Par panel starts work on legislative impact assessment

A parliamentary committee has started working on legislative impact assessment, days after Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu pitched for it, official sources said on Monday.

Legislative impact assessment is an informed law-making process under which social, economic, environmental and institutional impacts of legislative proposals are made.

It helps in realising the stated objectives of various laws.

Naidu is of the view that informed legislation will help in realising the stated objects of various laws. It requires a detailed impact assessment of legislation at the stages of both pre-legislation and post-legislation.

Now, the department-related parliamentary standing committee on law, justice and personnel, headed by BJP leader Bhupender Yadav, has started working on the issue and would come out with a report on ways to assess the impact of a law on people, society and economy before and after it is framed, the sources said.

A similar move to have judicial impact assessment on laws could not take off in the past.

Based on the directions of the Supreme Court, a task force was set up in 2008 to study Judicial Impact Assessment.

But various experts had claimed that assessing judicial impact of a law was not practical.

Later, a committee of experts was constituted in September, 2013 to examine the issue of implementing the methodology of Judicial Impact Assessment and suggest further action.

The committee in its report submitted on January 9, 2015 had concluded that Judicial Impact Assessment was neither feasible nor desirable as a method of proper budgetary planning and allocation of funds for the judiciary.