Accountability of regulators a serious crisis in India: Goyal

Stating that accountability of regulators was a very serious crisis that the country was facing, Union Minister Piyush Goyal today said very often they are not even able to justify many of their decisions.
"The one very, very serious crisis that the nation is facing today is the accountability of regulators. There is almost no accountability of regulators. And in the garb of independence of regulation, it occasionally goes to another extreme," the Union Minister of State for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines said.
He was speaking at a seminar on 'Ease of Doing Business- Regulators as Facilitators' at Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2017 here.

Pointing at regulation of environment sector as a case in point, he said the sector suffered due to "over regulation as regulators are not able to justify many decisions".
"The environment sector has suffered due to over regulation and very often regulators are not able to justify many decisions. So, you have a situation, where there is nothing like forest for an area called forest, no satellite image, no ground report says there is a single tree in that area," he said adding that seeking building permission or regulatory permission for such areas causes a lot of trouble.
Attending the seminar were chairman of Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) Ashish Bahuguna, chairman of Competition Commission of India (CCI) Devendra Kumar Sikri, and chairman of Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) Gireesh Pradhan, among others.

"Transparency is another area, when we look at the regulatory process. Regulators should be open about their working, hearings should as far as possible be more and more in public domain, and speaking orders, with a logical approach, should be available in public domain so that others should benchmark their business process to whatever is decided by regulators," he told the audience.

"And regulators should also be user-friendly rather than being under the shroud of what really was the intent of regulators and intent of law. Lastly, it is important to target regulation on what the problem is, so that we don't tend to go haywire and over-exceed our brief," Goyal said.

"If we can keep the side effects of regulations minimum, it can help make regulators truly a facilitator person and help economic growth. We can then have a situation where people are not fearsome of regulators, we have to get fear out of regulation," he said.
"In that sense, policy makers and regulators should work hand in hand. You can't have a situation, where policy makers and regulators think differently," he added.