"Procedural inertia, rather than bad intent, is the bigger enemy of citizen-centric administration." Discuss with reference to India's colonial administrative legacy and recent regulatory clean-up efforts.

The 2nd ARC's 12th Report said citizen-centric administration requires re-engineering processes around the citizen [1]. In India the bigger obstacle is usually not corruption. It is unexamined routine inherited from colonial rule, which carries on long after it has stopped serving any purpose.

Colonial legacy: inertia in practice

• Tamil Nadu's MTC 43 travel-allowance form still made officers declare, as late as the 1970s, that they had not used a "government elephant or boat". An officer with 28 years of service had never noticed the clause [2].
• The Directorate of Stationery and Printing reprinted the form without anyone reading it, and a Salem notice still fined a stray elephant Rs 8 [2].
• Some of the Central Acts repealed only in 2025 dated back to 1886 [3].

Why inertia outweighs bad intent

• Scale: bad intent is individual and can be punished. Inertia is systemic and goes unseen.
• Ritual compliance: officers certify statements that cannot be true, which empties official declarations of meaning [2].
• Frozen penalties: fines fixed in money terms stop deterring anyone as prices rise [2].
• "Set and forget": the OECD calls review of existing rules the "forgotten child" of regulatory policy [4].

Recent clean-up efforts

• A PMO-constituted committee identified roughly 1,800 obsolete Central Acts [5]. The Repealing and Amending Act, 2025 repealed 71 outdated Acts [3].
• The Jan Vishwas Act, 2023 decriminalised 183 provisions in 42 Acts and provided for fines to be revised every three years [6].
• The Jan Vishwas Bill, 2026 covers 784 provisions across 79 Acts and 23 Ministries. It adds graded enforcement, with advisories and warnings coming before penalties [7]. Parliament passed it in April 2026 [8].

Limits of the argument

• Bad intent still matters. Rent-seeking thrives on complex procedures, so inertia and corruption reinforce each other.
• Repealing Acts reach only Central laws. They do not touch the State forms and notices where citizens actually deal with the state [2][3].
• Repeals remain one-off drives, and few laws carry built-in review dates [4].

Inertia and bad intent feed each other, but inertia is the wider and quieter barrier. Two steps would keep rules current. The first is to move from one-off repeals to review and sunset clauses, as the OECD recommends [4]. The second is to make each department certify a form's content before it is reprinted. Together they would realise the 2nd ARC's vision of a citizen-centric, trust-based administration [1].