Context: The recent reforms brought outduring the just-concluded special session of Parliament are not just momentous but in many ways historic.
Labour Law Reforms:
Ending the tyranny of 'Inspector Raj': The web of 44 central labour laws, with over 1200 sections and provisions, has been dismantled
Four simpler Labour Codes have been put in place:
The Code on Wages
The Industrial Relations Code
The Social Security Code
The Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code.
They universalise minimum and timely payment of wages.
They enable ease of doing business by bringing in a regime of one-registration, one-licence and one-return.
Company Law Reforms:
Past Condition: Perverse provisions of Companies Act, 2013
It criminalised even otherwise normal civil infractions of routine nature.
It completely paralysed risk-taking and quick decision-making among the private wealth creators.
Post recent reforms: the perverse sections of the Companies Act 2013 have been done away with and nullifies the fear of criminal prosecution that hung over every corporate decision.
Banking Reforms
Past Condition: No standard governance norms or binding regulations to protect customer interest.
Organisations that called themselves "banks" were completely outside the ambit of RBI regulation.
Indian mainstream banks had a practice of "grossing" their bilateral liabilities rather than "netting". These funds could otherwise have been available for lending to consumers and would have also helped lower interest rates.
Post recent reforms
The bilateral banking netting law has been passed: A large corpus of unproductive capital has been freed to be deployed in the market.
Cooperative banks will now be regulated by the RBI: customers will have the same protections as those of other regular banks.
Agricultural Reforms:
Past Condition
Treated as captive sources of producing cheap food grain while living at subsistence levels.
At the farmer's end: no freedom to choose the point of sale for the produce, and also could not decide the price of the product with no say in selecting the buyer.
At the consumer's end: short-changed with frequent cycles of persistently high inflation.
The only beneficiaries of this perverse system were middlemen who thrived under political protection.
Post recent reforms
Farmers can now sell produce wherever they want, to whomsoever they want, and at whatever price they can command, the security of MSP still being there.
The stifling nature of the Essential Commodities Act and the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act have both been neutered.
Contract farming is nationally enabled, allowing private investment to come in, which will bring in technology, modern equipment, better seeds, know-how for in-between-season crops, improved yields, better logistics, and freer access to national and international markets.