Beyond the Red Tape: The Jan Vishwas Bill, 2026 and India’s Trust Revolution

In the life of an organisation like Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), there are certain days that stand apart, days when a long-argued case is not merely acknowledged but acted upon with a boldness that takes even its most ardent advocates by surprise. The passage of the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026, through both Houses of Parliament this week, is one such day. After years of sustained advocacy, after hundreds of engagements with policymakers, after pre-Budget memoranda and policy briefs and direct dialogue at the highest levels of Government, what India’s Parliament has approved is not incremental reform. It is a structural revolution, and one whose scale and ambition exceeds what CII had dared to project as the most optimistic possible outcome.

Let me be direct about what this Bill does, because the numbers alone tell a compelling story. It amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts – legislation spanning 23 Ministries, covering sectors as wide-ranging as pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy, railways, intellectual property, trade standards, and urban governance. Of these 784 provisions, 717 are being decriminalised; that is, the Government is removing the possibility of imprisonment as a consequence for minor, procedural, or technical defaults. An additional 67 provisions are being rationalised for ease of living. Together with the 183 provisions decriminalised under the Jan Vishwas Act of 2023, India has now systematically dismantled the criminal compliance architecture across nearly 1,000 provisions. This is reform at a scale that few democracies have attempted in a single legislative cycle.

The Long Battle CII Fought

I want to speak honestly about the journey that led to this moment, because it is a story about how democracy’s deliberative machinery can ultimately deliver. At CII, we began making the case for decriminalisation of minor regulatory offences as a structured reform agenda almost a decade ago. Our internal task forces mapped what we called ‘compliance friction points’, which are specific instances where the law was not merely demanding but needlessly punitive, where a technical slip by a junior official could expose a CEO to criminal liability, where the regulatory default was imprisonment first and proportionality never.

We documented how India’s statute books, accumulated across decades of legislation drafted in an era when regulatory distrust was the governing assumption, were riddled with imprisonment clauses for offences that any OECD counterpart would handle through a civil fine or an administrative warning. We brought this evidence to the Government, to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, to DPIIT, to sector-specific Ministries, not as criticism, but as a shared agenda. We argued that this was not about weakening regulation, but about making it smarter, more proportionate, and more consistent with the obligations of a state that regards its citizens and businesses as partners rather than suspects.

The Jan Vishwas Act, 2023 was the first major validation of this effort which decriminalised 183 provisions in 42 Central Acts, a significant and welcome step. But we knew the landscape to be reformed was much larger.

A Government That Listened, Then Went Further

The Jan Vishwas (Amendment) Bill, 2025, introduced in August of last year, was the next step. When it was referred to a 24-member Select Committee we were optimistic but measured. What followed exceeded all expectations. The Committee held 49 sittings. It consulted government departments, state governments, industry associations, subject-matter experts, and civil society. And in its March 2026 report, it did something remarkable: it not only refined the 17 Acts originally proposed for amendment but recommended expanding the reform to cover 62 additional Central Acts. The 2025 Bill was withdrawn; the 2026 Bill that emerged from this process is a document of a fundamentally different order.

This is the moment I want to dwell on, because it reveals something important about the quality of governance at play. The Government did not merely respond to industry’s asks. It took those asks through a rigorous institutional process – a parliamentary select committee with broad consultative reach, and the outcome was more comprehensive, more evidence-based, and more far-reaching than what industry had formally proposed. Hon’ble Commerce Minister Shri Piyush Goyal articulated it well in the Rajya Sabha: a nation progresses through trust, not through fear. That philosophy is now written into law across 79 Central Acts.

What the Bill Actually Does: The Architecture of Trust

Understanding why this Bill matters requires understanding what it actually changes in practice, not in the aggregate, but in the day-to-day experience of running a business in India.

Consider the Apprentices Act, 1961. Under the old regime, a company that failed to furnish required information faced criminal prosecution. Under the new Bill, it will first receive a formal advisory, then a warning, and only upon persistent non-compliance will a financial penalty apply, determined by a domain-specialist Adjudicating Officer, appealable to an Appellate Authority, and calibrated to the severity of the breach. Or consider the Legal Metrology Act, 2009, where the Bill introduces Improvement Notices, a formal, time-bound opportunity to correct a standards non-compliance before any penalty is triggered. These are not technicalities. They are the difference between a regulatory system that punishes and one that corrects.

The critical distinction the Bill maintains is also worth emphasising. Serious offences — the manufacture of spurious drugs, wilful environmental damage, deliberate fraud, food adulteration — retain full criminal sanction. As Minister Goyal stated emphatically in Parliament: fear will exist for those who break the law knowingly. What disappears is the fear that haunts those who are trying, in good faith, to comply with a demanding regulatory environment. That is the distinction that matters.

An equally important, though often underappreciated, outcome of the Jan Vishwas Bill, 2026 is its potential to significantly ease the burden on India’s judicial system, which is plagued by a total pendency of over 50 million (5 crore) cases across all levels of the judiciary. For decades, courts have been inundated with cases arising from minor, technical, and procedural violations. By decriminalising 717 provisions, the Bill effectively stops the further build-up of pendency in these vast areas. This will allow the judiciary to focus more meaningfully on serious offences, complex commercial disputes, and matters of public importance.

What This Unlocks: Restrained Capital and Suppressed Ambition

When entrepreneurs calculate whether to expand their factory, launch a product, hire staff, or formalise their business, they are computing not just financial risk but legal risk. In the old regime, that computation included what I call ‘Criminal Risk’- the possibility that a procedural error, however inadvertent, could result in criminal proceedings. The uncertainty itself was the cost, regardless of how often that risk materialised in practice.

By removing that risk across 717 provisions, this Bill unlocks what has long been ‘Restrained Capital’ – investment that was withheld, expansions that were deferred, formalisation that was avoided, startups that were never registered, all because the regulatory environment was too hostile to the honest risk-taker. India has over 63 million MSMEs. It has, as Minister Goyal noted in Parliament, grown its startup ecosystem from around 500 registered startups in 2015 to over three lakh today. The Jan Vishwas Bill gives the next generation of that ecosystem a regulatory environment it can build within, rather than around.

The Global Signal

Let me situate this reform in the broader context in which global capital makes its decisions. India is competing, with considerable success, for a share of the supply chain realignment that geopolitical shifts are producing. The determinants of that competition are no longer just cost and market size. They include regulatory predictability, legal clarity, and the confidence that mistakes will be handled proportionately. When international investors look at a country’s regulatory architecture, they are asking: will a minor compliance error result in criminal exposure for our local management? Will our joint venture partner face imprisonment for a technical filing lapse? These are real questions that affect real investment decisions.

The Jan Vishwas (Amendment) Bill, 2026 answers those questions definitively and favourably. It aligns India’s enforcement philosophy with OECD-standard practices where civil wrongs are met with civil penalties. It signals to the world that India is capable of distinguishing between the fraudster and the honest entrepreneur. This is not a soft benefit. It is a hard competitive advantage.

CII’s Commitment Going Forward

The passage of this Bill is a moment for celebration, but not for complacency. The work of regulatory reform is never complete.

We will continue to push for the next generation of reforms: the extension of the Jan Vishwas spirit to state-level legislation, where a large body of criminalised minor offences remains unreformed; the rationalisation of the compliance calendar; the consolidation of overlapping statutes; and the expanded use of technology to make compliance less burdensome, more transparent, and more predictable. The era of trust has arrived at the Central level. The task now is to ensure it percolates to every level of governance in India.

India chose trust over fear this week. That is not a small choice. It is the choice of a nation confident enough in its people and its entrepreneurs to govern them as partners.