Laws in India: changes over the years
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Major changes
2014-2024 April
Prabhash K Dutta, April 18, 2024: The Times of India
From new criminal code to triple talaq and internet regulations, and the failed attempt at bringing new farming legislation, a look at the government's push to change laws in the past 10 years
As prime ministerial candidate in 2014, Narendra Modi promised that if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to office, his government would repeal 10 obsolete laws for every new one passed. Parliamentary affairs ministry data shows that 346 Bills have been passed since the BJP government came to power in 2014 — 180 during the 16th Lok Sabha and 166 during the outgoing 17th Lok Sabha.
In the 2023 winter session of Parliament, law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal said 1,562 defunct laws have been repealed since 2014.
An overhaul of the legal framework has been a pet theme of the BJP. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee led the NDA government in the late 1990s, a panel was set up under retired IAS officer PC Jain to review administrative laws. The commission recommended in 1998 to scrap more than 1,300 of about 2,500 central laws.
By “refining and scrapping outdated laws”, the government has created a new legal framework. Here’s a look at some of the changes.
New criminal code
Known to push for a Uniform Civil Code — now left to states to roll it out — the BJP government sprang a surprise last year when it introduced three criminal laws to replace the colonial-era Indian Penal Code (IPC), Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and the Indian Evidence Act. Notified in February, the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA) will come into effect from July 1.
The new set of laws means both the authorities and the public (and film scriptwriters too) will have to memorise new sections for old crimes. For instance, while IPC Section 302 declared murder a crime and provided for punishment under Section 303, Section 104 of the BNS will now be invoked in such cases. Mob lynching was not a separately identified crime under the IPC. Under the BNS, Section 103 makes it a criminal offence.
Overall, while the IPC had 511 Sections, BNS has 358. Similarly, while CrPC had 484 Sections, BNSS has 531. The Evidence Act had 166 Sections, but BSA has 170.
Sedition, as we know under IPC Section 124, has ceased to be a crime. However, BNS Section 150 deals with “offences against the state”, expressly criminalising “acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India”.
Treason (a crime against the nation, in contrast to sedition, which is an act against the government) through armed revolution has been defined as a crime. Introducing the new legislation, home minister Amit Shah said in December 2023, “Any activity will be considered treason only if it is intended against the integrity, sovereignty and unity of the nation and not just because it is against the government. Anyone can say anything against the government, but if someone interferes with the country’s flag, security or property, they will go to jail.”
Terrorists and terrorism have been defined afresh. A person using dynamite, poisonous gas, etc against the well-being of the nation is a terrorist. An activity threatening the security of the government of India, any state or any foreign government or any international government organisation is terrorism.
Now, trial in absentia (for example, in cases of fugitives) is possible if the accused does not appear before a court within 90 days.
Laws dealing with rape and sexual assaults have been made gender-neutral. Life-long imprisonment or death penalty has been provided for raping minors. In the case of a gangrape, the convict will spend the rest of their lives in prison.
New tax regime
Having come to power promising “achche din”, the Modi government began reshaping India’s tax structure from its first budget itself. In 2014, then finance minister Arun Jaitley increased the limit of investment exempted from income tax under 80C from ₹50,000 to ₹1.5 lakh. Household savings was one of the key economic concerns during the final years of the Manmohan Singh government.
However, the big tax reshuffle happened in 2017. While the direct income tax rate for the ₹2.5-5 lakh slab was reduced from 10% to 5%, the indirect tax structure was overhauled. Through a special session of Parliament, the government introduced the goods and services tax (GST), subsuming most of the indirect taxes — sales, excise and value-added tax — with the idea of “one nation, one tax”.
An important feature of GST is that the Centre has lost its power to change indirect tax structure decisions — it’s the domain of the GST Council now, where like any other state government, the Centre is just one stakeholder.
Now, over 1,300 goods and 500 services are categorised under four tax slabs, excluding the no-tax brackets — 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%. The government says the indirect tax collection has doubled since the GST rollout.
The direct income tax structure underwent significant changes in 2019 and 2020. In the 2019 interim budget, then finance minister Piyush Goyal increased the income tax exemption limit from ₹2.5 lakh to ₹5 lakh.
The next year, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced the new income tax regime — which runs parallel to the old one — for those who forego all benefits coming from standard deductions and provisions of exemptions under various schemes.
Under the new regime, no income tax is charged on earnings up to ₹7 lakh a year. To make the new regime more attractive, Sitharaman introduced an additional exemption by allowing a standard deduction of ₹50,000 — so, no income tax up to ₹7.5 lakh.
New reservation law
When the Constitution was adopted, it provided for the reservation of jobs for historically disadvantaged communities — scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) who were identified as backward classes. In the following decades, a campaign was built to identify more backward classes as the number of jobs that the growing population of India needed was not to be found. Finally, in 1990, the VP Singh government decided to implement the recommendations of the BP Mandal Commission, which had identified other backward classes based on their caste standings.
The composite quota structure reserved 49.5% of new government jobs. When challenged in the Supreme Court, the latter upheld the reservation scheme, capping the upper limit of reservation in jobs and higher education at 50% of the available seats in 1993 in the Indira Sawhney judgment.
Subsequently, several attempts by various state governments to raise the reservation bar were struck down by the court — except the Tamil Nadu government’s 69% quota scheme, which was placed in the Ninth Schedule to protect it from being contested in court.
This 50% quota structure changed in 2019. The Modi government amended the Constitution to provide for a 10% reservation in jobs for the economically weaker class (EWS) from the “general category” (upper caste) applicants. This pushed the total reservation to 60%, leaving a minority of seats in a job notification to open merit selection.
This law was challenged, but the Supreme Court upheld it in 2022.
New divorce law for Muslims
Through Supreme Court rulings and legislation brought by the government, the legal framework for divorce has undergone a significant change. The most-debated case has been the declaration that instant triple talaq among Muslims is illegal and punishable with a jail term.
Following a 2017 ruling of the Supreme Court, the government brought the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage), 2019, criminalising instant triple talaq in any form — spoken, written or communicated electronically. It invites imprisonment for up to three years.
Some of the other changes in divorce laws are:
New citizenship law
The Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955 defined who are Indian citizens and how one can acquire citizenship. All those living in India or choosing India as their country during Independence and Partition in 1947 were recognised as Indian citizens. Those born between January 26, 1950, (when the Constitution came into force), and June 30, 1987, were citizens by birth. Those born on or after July 1, 1987, were identified as Indian citizens if one of their parents was an Indian citizen at their birth.
The laws to acquire citizenship required a foreigner to be domiciled in India for 12 years before applying for Indian nationality through naturalisation.
This law was amended in 2019 through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). It fast-tracked acquiring citizenship for people already living in India illegally if they belonged to one of the six identified communities — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians but not Muslims — if they came from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan before 2015.
The amendment, which has triggered a massive controversy, has been challenged in the Supreme Court, which in the last hearing on March 19 issued a notice to the Centre. It refused to stay the execution of the law, whose rules were notified in March, almost five years after Parliament passed the Bill.
New J&K law
From 1957 to 2019, India was governed by two Constitutions. Jammu and Kashmir had its own Constitution and criminal code (the Ranbir Penal Code). The Modi government scrapped the special status that Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed under Article 370 of the Constitution of India, which had allowed the functioning of a separate Constitution in one of its border states.
In 2019, the government through an executive order ceased the operation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, “fully integrating” it with the rest of India. The government also brought a reorganisation law to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its statehood and split it geographically into two Union Territories. Ladakh was created as a separate Union Territory.
New Insolvency and Banking Code
Loan defaults and non-performing assets (NPAs) were among the key criticisms of the Manmohan Singh government. Two years after coming to power, the Modi government brought the Insolvency and Banking Code (IBC) as a transformative tool to resolve stressed assets and improve the credit culture in India.
The IBC amended and consolidated existing laws relating to insolvency and bankruptcy of corporate persons, partnership firms and individuals. A growing economy like India needs a healthy credit flow. But when a company suffers economic setbacks, it starts defaulting on loan repayments. In a cascading effect, this becomes unviable for the economy as banks suffer a lot and refuse to offer new loans, which may lead to policy paralysis.
Under the IBC, if insolvency is triggered, two legal outcomes are on the offer now — resolution or liquidation. The National Company Law Tribunal comes into the picture to decide whether the company can be revived through restructuring the loans or a new ownership plan, or else the company’s assets are liquidated to repay the loans.
NJAC setback
The government’s attempt to reform how judges are appointed in high courts and the Supreme Court resulted in a major setback and a loss of face. It brought the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Act in 2014, providing an alternative mechanism for appointing judges to the higher judiciary. The government said it would bring greater transparency and accountability to the judiciary.
It created the NJAC as a body responsible for judicial appointments. It consisted of the Chief Justice of India (CJI), two senior-most Supreme Court judges, the Union law minister and two eminent persons nominated by a committee comprising the PM, the CJIndia and the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
In 2015, the apex court struck down the NJAC Act, saying the law violated the basic structure of the Constitution, and restored the collegium system — created by a Supreme Court judgment in 1993 and currently comprises the CJI and four other judges from the court. Since then, ministers and Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar have spoken openly against the system of judges appointing fellow judges in the higher judiciary.
The farm law experiment
Doubling the income of farmers was one of the promises Modi made in his public speeches. While farmers interpreted it mainly as a substantial hike in the minimum support price (MSP) that the government announces twice a year, the government opted for a farm reform approach. It brought three farm laws in 2020 aimed at reforming the agricultural sector.
The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, was meant to create an ecosystem where farmers could sell their produce outside the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) or mandis regulated by state governments. It allowed farmers to engage in trade and commerce of agricultural produce outside the physical premises of APMCs, thereby providing them with more options and potentially better prices.
The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020, aimed at facilitating contract farming by enabling farmers to enter into agreements with buyers, including agribusiness firms, exporters and retailers. These agreements would outline the terms and conditions of supply, quality standards and prices for agricultural produce. The law aimed to provide farmers with assured prices and access to modern technology and inputs through contract farming arrangements.
The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, sought to amend the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, by deregulating the production, supply and distribution of certain agri commodities. It removed commodities such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, onions and potatoes from the list of essential commodities subject to stockholding limits except under extraordinary circumstances like war, famine, natural calamities or price spikes.
Farmers’ associations, particularly from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, launched a massive protest, with an over a year-long sit-in at Delhi borders demanding the rollback of the laws. In November 2021, months ahead of polls in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and three other states, Modi announced that the three laws would be repealed.
Internet laws
The laws governing cyberspace have changed a lot under the Modi government, which was drawn to the sector, particularly during the protests against the CAA and farm laws. Both protests drew their strength in controlling narratives from the internet and social media. As the protests swelled, the government found that its requests for taking down content it considered offensive and inappropriate were met with resistance by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google.
In February 2021, the government brought the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules to govern tech platforms. One of the requirements was that the tech companies had to appoint three Indian residents as full-time executives under the 2021 IT Rules.
Recently, the government announced a fact-check unit under the information and broadcasting ministry’s Press Information Bureau (PIB). The provision empowered the PIB unit to decide what is “fake” news. This has been challenged in the apex court, which has stayed the rolling out of this fact-checking unit.
According to the Freedom House report published in 2023, India topped the world for five years in a row — 2016 to 2022 — in imposing internet bans, accounting for over 60% of all blackouts during the period.
According to data collected by the Software Freedom Law Centre, 780 internet shutdowns were imposed in India between 2014 and 2023. More than 700 hours of internet shutdown were imposed in 2023.
The privacy law
In 2017, the Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right. The judgment also said that the right to informational privacy is part of this right. Following this, the government brought four drafts of the Personal Data Protection Bill — in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023, when the legislation was finally passed by Parliament.
