PIB TrackerJan Vishwas Bill decriminalises 717 minor offences
Parliament has passed a single Bill that amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts, replacing jail for minor lapses with graded civil penalties.
What happened
- Both Houses of Parliament passed the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026, an omnibus Bill that edits many laws at once instead of amending each separately.
- It amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts that are administered by 23 different Ministries — a whole-of-government clean-up of the statute book.
- Of these, 717 provisions are decriminalised to ease doing business, and 67 provisions are amended to ease living for ordinary citizens.
- The Bill rationalises more than 1,000 offences by stripping out minor offences, where the punishment was disproportionate to the actual harm caused.
- Its core technique: replace imprisonment for minor procedural violations with graded monetary penalties, backed by an adjudication mechanism, while keeping criminal action for serious violations that genuinely threaten public health and safety.
- The health-sector chapter is the showcase — it rewrites penalty clauses across five major health laws and, for the first time in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, creates dedicated adjudicating authorities outside the courts.
Background & context
The full name is the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 — "Jan Vishwas" literally means "public trust" or "people's trust" in Hindi. The name is the policy in two words: the Government's argument is that a regulatory state which threatens to jail a business owner for failing to maintain a register, or to display a notice, governs by fear rather than by trust. The Jan Vishwas family of laws is the legislative arm of two stated Government objectives that recur across schemes and reforms — Ease of Doing Business (lowering the cost and risk of running an enterprise) and Ease of Living (lowering the everyday compliance friction faced by citizens).
This 2026 Bill is the successor to the first Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023. That earlier Act was the proof-of-concept: it decriminalised 183 provisions across 42 Central Acts, converting a swathe of imprisonment clauses into monetary penalties. The 2026 Bill is far larger in scope — 717 provisions decriminalised against the 2023 Act's 183, and 79 Acts touched against 42 — signalling that the first round was treated as a pilot and the model is now being applied at scale across the statute book.
Decriminalisation by omnibus amendment also sits inside a wider reform lineage. India has, in parallel, overhauled its core criminal codes (the colonial-era penal and procedural laws have been replaced by new criminal statutes) and run a sustained "minimum government, maximum governance" and regulatory-cholesterol-reduction agenda — repealing obsolete laws and removing redundant compliances. The Jan Vishwas approach is distinct from all of these: it does not repeal the parent laws, and it does not touch their substantive standards; it only changes the consequence attached to a breach, swapping the criminal track for a civil/administrative one for the least serious infractions.
For Prelims
- Entity: Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 — an omnibus amendment Bill (one Bill amending many separate Acts).
- Status: passed by both Houses of Parliament; "Jan Vishwas" = public/people's trust.
- Scale: 784 provisions amended · 79 Central Acts · 23 Ministries · 717 decriminalised (Ease of Doing Business) + 67 amended (Ease of Living).
- Mechanism: imprisonment for minor procedural lapses → graded monetary penalties + an adjudication (civil penalty) mechanism; serious public-health violations stay criminal.
- Predecessor: Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 — decriminalised 183 provisions across 42 Acts.
- Health-sector Acts amended (the named set): Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 · Pharmacy Act, 1948 · Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 · Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010 · National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions (NCAHP) Act, 2021.
- New machinery in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act: adjudicating authorities appointed by the Central and State Governments; a defined process of show-cause notice → personal hearing → appellate mechanism; an adjudication route introduced for violations under Section 27A(ii) and Section 28A.
- Cosmetics carve-out: minor cosmetics violations (other than spurious or adulterated products) move to civil penalty — but spurious/adulterated products are not let off the criminal hook.
- What it is NOT: it is not a repeal of these 79 Acts — the parent laws and their standards survive; only penalties for minor breaches change. It is not a blanket amnesty — serious violations affecting public health and safety remain criminal. It is not the same as the new criminal codes that replaced the colonial penal and procedural laws — Jan Vishwas amends sectoral economic/regulatory statutes, not the general criminal law. And it is not the 2023 Act — the 2026 Bill is its larger successor (717 vs 183 provisions, 79 vs 42 Acts).
- The full reform spectrum it belongs to (for "match the pairs"): repeal of obsolete laws (removing a law) · decriminalisation (Jan Vishwas — keeping the law, softening the penalty) · simplification of compliances (reducing filings/returns) · recodification (new criminal codes replacing old ones). Jan Vishwas is squarely the decriminalisation instrument.
Why it matters
The problem the Bill addresses is "over-criminalisation": across decades, Indian regulatory statutes accumulated thousands of offences that attached imprisonment to what are, in substance, paperwork failures — a missing register, an unfiled return, a lapsed display notice. For a small enterprise or a healthcare professional, the mere threat of a criminal case carries outsized consequences: arrest risk, court appearances, legal cost, reputational damage, and years of litigation, all for an infraction that caused no real harm. That climate, the Government argues, deters enterprise and breeds rent-seeking, because a criminal hook gives a frontline inspector disproportionate leverage.
By converting minor offences into civil penalties handled by an adjudicating authority, the Bill aims to do three things at once. It decongests the courts, because minor compliance disputes no longer enter the criminal justice system and are resolved administratively instead. It makes enforcement predictable and proportionate — a graded penalty schedule means the consequence is known in advance and scaled to the breach, rather than an all-or-nothing prosecution. And it shifts the regulator-citizen relationship from one of suspicion to one the Government frames as trust-based, where the default response to a minor lapse is correction, not prosecution. The health-sector example is instructive: a cosmetics firm that fails to maintain a statutory record can now be issued a show-cause notice, given a hearing, and fined through a civil process with a right of appeal — without a criminal trial — while a firm selling spurious or adulterated products still faces the full criminal sanction. The proportionality cut is deliberate, not a dilution of public-health protection.
The breadth — 23 Ministries acting through a single Bill — is itself the point. Reforming each Act one at a time would take years of separate parliamentary cycles; the omnibus route lets the Government move the whole regulatory stock in one stroke, which is why the model was scaled up so sharply from the 2023 Act. The flip side, and the standard critique of omnibus legislation, is reduced clause-by-clause scrutiny: when 79 Acts move together, individual amendments get less debate than they would as standalone Bills, which is the trade-off an aspirant should be able to name in a Mains answer.