not repeal, and the statute that performs it is not a repealing Act. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 is the governing example. As the Press Information Bureau recorded at its notification on 11 August 2023, the Act decriminalised one hundred and eighty-three provisions across forty-two central Acts administered by nineteen ministries. Its method was the opposite of repeal’s. Where repeal removes an enactment that no longer operates, the Jan Vishwas Act took enactments in full operation and rewrote their penal provisions: imprisonment for specified minor, technical and procedural defaults was removed, fines were converted into penalties of larger amount, penalty adjudication was entrusted to administrative officers rather than criminal courts, and in defined cases a first contravention was made to attract an advisory or warning rather than a penalty at all. The statutes amended remain in force, their regulatory schemes intact and their offences, in the main, still offences or contraventions of a civil character. The Act touched, among many others, the Legal Metrology Act, 2009, whose scheme of penalties for weights and measures offences this series has set out in its account of the Legal Metrology Act, converting imprisonment terms in that Act into monetary penalties for the defaults it specified.

The machinery the Jan Vishwas Act installed deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the part of decriminalisation that outlasts the announcement. Adjudication of the converted penalties was placed in the hands of officers designated within the regulatory administration rather than magistrates, with an appeal lying within the administrative hierarchy in the manner the amended Acts prescribe, so that a default that once began a prosecution begins instead an assessment. A graduated structure distinguishes a first contravention from repetition in a number of the amended provisions, reserving the heavier penalty for the defaulter who returns. And the Act wrote into the scheme a device against the decay that afflicts every penalty fixed in money: the fines and penalties it set are to rise by ten per cent at intervals of three years, so that the deterrent the legislature chose does not shrink in real terms while the statute book stands still. Each of these features is a judgment about how minor regulation should be enforced, open to argument on its merits, and none of them has anything in common with the removal of dead enactments beyond appearing in the same season’s publicity about the statute book.

The distinction matters for three reasons. The first is analytical: a government that reports repeal counts and decriminalisation counts in the same breath is reporting the removal of dead law and the softening of live law as a single achievement, and the two figures cannot be added without deceiving the reader about both. The second is practical: decriminalisation changes the daily legal position of businesses and citizens in a way no repeal of a spent Act can, because it governs conduct under statutes that are enforced every day, and it raises real questions, about the adequacy of monetary penalties as deterrents and about the fairness of administrative adjudication, that repeal never raises. The third is examinational, and it is the reason this article treats the two exercises in separate sections: the repealing and amending Act and the Jan Vishwas Act are different instruments with different objects, different methods and different effects, and an answer that merges them has misunderstood both. Repeal asks whether a statute should continue to exist. Decriminalisation assumes it should, and asks what should happen to those who default under it.

The two cases on the repeal exercise, stated fairly

The case for the repeal drives is the case for an intelligible statute book, and it is stronger than the drives’ critics usually allow. A statute book is a working instrument before it is anything else. Citizens, businesses, administrators and courts must be able to establish what the law is, and a book carrying two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one central enactments, of which a committee of the government’s own appointment found one thousand seven hundred and forty-one fit for repeal, fails that purpose by its sheer unreadability. Dead law is not harmless law. An unrepealed prohibition remains available to an inspector or a prosecutor disposed to use it; an unrepealed licensing or permission requirement clouds a transaction until advice is taken on whether it is spent; and the research cost of distinguishing the living from the dead is paid on every transaction, every pleading and every examination answer in the system. Successive law ministers have made the point in the government’s name, and the Minister’s statement in the 2023 debate, that obsolete laws are impediments in the normal life of common people, is the compact form of an argument the Law Commission’s reports support in detail. On this view the counts, even discounted for their composition, represent thousands of occasions on which a reader of the statute book will no longer be misled, and that is a real public good purchased at low legislative cost.

The case against is not that the drives do harm but that they are misdescribed, and misdescription has consequences. The headline figure for laws repealed aggregates spent Appropriation Acts, absorbed amending Acts and substantive prohibitions into one number, and the number is then deployed as evidence of deregulation, of a state withdrawing from the lives of citizens. No such withdrawal is effected by removing an Appropriation Act for a financial year that closed decades ago, or by repealing the amending Act whose amendments continue undisturbed in the principal Act by force of the savings clause and Section 6A of the General Clauses Act. The genuinely substantive deregulatory questions in the Indian statute book are questions about living statutes: licensing regimes that persist in residual form, offences that remain imprisonable, repeals enacted and not commenced. On every one of those, as the classification above shows, the drives are silent, and the silence is structural rather than accidental. Critics in and outside Parliament have made the narrower arithmetical point as well, noting, as the government’s own officials acknowledged when the 2025 Bill was introduced, that sixty-five of its seventy-one repeals were of amending Acts, and asking what work the word repeal is doing in such a count. The rejoinder available to the government, that absorbed amending Acts clutter the book and confuse its readers, is true, and it concedes the critics’ essential claim: the exercise is housekeeping, valuable as housekeeping, and entitled to be praised in those terms and no others.

As with private member Bills, this article adjudicates neither case. It insists only on the separation of the counts, because a reader who knows how many of the repealed enactments were spent, how many absorbed and how many substantive holds the material for the judgment, whichever way the judgment goes, and a reader who has been given only the aggregate holds nothing but a slogan.

The loop closed: what the two ends of the process show together

This article closes the loop on a pattern the series has documented across its whole file, and the pattern is worth stating as the finding it has become. The failure modes catalogued article by article are, in the main, four: statutes enacted and never commenced, in whole or in part; machinery provided for in a statute and never created; mechanisms at the centre of a statute disapplied by notification while the statute stands; and repeals enacted in a successor Code and left unnotified while the condemned statute administers its field. Each failure mode has been found, in the articles that own those statutes, to be a considered outcome rather than an oversight, the product of governments discovering that an uncommenced provision, an uncreated tribunal, a disapplied mechanism or an unexecuted repeal costs less than the alternatives. The two exercises examined here meet that pattern from opposite directions and with the same result. The private member Bill cannot disturb it, because a private proposal that touches the pattern will be a proposal about a living statute, will usually carry expenditure in its wake, and will be met by the financial filter, the Friday ration and the assurance of a government Bill that may adopt the subject in diluted form or not at all. The repeal drive cannot disturb it, because a drive is constructed to remove what nobody is using, and the pattern consists precisely of statutes that are either being used without full authority or not being used despite it, categories in which repeal is a policy decision and not a clerical one.

That is the answer to the question with which this article began, and it is the One Test answer the brief of this article sets: the reader understands why the introduction of a Bill by a member who is not a minister and the removal of a statute from the book are both largely symbolic, and knows the exception in each case. The exception at the introduction end is the subject-forcing success, of which April 2015 is the complete modern instance: a Bill that failed as legislation and succeeded as compulsion, because its mover refused the assurance and the government legislated the subject itself. The exception at the removal end is repeal inside a successor Act, where a living statute is closed because a new regime is opening, and the repeal carries transitional consequences that Section 6 of the General Clauses Act and the successor’s own savings clauses must manage between them. Between those exceptions lies the ordinary operation of the two ends of the process, orderly, constitutional, heavily used and almost entirely without effect on the statute book as citizens encounter it. A reader preparing for examination should hold the figures: fourteen enactments, the last in 1970; one thousand seven hundred and forty-one Acts identified for repeal out of two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one; one thousand five hundred and sixty-two repealed on the government’s stated total as the 2023 Act passed. A reader preparing to practise should hold the provisions: Articles 107, 110, 111, 117 and 372, and Sections 6, 6A and 24 of the General Clauses Act, 1897, which between them explain nearly everything the figures record. The legislative process in India begins in the hands of the executive and ends in the hands of the executive, and the two institutions examined here, for all the sincerity of those who work them, mark the boundaries of that fact rather than exceptions to it. The material in this article is general information on legislative procedure and the statute book, and is not legal advice on any particular matter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who may introduce a private member Bill?

Any member of either House of Parliament who is not a minister may introduce a private member Bill. The category turns on the mover’s office and on nothing else: a backbench member of the ruling party, a member of the opposition, an independent member and a nominated member are all private members for this purpose, while a minister introducing the identical text would make it a government Bill. The member must give one month’s notice, supply the text with a statement of objects and reasons, and take a place in the ballot for precedence. The subject must fall within the legislative competence of Parliament, and the financial restrictions of Articles 110, 117 and 274 limit what such a Bill may contain.

Q: How many private member Bills have become law?

Fourteen, on the count maintained in the published analyses of PRS Legislative Research, which states that only fourteen private member Bills have been passed by Parliament since 1952 and that the last of them was passed in 1970. Passed here means passed by both Houses and assented to by the President. The first was the Muslim Wakfs Bill, enacted in 1952, and the last was the Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, introduced by Anand Narain Mulla and enacted in 1970. Counts that appear larger are measuring something different, usually Bills passed by one House only, Bills discussed, or Bills introduced, of which there have been many thousands.

Q: Why do private member Bills rarely pass?

Four structural reasons combine. Time is rationed: private members’ business receives the last two and a half hours of Friday sittings, and those hours are regularly absorbed by government business, adjournments and thin attendance. Precedence is decided by ballot, so a Bill may wait sessions for discussion; PRS Legislative Research found that roughly four per cent of the private member Bills introduced in the Fourteenth Lok Sabha were discussed at all. Money is fenced off: Articles 117(1) and 117(3) require the President’s recommendation, which means the government’s consent, before a Bill touching taxation or Consolidated Fund expenditure can be introduced or passed. And the convention of withdrawal ends most debates that do occur, the member accepting a ministerial assurance in place of a vote the government’s majority would decide.

Q: How does a repealing and amending Act work?

A repealing and amending Act is a single statute whose operative content sits in schedules. Its First Schedule lists enactments repealed, each identified by year, number and short title, with the extent of repeal stated, usually the whole Act. A further schedule records minor textual amendments to Acts that stay in force. The Act is prepared by the Legislative Department of the Ministry of Law and Justice from the recommendations of commissions and committees, after obtaining the concurrence of the ministry administering each listed Act, and it carries a savings clause protecting things done under the repealed enactments and the amendments they had made. Passed in the ordinary way, it removes dead enactments in bulk without reopening the policy of any living statute.

Q: Which committees recommended mass repeal?

Three identification exercises stand behind the modern drives, and they should not be merged. The Commission on Review of Administrative Laws, chaired by P. C. Jain and reporting in September 1998, recommended the repeal of one thousand three hundred and eighty-three Acts, a figure the Law Ministry gave to the Lok Sabha in March 2017, adding that four hundred and fifteen had been repealed by April 2014. The twentieth Law Commission’s Reports 248 to 251 of 2014 recommended two hundred and eighty-nine repeals between them. The two-member committee chaired by R. Ramanujam, appointed by the Prime Minister’s Office in September 2014, counted two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one central Acts and identified one thousand seven hundred and forty-one for repeal.

Q: How many obsolete laws have been repealed?

The figure must be quoted with its source and period. In the debate on the Repealing and Amending Act, 2023, the Minister of Law and Justice, Arjun Ram Meghwal, stated that one thousand four hundred and eighty-six Acts had been repealed since 2014 and that the seventy-six repeals in that Act would take the total to one thousand five hundred and sixty-two. The government has since stated in Parliament that the total stands at one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five. These are counts of enactments removed, dominated by spent Appropriation Acts and absorbed amending Acts: the Appropriation Acts (Repeal) Act, 2016 alone removed seven hundred and fifty-eight. They are not counts of living regulatory regimes abolished, and should never be presented as such.

Q: Does repeal reach the statutes that matter?

On the evidence of the statutes this series has examined, largely it does not, and the reason is categorical rather than accidental. Repeal drives remove enactments that are spent, superseded or obsolete, where removal changes nothing in operation. The statutes raising live questions sit in categories a drive cannot process: the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1951, whose licensing mechanism was disapplied by notification in 1991, has never been repealed; the monopolies statute survived the deletion of its operative core in 1991 by eighteen years before a successor Act’s repeal closed it in 2009; and the provident fund statute stands listed for repeal in the Code on Social Security, 2020, under a repeal no notification has carried into effect.

Q: What is decriminalisation of minor offences?

Decriminalisation is the removal of criminal punishment, principally imprisonment, from defaults under a statute that remains in force, substituting monetary penalties, administrative adjudication or warnings. Its governing Indian example is the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, which, as the Press Information Bureau recorded at its notification in August 2023, decriminalised one hundred and eighty-three provisions across forty-two central Acts administered by nineteen ministries. The conduct regulated stays regulated; the regulator keeps the power to penalise; what changes is that a technical or procedural lapse no longer exposes a citizen or a business to prosecution and a prison term. It is therefore a reform of live law, the opposite in character of repeal, which removes dead law.

Q: What is the difference between a private member Bill and a government Bill?

The texts may be identical; everything around them differs. A government Bill is introduced by a minister, drafted by the Legislative Department, approved by the Cabinet, supported by the majority, and allotted time by the government that controls the calendar. A private member Bill is introduced by a member who is not a minister, is drafted by the member with limited secretarial assistance, requires one month’s notice, takes its chances in a ballot, and is debated, if at all, in the Friday afternoon allotment for private members’ business. A government Bill’s defeat can end a ministry; a private member Bill’s defeat is a routine entry in the proceedings. The constitutional stages after introduction are the same for both.

Q: How much notice must a member give before introducing a private member Bill?

One month. The rules of procedure of the Lok Sabha require a member who is not a minister to give one month’s notice of the intention to move for leave to introduce a Bill, and the Rajya Sabha’s rules impose the same discipline on private members there. The notice must be accompanied by the full text of the Bill and a statement of its objects and reasons, so the member’s drafting work is complete before the procedural journey begins. The contrast with government Bills, for which a far shorter notice suffices, is deliberate: the long notice, the ballot that follows it and the Friday allotment together filter the volume of private proposals down to what the calendar can hold.

Q: How does the ballot for private member Bills work?

Because notices of private member Bills always exceed the Fridays available, precedence among them is settled by ballot under the authority of the Speaker in the Lok Sabha and the Chairman in the Rajya Sabha. The ballot fixes the order in which members may introduce their Bills on the allotted days and, for Bills already introduced, the order in which they stand for consideration. A member drawn early in the ballot may introduce in the session of notice; a member drawn late may wait through a session or more, and a Bill that is never reached simply remains pending in the queue. The Committee on Private Members’ Bills and Resolutions then classifies introduced Bills and recommends discussion time for those it ranks most significant.

Q: On which day does Parliament take up private members’ business?

Friday. The Lok Sabha’s rules allot the last two and a half hours of the Friday sitting to private members’ business, and the Rajya Sabha allots a corresponding block on Friday afternoons, the time alternating between private members’ Bills and private members’ resolutions in each House. The choice of the week’s last sitting has shaped the institution’s fate. By Friday afternoon members are leaving for their constituencies, attendance thins, and the allotted hours are the first to be surrendered when government business overruns, when a sitting is extended for a government Bill, or when the House adjourns early. The day is not an accident of scheduling; it is a statement of the priority the institution is given.

Q: Can a private member Bill become a Money Bill or authorise spending from the Consolidated Fund?

No, in either case, without the government’s consent expressed through the President’s recommendation. A Bill containing only the matters listed in Article 110 is a Money Bill; Article 117(1) bars the introduction of any Bill or amendment making provision for the taxation and fund matters in clauses (a) to (f) of Article 110(1) except on the President’s recommendation, and Article 110 Bills may be introduced only in the Lok Sabha. Separately, Article 117(3) bars either House from passing any Bill that would involve expenditure from the Consolidated Fund unless the President has recommended its consideration. Since the President acts on ministerial advice, a private member who drafts a priced proposal is asking the government to adopt it, and adoption means a government Bill.

Q: What happens to a private member Bill when the Lok Sabha is dissolved?

It depends on where the Bill stands, under Article 107. Prorogation never kills a Bill, as Article 107(3) provides. On dissolution of the Lok Sabha, Article 107(5) lapses every Bill pending in the Lok Sabha and every Bill passed by the Lok Sabha that is pending in the Rajya Sabha. A Bill passed by the Rajya Sabha and transmitted to the Lok Sabha is pending in the Lok Sabha, so it lapses as well; that was the fate of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2015, which the Sixteenth Lok Sabha never took up and which lapsed at its dissolution in 2019. Article 107(4) preserves only a Bill pending in the Rajya Sabha that the Lok Sabha has not passed.

Q: What became of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill after the Rajya Sabha passed it in 2015?

It never became law. The Rajya Sabha passed the Bill, moved by Tiruchi Siva, unanimously on 24 April 2015, the first private member Bill that House had passed in forty-five years, after Siva refused the government’s request to withdraw it in exchange for an assurance of official legislation. The Bill then went to the Lok Sabha, where it was introduced in February 2016 in the charge of Baijayant Panda. The Lok Sabha never took it up for consideration and passing. The government introduced and enacted its own measure, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, in different terms. When the Sixteenth Lok Sabha was dissolved in 2019, Siva’s Bill, pending in that House, lapsed under Article 107(5).

Q: What does the Committee on Private Members’ Bills and Resolutions do?

It is the House’s own rationing device for the Friday institution. Each House maintains a Committee on Private Members’ Bills and Resolutions; in the Lok Sabha it is chaired by the Deputy Speaker. The committee examines private member Bills after their introduction, classifies them by their nature, urgency and importance into categories, and recommends the time that should be allotted to the discussion of those it ranks highest. It performs a corresponding sifting of private members’ resolutions. Its existence is an admission, written into the committee system, that the volume of private proposals exceeds the allotted hours by an order of magnitude, and that somebody must choose which proposals the scarce time will serve.

Q: What happens to rights, liabilities and pending cases when a statute is repealed?

They survive, unless the repealing Act says otherwise. Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 states the default: repeal does not revive anything not in force, does not affect the previous operation of the repealed enactment or anything duly done under it, does not disturb any right, privilege, obligation or liability acquired or incurred, does not erase any penalty or punishment incurred for an offence against it, and leaves investigations and legal proceedings to be instituted or continued as if the repealing Act had not been passed. Section 6A preserves the amendments an amending Act made even when that Act is itself repealed, and repealing Acts add their own savings clauses. This is why repeal of an obsolete statute rarely alters any person’s position.

Q: Why do obsolete statutes remain on the statute book instead of lapsing on their own?

Because Indian law knows no doctrine of desuetude. A statute does not expire through disuse, however long or complete the disuse, and repeal requires a positive act of the legislature competent to repeal it. Article 372(1) carried the entire pre-Constitution statute book into the Republic, and everything enacted since remains in force until a repealing Act, a successor statute, expiry by its own terms or a court’s annulment ends it. Implied repeal exists but is narrowly applied, since courts lean against reading a later Act as silently destroying an earlier one. The accumulation is therefore the default condition of the system, and only deliberate exercises, of the kind conducted since 2014, reduce the stock.

Q: What is a sunset clause, and why do Indian statutes so rarely contain one?

A sunset clause is a provision by which a statute, or a part of it, repeals itself on a stated date unless the legislature renews it. It converts expiry from an act of legislative housekeeping into the default, forcing a periodic decision about whether the law deserves to continue. Indian statutes rarely contain one: the legislative habit has been to enact in perpetuity and to leave termination to later repeal. The Law Commission, in its 2014 reports on obsolete laws, identified the absence of sunset clauses as a direct cause of accumulation, pointing to Appropriation Acts, which authorise a single year’s expenditure and are spent within months, yet were enacted without self-repealing provisions and accumulated by the hundred until removed in bulk in 2016.

Q: Apart from repealing enactments, what else does a repealing and amending Act do?

It corrects the living statute book. The amending limb of the Act makes minor, textual amendments to Acts that remain in force: substituting a word, updating a cross-reference to a provision that has been renumbered or repealed, and removing obvious drafting errors, all by entries in a schedule so that no policy question is reopened. Its savings clause does quieter work of equal importance, protecting the operation of repealed enactments in other statutes that cite them and preserving things done under them. The double title is exact: the Act repeals what is dead and amends, at the level of the text only, what is alive, and confusing the second function with substantive amendment misreads the instrument.