Challenge is wages, not jobs. Expanding Jan Vishwas interventions can help

Four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, Hammurabi articulated equal justice: An eye for an eye. His punishment prescriptions reflected power, not principle. Blinding an aristocrat led to losing your eye, but blinding a slave prescribed a fine. A similar disease — show me the employer, and I’ll show you the rule — sabotages the massive creation of formal jobs that India’s mass prosperity needs. Building on the recent remarkable decriminalisation of thousands of offences, Jan Vishwas must now expand to three interventions: Siddhant (enforce the principles of trust-based regulation); sangreh (create a single source of legislative truth), and ashwasan (guarantee that only obligations published there are enforceable).

The primary case for Jan Vishwas is high-wage job creation. Mass prosperity (we rank 128th in global per-capita GDP) did not accompany our remarkable achievement of mass democracy (30 lakh people win an election) because of a lack of land (every household could get half an acre and fit into Rajasthan and Maharashtra), labour (a third of our labour force toils in employed poverty) or capital (our equity+debt to GDP ratio equals sustainable global benchmarks). Our challenge is not jobs but wages, because the lack of Jan Vishwas breeds the 21st-century slavery of informal wage work and self-employment.

China’s per-capita GDP is five times higher than ours — we were on par in 1991. This is not because they are smarter than us or work harder than us, but because our regulatory cholesterol — the lack of transparency, consistency, and trust in law enforcement makes it hard for entrepreneurs to combine land, labour, and capital into productive, innovative, export-oriented jobs that pay high wages. This could change with three Jan Vishwas interventions:

Siddhant or the philosophy of trust: Reducing regulatory cholesterol has begun, but it’s a long road because of six toxic economic thought worlds: Prior approval (prohibited till permitted), enforcing the unenforceable (idealism with illusions that often informs regulatory role or capacity assessment), process is punishment (for the innocent), compliance and instrument blind spot (the worm’s eye view of daily life of employers through 25+ non-act/non-rule administrative instruments rather than the bird’s eye view of Acts), writing laws for edge cases (drunk driving becoming an argument against cars) and excessive criminalisation (jail is only a deterrent if cases are filed and quick prosecution is obtained). The new Jan Vishwas Siddhant’s freedom, necessity, and proportionality world view is a strong start, but we need spiritual, intellectual, and physical adoption by more than 30 million civil servants.

Sangreh, a single source of legislative truth: Our Constitution replaced the rule of rulers with the rule of law, but it also holds that Ignorantia juris non excusat: Citizens and enterprises cannot plead ignorance of the law. But our duty to know the law presupposes the state’s duty to make it knowable, understandable, and accessible. If the obligation is buried in an executive drawer, scattered across websites or hidden in a circular that nobody knows exists, the moral basis of ignorantia juris collapses. Our judiciary has often reinforced this principle. In Harla v State of Rajasthan (1952), the Supreme Court rejected secret laws, holding that citizens cannot be governed by rules “locked away in executive drawers” and unknown to those they bind. In B K Srinivasan v. State of Karnataka (1987), the Court shifted from secrecy to knowability, stressing that law must be such that both the compliant citizen and the one seeking to avoid it can know it. In Viraj Impex v Union of India (2019), it ruled that a law becomes operative only when it is properly published and reasonably brought to public notice. Global precedent is strong as well: The US has the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, the UK has legislation.gov.uk, the EU has EUR-Lex, Singapore has Statutes Online, and Australia has its Federal Register of Legislation.

Sangreh, India’s legal and regulatory digital public infrastructure, must become the canon for every legal right and obligation. Every ministry and state government can maintain its official legal repository, while sangreh aggregates and indexes these sources into a unified, searchable, machine-readable and API-enabled open national view. This reform is partly institutional (unifying the Ministry of Housing’s physical gazette, MEYTI’s e-gazette, and Ministry of Laws India Code), partly legal (the legal language, syntax and architecture proposal by lawyer Rahul Matthan for Bharat Niti Lipi) and partly technological (the DPI architecture and protocols being prepared by IIIT’s Centre for DPI and NCAER).

Ashwasan, because trust needs certainty: Earlier attempts at creating a single source of truth did not fail because of a civil service conspiracy — though their resistance, fears and self-interest did contribute — but because of poor design, weak capacity, unsustained attention, power fragmentation, and poor technology. But the meta-factor was obligation: There was no guarantee that anything not listed did not require compliance. This is addressed by the draft proposal from economist Sanjeev Sanyal for a Transparency of Rules Act (TORA) that requires every enforceable legal obligation — whether arising from an Act, rule, or more than 25 edicts — to be published on Sangreh. This would make Sangreh more than a repository. Enterprises and citizens would gain certainty and predictability, governments would acquire credibility, and corruption would get harder.

This year marks the 250th and 76th anniversaries of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the Indian Constitution. Though separated by geography and time, they advanced the same revolutionary idea: Democratic governments exist to expand human freedom, not constrain it. Smith argued that liberty, anchored in the rule of law and competition, unleashes enterprise, innovation and prosperity. Our Constitution argues that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The three phases of Jan Vishwas reconcile these traditions. More importantly, their delivery will reinforce that what is wrong about India can be fixed by what is right with India.

Sabharwal is co-founder of Teamlease Services and co-author of Made in India