June,23,2017:
During 2014 election campaign, Modi had promised that for every law passed, he would repeal 10 obsolete ones.
Under Indian Motor Vehicles Act 1914, an inspector in Andhra Pradesh must have well-brushed teeth, and will be disqualified if he has a pigeon chest, knock knees, flatfeet and hammer toes.
This is one among the tangle of bizarre, archaic laws, which survived for the years like a relic in a museum but with no relevance in the modern India.
Many of these rules put up obstacles to running the smooth administration and ease to do the business.
Narendra Modi Government had made it clear at its inception that it was time for these dinosaurs to go extinct.
Among the myriad laws in India, there are those that made strange demands. A century-old one said toll tax for boats ferrying passengers across river Ganga cannot be more than two annas a denomination which is not in use any more.
According to another one, Policemen in some of the States have to ensure that the air-dropped pamphlets do not fall in their areas. This was aimed to foil propaganda campaign during the World War II.
A 200-year-old law allowed British monarch to review the decisions of all the Indian courts. But these Acts are now history.
Modi Government is now creating a record of the sorts in scrapping these old, redundant and the archaic laws from the statute books.
While the successive governments could remove omly 1,301 obsolete laws which came in way of smooth administration and the economic growth in 65 years, present Central Government has managed to weed out as many as 1,200 Acts in just three years.
As many as 1,824 more obsolete Central Acts have been identified for the repeal.
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