Legislation and policies in India are often passed with inadequate scrutiny and assessment. In this context, discuss the significance of the idea of legislative impact assessments in India. (200 words)
Refer – The Hindu
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 6 years
KEY POINTS
· Legislations seek to create a framework that helps coordinate certain governance processes or to resolve certain identified problems.
· However, Legislation and policies in India are often passed with inadequate scrutiny and assessment.
· The rush towards such laws 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.
· This creates the need for legislative impact assessments, which is slowly getting traction around the world.
Policy and Legislative Impact Assessment (P&LIA)
· A PLIA is 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.
Significance of P&LIA
· It will pre-empt possible conflicts by identifying and planning for the mitigation of all negative effects of taking an action.
· It benchmarks the said legislation against the available alternatives.
· It thus ensures that preferred options are those that are economically feasible, operationally viable, and socially acceptable.
· It would allow the common people to identify optimal law and policy changes.
· 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.
· Above all, such a framework would promote transparent and democratic law-making in the country.
Road to future
· 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.
India should also emulate such an assessment to minimise the negative effects, or at the very least, to identify them.
Nandadeep 6 years
Please review.thanks
IAS Parliament 6 years
Try to work on sentence formation. Try to be more legible. Keep writing.
Sahitya 6 years
Please review
IAS Parliament 6 years
Points are good. Rework it to satisfy the demands of the question. A good try though. Keep writing.
Manav 6 years
Kindly review it. Thanks.
IAS Parliament 6 years
Approach is good. First part of the question need to be explained. Try to add more valid points in the significance part. Keep writing.
