T N Ninan: Crazy laws

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

If you drive down the mostly-complete expressway between Delhi and its boomtown suburb of Gurgaon, and provided you are not caught in a traffic jam, you will find that the traffic moves at an average speed of 80 km per hour. With a broad, 8-lane highway, good lighting, proper road engineering and the kind of cars that now dominate the market, driving at a speed of 80 km feels perfectly normal, and not like dangerous speeding. More to the point, everyone is doing it. And to the best of my knowledge, the highway is not riddled with accidents.

But the signs all along the route tell you that the legal speed limit is 50 km per hour for cars, and 40 km for other vehicles""speeds at which you can't even get into top gear comfortably in today's vehicles. But those are the speeds that the law stipulates. As Mr Bumble might have said, the law is an ass, because no one is driving on the basis of the speed limit. The only people who profit from this are the traffic policemen, who stand at unsuspecting corners and book motorists for speeding.

It is a sensible rule to follow that any law which makes ordinary people into criminals by declaring that everyday behaviour is outside the pale of the law, should be changed. The law on speed limits was made at a time when the quality of our roads and the speed capabilities of vehicles as also their braking efficiency were entirely different from what exist today. Someone should take a good look at this and other, similar out-dated laws.

A second instance is the excise law on how much liquor you can keep in your house. A senior government official was raided the other day for alleged corruption, and booked immediately for having more than the stipulated limit of four bottles. Whatever the logic of such a limit was when first conceived, it cannot be anyone's case that keeping more than four bottles of liquor in one's house somehow puts the government's excise revenue from the liquor industry at risk. Why then have such a limit""which millions of people must be ignoring simply because they want to be able to offer their guests a choice of drinks, which should not be considered a crime?

The country used to be riddled with such irrational laws""like a peak income tax rate of 97 per cent, peak tariff rates of over 300 per cent, and a total foreign allowance of six dollars when you left the country ("liberalised" later to $100!). With economic reform, many of these idiocies which merely bred corruption, the hawala market, and widespread tax fudges by the employees of even reputed companies, have been thrown out of the window. But the process is far from complete, and much more needs to be done.

Take, for instance, the stamp duty for property transfer, which had gone up to 14 per cent in some states""this is asking for property transactions to be undervalued because the duty is ridiculously high, and thus helping the generation of vast quantities of unaccounted wealth. More and more states realise this, but there is a long way to go before property transfers attract the same level of duty as share transfers (ie, they reach a level where you barely notice its existence).

There are similar instances in the non-economic field. One is the law on adultery when it comes to sex between consenting adults, which goes back to some Victorian notion of the wife being the husband's property. Other examples relate to the rigmarole of having to get police clearance before you can stage a play, or standing before a magistrate before you can become the publisher of a newspaper or magazine. These last two examples date back to the time when the British wanted to keep a check on any form of public expression, but why are they required in a free democracy?

As for solutions, one would be to have a sunset clause for most laws as a matter of routine, so that there is opportunity for periodic review.