Demands have been increasing for an impact assessment framework before passing legislation in India.
What are the issues in law making?
A legislation seeks to create a framework that helps coordinate certain governance processes or to resolve certain identified problems.
It also articulates a standard of morality and an ethical approach that a society and government deems appropriate.
However, Legislation and policies in India are often passed with inadequate scrutiny and assessment.
The rush towards law results in policies and legal frameworks that are mostly reactive and seek to offer quick-fix solutions to complex problems.
As a result, both law-makers and citizens are frequently blindsided by the unanticipated impact of these moves and the laws often run aground on issues of implementation.
Also, the time and effort it takes to undo and resolve the issues caused by such hasty law-making compounds the problem that the law was intended to resolve, making the entire exercise of ‘fixing’ the issue futile.
Also, law-making in India suffers from lack of consciousness on potential impact on the economy, ecology, development and society in ways that might be wholly unintended by their framers.
This lack of consciousness stems from multiple causes –
The nature of political economy in India
The lack of a formal assessment structure for these laws and rules
The increasing complexity of law-making in today’s diverse and interconnected societies.
For example, the implementation of Biological Diversity Act, 2002 (BDA) shows that awareness of the BDA’s provisions is extremely limited among the judiciary and the executive.
It also reveals that the provisions of the act are so contradictory that conservation, use and development action have almost come to a standstill.
This creates the need for legislative impact assessments, which is slowly getting traction around the world.
What is the importance of Impact assessment?
There is widespread acceptance of the idea that laws and rules need to be comprehensively analysed prior to their enactment.
This is mainly done to identify the possible negative externalities from the legislation and to minimise them.
Countries like Kenya and Finland have mechanisms in place for the assessment of regulatory and legislative proposals as an essential part of their legislative process.
Thus there is a need for a policy and legislative impact assessment (PLIA) framework for India which should –
Identify the policy problem, its root cause and the need for action
Benchmark it against available alternatives
Conduct stakeholder meetings and identify potential impact
Pre-empt possible conflicts by identifying and planning for the mitigation of all negative effects of taking such an action.
Such a framework should be submitted and released to the public along with every proposed bill.
A PLIA should be a fundamentally iterative process that seeks to methodically apply a framework that assesses policies and laws at a granular level before they are put into place.
Costs and benefits of proposed legislation and policies should also be identified since laws have persistently sought to undervalue ecosystem services as well as indigenous peoples’ rights.
What lies ahead?
Establishing and following a PLIA framework in both letter and spirit would allow the common people to identify optimal law and policy changes.
It also ensures that preferred options are those that are economically feasible, operationally viable, and socially acceptable.
Above all, such a framework would promote transparent and democratic law-making in the country.
It will allow citizens to understand and debate trade-offs created by such laws even before they are formalised.
Thus the need of the hour is an impact assessment that focuses on policy and legal frameworks before they are passed.
