States need a 'clean' slate to get their abundance of laws in order

This framework to review old laws is a must to maintain a statute book aligned with latest needs

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A mature legal system must know when to legislate and when to let go. Statutes, like institutions, are not immortal.

They must be periodically examined for relevance and coherence. As Jeremy Bentham observed, law must reflect reason, not persistence. Yet in India, persistence often masquerades as legality. Statutes enacted for contexts that have long disappeared remain formally alive, cluttering the statute book, creating interpretive confusion, and occasionally being invoked to extract rent or stall reform.

Every legal system faces the problem of legislative sedimentation. State governments, in particular, often lack an authoritative inventory of their own statutes. Some are mere legal fossils, colonial regulations on boating and ferries, post-Independence controls on telegraph wires, or obsolete licensing frameworks that predate digital systems. Such enactments are harmless in isolation but collectively corrosive. They perpetuate uncertainty, expand discretion and undermine administrative efficiency and legal predictability.