Jan Vishwas 2.0 Bill clears both Houses

A decriminalisation law amending 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts to ease doing business and ease living.

What happened

• Both Houses of Parliament passed the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 — the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha clearing the second-generation decriminalisation law.
• The Bill amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts falling under 23 Ministries.
• Of these, 717 provisions are decriminalised in the name of Ease of Doing Business, and 67 are amended in the name of Ease of Living.
• Taken together, the amendments rationalise over 1,000 offences by removing or recalibrating minor and technical infractions.
• It was first introduced on 18 August 2025 as the Jan Vishwas Bill, 2025 — then covering 355 provisions across 16 Acts under 10 Ministries — and referred to a Lok Sabha Select Committee.
• The Select Committee, chaired by Tejasvi Surya, held 49 sittings, submitted its report on 13 March 2026, and recommended decriminalisation across 62 additional Central Acts, sharply widening the Bill's reach before passage.

Background & context

The Jan Vishwas family belongs to the Union Government's larger trust-based-governance and regulatory-reform agenda, steered for this measure by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry (its Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade is the standard nodal home for the ease-of-doing-business and decriminalisation drive). The literal sense of the name is instructive: Jan Vishwas means "people's trust" or "public trust", and the stated premise of the law is that an over-criminalised statute book treats ordinary citizens and small businesses as suspected offenders for routine, technical lapses, eroding that trust.

The 2026 Bill is not a standalone event but the successor to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 — the first instalment of this exercise. The 2023 Act decriminalised a set of minor offences across dozens of Central Acts, converting imprisonment-and-fine penalties into monetary penalties, compounding, or warnings, and is generally cited as having touched the order of 180-odd provisions across around 42 Central Acts spanning multiple ministries. That first law established the template the 2026 Bill scales up: identify minor offences scattered through the statute book, strip out imprisonment for purely technical or procedural breaches, and replace it with graded civil or monetary consequences while keeping genuinely harmful conduct criminal.

The 2026 measure is therefore best read as "Jan Vishwas 2.0" — a second, much larger wave. Its journey through Parliament is itself examinable. Introduced as the 2025 Bill, it was referred to a Lok Sabha Select Committee rather than passed directly, signalling pre-legislative scrutiny. A Select Committee is a committee of a single House constituted to examine a specific Bill referred to it (distinct from a Joint Committee, which draws members from both Houses, and from the permanent Department-related Standing Committees). After 49 sittings and a report tabled on 13 March 2026, the Committee's recommendation to extend decriminalisation across 62 further Central Acts explains the jump from the introduced figure of 355 provisions / 16 Acts / 10 Ministries to the final 784 provisions / 79 Acts / 23 Ministries — more than doubling the provisions and almost quintupling the number of Acts touched.

This reform also sits alongside the machinery the government has built to track subordinate legislation and regulatory burden, such as the Subordinate Legislation Monitoring System (SLMS) portal used to monitor the stages of delegated legislation. The decriminalisation push, the de-licensing and compliance-reduction drive, and these monitoring tools are parts of the same "minimum government, maximum governance" regulatory-reform stack.

For Prelims

• Name: Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 — passed by both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.
• Literal meaning: Jan Vishwas = "people's / public trust"; the law's organising idea is trust-based governance.
• Scale: 784 provisions amended across 79 Central Acts under 23 Ministries.
• Split: 717 provisions decriminalised (Ease of Doing Business) · 67 provisions amended (Ease of Living).
• Effect: rationalises over 1,000 offences by removing or recalibrating minor and technical offences.
• Nodal ministry: Ministry of Commerce & Industry (ease-of-doing-business / decriminalisation drive).
• Legislative trail: introduced 18 Aug 2025 as the Jan Vishwas Bill, 2025 (355 provisions · 16 Acts · 10 Ministries).
• Scrutiny: referred to a Lok Sabha Select Committee chaired by Tejasvi Surya · 49 sittings · report on 13 Mar 2026 · recommended decriminalisation across 62 additional Central Acts.
• Lineage: successor to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, the first decriminalisation instalment.
• Mechanism: typically replaces imprisonment for minor/technical breaches with monetary penalties, compounding, or warnings — it does not abolish the underlying duties, only the criminal sanction for petty lapses.

What it is NOT: It is not a single new Act with one subject — it is an omnibus amending law that simultaneously edits dozens of pre-existing Central Acts. It does not repeal those parent Acts, nor does it decriminalise serious offences; it targets minor, technical and procedural infractions only. It is not the same as the 2023 Jan Vishwas Act — that was the first round; this 2026 Bill is the larger second round. The Select Committee that scrutinised it was a Lok Sabha Select Committee, not a Joint Parliamentary Committee and not a Department-related Standing Committee.

The set it belongs to (the regulatory-reform family): Jan Vishwas Act, 2023 (first instalment) · Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 (this, the second instalment) · the broader Ease of Doing Business and compliance-reduction drive (de-licensing, decriminalisation, digitisation, de-duplication of filings) · monitoring tools such as the SLMS portal for subordinate legislation. Remembering the pair "2023 Act → 2026 Bill" and the two-pronged framing "Ease of Doing Business + Ease of Living" survives the "match the pairs" and "how many of these are correct" patterns.

Why it matters

The problem the law addresses is statutory over-criminalisation. Over decades, Indian Central legislation accumulated thousands of offences carrying imprisonment for breaches that are essentially procedural — a missed filing, a labelling error, a delayed registration. For small firms and ordinary citizens this raised the cost of compliance, created room for harassment and rent-seeking, and clogged courts with petty matters. By converting such infractions into civil or monetary consequences, the reform aims to lower the compliance burden, improve the investment climate, and free judicial and administrative bandwidth for genuinely serious wrongdoing.

The two-pronged framing matters for governance: the 717 decriminalised provisions are pitched at Ease of Doing Business (the business and investor interface with the State), while the 67 amended provisions are pitched at Ease of Living (the citizen's everyday interface with regulation). Scaling the exercise from the 2023 Act's narrower base to 784 provisions across 79 Acts signals that decriminalisation is being institutionalised as a recurring legislative method rather than a one-off cleanup. At the same time, the design caution is real and examinable: decriminalisation must be calibrated so that recalibrating penalties does not weaken deterrence where public health, safety, environmental protection or consumer interest are genuinely at stake — which is precisely the balance a Select Committee scrutiny is meant to test.

How it compares with the 2023 Act: the first Jan Vishwas law is the natural peer. The 2023 Act was the proof of concept, touching a more limited set of provisions across roughly four dozen Central Acts; the 2026 Bill applies the identical philosophy at far greater scale — almost five times as many Acts and more than double the provisions — and adds the explicit Ease of Living strand alongside Ease of Doing Business. Where the 2023 Act read as a targeted cleanup, the 2026 Bill reads as the consolidation of decriminalisation into a standing instrument of regulatory policy. The method in both is the same and worth stating precisely: the parent Acts and their substantive obligations survive; what changes is the consequence for breach, with imprisonment for minor and technical lapses giving way to monetary penalties, compounding or graded administrative action.

For the citizen and the small enterprise, the practical promise is fewer criminal entanglements over paperwork and lower fear of routine inspection turning into prosecution. For the State, it is a leaner enforcement load and courts less burdened by trivial matters. The political-economy reading is that a credible, repeated decriminalisation programme signals regulatory predictability to investors — one reason the reform is framed around restoring trust between the citizen and the law rather than merely cutting red tape.

For Mains