The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026 — which amends 82 central laws — is being described, accurately enough, as a mass 'decriminalisation' exercise. But for anyone advising a business or an individual on compliance risk, the more useful question is what actually changes on the ground, and what does not.
What changes
The core shift is procedural, not substantive: conduct that used to expose a person to arrest, prosecution and the possibility of imprisonment now exposes them instead to a civil penalty determined by an adjudicating officer, with an appeal to a designated appellate authority. Under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, for example, selling non-compliant cosmetics no longer carries a jail term — it carries a penalty of ₹1 lakh or three times the value of the goods seized, whichever is higher. Under the Indian Succession Act and the Electricity Act, imprisonment terms of up to three months are simply removed, leaving fines as the sole consequence. A handful of offences, such as triggering a false fire alarm under the Delhi Police Act, are dropped from the statute book entirely.
What does not change
The underlying obligations themselves are untouched. A business that mislabels a cosmetic product, misreports a birth or death, or violates municipal advertisement rules is still in breach of the law; it simply now faces a civil penalty and an adjudicatory process rather than a criminal complaint and a magistrate. The Bill's automatic 10% escalation of fines every three years also means the civil exposure is not static — it is designed to rise with time, which compliance teams should build into risk assessments rather than treat as a one-time recalibration.
The graduated-enforcement model
For some categories of violation — the Apprentices Act is the example on record — the Bill introduces a staged response: an advisory for a first contravention, a warning for a second, and a civil penalty only from the third. This is a meaningful change in enforcement posture, effectively building in a compliance grace period that did not previously exist for first-time or inadvertent lapses.
Why it matters for practitioners
For litigators, the shift means fewer criminal complaints under the affected provisions and more adjudicatory proceedings — a different forum, different procedure, and, generally, a lower personal stake for the individual involved, since imprisonment is off the table for the amended offences. For corporate and compliance counsel, the message is the opposite of 'deregulation': due diligence obligations remain, but the consequence of getting it wrong has moved from the criminal justice system into a civil, penalty-based track that is arguably more predictable — and, given the automatic escalation clause, more expensive to ignore over the long run.