“Jan Vishwas Bill Frees MSMEs From Criminal Liability. Now Comes The Hard Part”, Swarajya, April 25, 2026
“A person running a manufacturing unit is not a fraudster. He is not an environmental criminal. He did not steal from the government or endanger any consumer. At some point in the ordinary course of running a small business in India, he was technically a criminal, because the law said so.
This is not a story about one man’s misfortune. It is a story about a system that, for decades, treated procedural lapses by small businesses with the same legal architecture reserved for wilful fraud. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2026, passed by Parliament on 1 April, is the most serious attempt yet to dismantle that architecture. Whether it will reach the small businesses of India, or remain an excellent document that changes nothing on the ground, is the more pressing question.
What Parliament Actually Did
The scale of the legislation is worth stating plainly. The Jan Vishwas Bill, 2026 amends 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts, decriminalises 717 of them, and touches 23 ministries. It is the third iteration of this framework, following the 2023 version and a withdrawn 2025 attempt, and by far the most ambitious……”
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