Insights
Jan Vishwas 2026: Decriminalisation, Corporate Liability and What Comes Next
Historical Context
India’s regulatory overcriminalisation did not emerge overnight. It was built slowly through decades of legislation drafted under a colonial framework that instinctively reached for criminal sanction as the primary enforcement tool. Strikingly, over 75% of these offences are defined not under core criminal justice legislation, but under regulatory and sector specific statutes spanning shipping, taxation, financial institutions, and municipal governance.
The consequences were, at times, almost absurd. A person could face arrest for failing to report an animal’s death within three hours, or for neglecting to provide adequate exercise to a pet dog. More commercially damaging, minor filing delays or labelling errors in industries like pharmaceuticals, food processing, and financial services attracted the same heavy criminal machinery as deliberate fraud. The law made no meaningful distinction between the careless and the corrupt.
This blunt, undiscriminating approach carried serious costs. Disproportionately high punishments for routine, technical infractions made the business environment deeply uncertain. Entrepreneurship was quietly discouraged. Trust in regulators quietly eroded. And at the systemic level, the burden was crushing: India’s courts groaned under more than 3.5 crore pending criminal cases, many of them the unglamorous debris of regulatory overreach rather than genuine wrongdoing.
Legislative Evolution: From 2023 to 2026
The third step in this sequence comes from the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026, which follows a path laid by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023. The Act amended 183 provisions in 42 Central Acts by replacing criminal sanctions with civil sanctions in the form of money penalties, and also did away with the threat of incarceration in the case of regulatory non-compliance, with the provision of an empowered officer to hold inquiries and levy penalties, and an appealable forum. In essence, the Act may be described as a precursor to what followed next. Following this precedent, the second step took shape when the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2025 was brought before the Lok Sabha on 18 August 2025, with the proposal to amend 355 provisions in 16 Central Acts. It was referred to a Select Committee under the chairmanship of Tejasvi Surya, held 49 meetings and consulted stakeholders extensively, finally producing a report dated 13 March 2026 and recommending expansion to 62 more Central Acts.
Scope, Mechanism and Reach
In all, there are 784 clauses pertaining to 79 Central laws across 23 Ministries in the 2026 Bill, of which 717 clauses are decriminalized and 67 clauses have been amended to enhance the ease of living. There are four mechanisms included in the reform process. First is the Improvement Notice mechanism, whereby a specified Adjudicating Officer is to issue an improvement notice with respect to offenses committed under 76 clauses from 10 Acts and allow time for correction of those offenses by giving an opportunity to the offender prior to any punishment. Second is the compounding of the offense mechanism, which requires making payment without legal proceedings.
As far as sectors go, the reform is rather comprehensive. For example, the reforms impact the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, the Life Insurance Corporation Act, 1956, the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Act, 1972, and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Act, 2013, where criminal liability is taken out of regulatory non-compliance, replaced with higher civil sanctions and administrative sanctions against officers. The enforcement mechanism under these laws are brought closer to the existing schemes in place for the regulators like SEBI and IRDAI. Other colonial era laws which have been amended include the Cattle Trespass Act, Livestock Importation Act, and portions of the Motor Vehicles Act.
Judicial Backdrop
The reform does not operate in a vacuum. At least four strands of judicial development give it important doctrinal context.
First, the conclusion by the Supreme Court of the Sterling Biotech case in December 2025 after settling for INR 5,100 crores. It is significant that the Court has been willing to quash the criminal proceedings after the accused have made sufficient financial amends, as it indicates a doctrinal recognition that where economic crime is involved, restitution is possible and may serve as an end-point. Considering Jan Vishwas in light of this trend, it seems evident that Indian enforcement jurisprudence is slowly but surely evolving from its traditional approach of prosecution to a resolution approach.
The second theme has to do with the long established doctrine of proportionality of regulatory penalty. Even way back in 1969, the Supreme Court in the case of Hindustan Steel laid down the position that penalties should not be levied on technical considerations alone, especially when the defaulter was acting in all good faith. This basic tenet, which is that regulatory penalties should have a relationship to moral culpability, has been reiterated in various taxation and business situations, but finds statutory recognition for the first time in Jan Vishwas.
Third is the question of corporate criminal attribution. According to the consistent stance taken by the Court, corporate criminal responsibility can be ascribed neither to the sole fact of association nor through a general application but only if there is some participation coupled with a proved mens rea, as well as an expression in statute to that effect. Jan Vishwas is an affirmation of such approach. With the removal of criminal consequences for regulatory defaults, the new law reduces the scope of corporate criminal liability.
The fourth and probably the most important of these strands pertains to IP enforcement per se. In Knit Pro International, the Supreme Court made it clear that the commission of the crime of copyright infringement under Section 63 of the Copyright Act, 1957 is a cognizable, non-bailable offense.⁴ This aspect of the Knit Pro judgment provided the context for the Jan Vishwas reform, since the very incentive structure embodied therein was one of the major flaws it sought to address, a flaw inherent in a situation where the criminal process can be readily abused in order to settle civil disputes.
Together, these strands do more than set the scene; they offer the legal syntax against which Jan Vishwas must be understood.
Promises, Gaps and What Practitioners Should Watch
The early evidence from the 2023 Act is encouraging. The reform’s core logic that procedural lapses do not belong in the same enforcement machinery as deliberate fraud has proved difficult to argue against, and the shift of minor regulatory cases from criminal courts to administrative channels has meaningfully reduced judicial pressure.
The structural issues are more long-lasting. The whole design of the reform hinges on the competence and independence of the newly appointed Adjudicating Officers, but Indian regulatory authorities lack the capacity, and in cases involving government appointees adjudicating against the government itself, there cannot be any guarantees of institutional independence. Moving enforcement from the courts to administration does not necessarily reinforce regulation; it merely moves discretion elsewhere. There is also a deterrent problem here. Fines do not make an impact on large corporations within pharmaceutical and food-safety sectors; criminal liability, though infrequently imposed, had been an effective deterrent that its removal creates a different incentive structure when it comes to compliance with regulations that have public stakes involved. That the pharmaceutical sector was able to turn a substantive deterrent into a compoundable offense also demonstrates another potential danger: reform intended to address procedural offenders through negotiation can be expanded to include intentional wrongdoers.
Problems regarding structure remain, though. Everything that has been proposed above depends entirely on the professionalism and objectivity of the Adjudicating Officers, but the Indian regulatory authorities suffer from lack of staff resources, and the officials who have been appointed by the government cannot be considered independent when adjudicating against government organizations. Moreover, transferring some powers from courts to administrative agencies will hardly improve the effectiveness of regulations enforcement, because discretionary power will be transferred from one institution to another. Finally, there may be problems with deterring violations. For the leaders of industries which deal with pharmaceutical products and food safety regulations, financial penalties will only mean extra expenses, whereas criminal charges were seldom applied, but they deterred violators effectively. That the pharmaceutical industry managed to turn the threat of criminal proceedings into a compoundable offense can be viewed as yet another problem that reforms meant for minor offenders may encounter.
The practitioner impact is clear. For one thing, a criminal exposure from a broad array of regulatory violations has been stripped away. For another, due diligence risk assessments need to be reconsidered. And, finally, the ability to use the threat of a criminal complaint as leverage has been significantly diminished. What hasn’t changed is the regulatory arena in which enforcement takes place.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Jan Vishwas 2026 appears to be the most daring initiative in India’s legislative history post-independence to tackle the issue of regulation by criminal means.
While the legislative initiative is definitely a step in the right direction, the intentions of the legislature may not always correspond with actual implementation. Ultimately, what really matters with respect to the success of Jan Vishwas is not how many offenses were decriminalized, but rather whether the substitute mechanism for criminal prosecution was given enough power to function without interference.
From a practitioner’s perspective, this means serious consequences now. However, from the perspective of policy makers, there are still challenges left to address. It is up to the Indian judiciary to create an appropriate interpretation and application framework which would be in line with the true meaning of the reform.