Okay, so good afternoon everyone.

I am Tashmita, as already introduced. My mentor, Pradeep Mehta, was supposed to make this presentation along with me today on Regulatory Impact Assessment, but due to his poor health condition, he was unable to join us today. But he has sent all his regards, all the way from Jaipur, to all of you.

So today’s presentation, yeah, I will take just 10 minutes. So, it is a Regulatory Impact Assessment. And in the next 10 minutes, I would like to take you through examples of bad regulations in India, which will set the context of why we require or why we need RIA, Regulatory Impact Assessment, and how regulatory intentions could have been better met if we could have used RIA before.

What basically RIA is, the steps of RIA methodology, and tools to be used in RIA, the need for it, global best practices to be used, and what is the current scenario for RIA in India, and what steps we have to take next to adopt RIA, and also the counterfactuals of RIA.

Now, there are examples to show that good intentions meet undesirable consequences, and that is where impact assessment is very necessary. We have tried listing down some of the examples over here and I will quickly take you through the very first one.

So in 2025, in October, the government implemented the ban on online gaming system through the Act, and CUTS did a study in the Delhi NCR region to assess the impact of such ban. The objective of the ban was to prevent and protect the consumers, especially the youth, from illegal financial transfers, from money laundering, and also from addiction.

But we saw through our study that this ban has resulted in an increase in the number of users from online gaming to offshore gambling, and this surge in daily users has been from 3.4 to 42.3%, a massive rise.

Had RIA been implemented over here, because there was limited stakeholder consultation which took place, and no impact assessment as well before banning. If we had implemented RIA before this banning mechanism, then we would have been better assessed with the risk of this migration towards offshore gambling. And also we could have analyzed the cost as well as benefit of other regulatory and non-regulatory alternatives as well, as to what better could have been adopted to identify and meet the objectives in a better manner, which unfortunately the ban could not do.

So we need much more effective, much more enhanced and smart regulation.

By RIA, I mean it is a tool, basically a diagnostic tool, which helps in assessing costs as well as benefits of new as well as existing regulatory choices made. And this is a very important tool as it helps assess the market failure first and then go through the objective identification, what we want to or what we intend to achieve, understand the baseline scenario, develop regulatory as well as non-regulatory alternatives.

Then see who are the stakeholders, map out the stakeholders who will be impacted, and identify the direct as well as indirect cost as well as benefits to be getting impacted on those stakeholders.

Lastly, we have to do this, the most important step by the way, do a cost-benefit analysis, which is an econometric tool, on all the options, on all the regulatory as well as non-regulatory options which we have listed, and come up with an optimal regulatory option.

And by optimal, I mean here is effective as well as efficient. That means not only the intended objective is being met, but also it is that the benefits have surpassed the cost or the overall cost on the consumers or be it the businesses. And lastly, monitoring and evaluation is also very important.

Now we need to remember that RIA is not necessarily a tool for reducing regulations. If I want to reach a destination and I can reach it through four simple steps, then why take six complicated steps? And RIA is exactly the answer. It helps us with better decision-making. It helps us with better governance, increase the competitiveness, and also betterment of economy for ease of doing business, which we are talking about as a whole today. Viksit Bharat is the theme for reducing compliance burden, administrative burden especially, which impacts the SMEs disproportionately.

Now I already spoke about the global best practices, but I would like to draw all of your attention towards our neighbor Pakistan, who had recently implemented the Aasaan Karobaar Act. They have given legal basis to this RIA because they want to do a systematic review of all the existing regulations, do a cost impact analysis, and hence come down with the compliance burden.

And by this I mean that in India, we are talking about de-regulation and many committees in India as well as many regulatory bodies have already been talking about RIA, talking about the need of RIA. We have to understand that when we are deregulating, we are scrapping old regulations, but we are also coming up with new ones, which also have their own cost implications.

So taking into account and doing it mindfully, calculatively, is the need for the Act which Pakistan Act, by the way, talks about, and they are doing so now.

Under developments at home, I would also like to mention that the DPIIT’s framework, the cost of doing business which they came out with in 2024, it helps in assessing the cost or the impact of cost, different kinds of administrative burdens, their compliance cost which impacts the SMEs disproportionately, and they are talking about standard cost model, which is one of the important tools of RIA.

Through that, we see how much cost is impacting the SMEs especially, and how we can reduce it with other alternative regulatory choices and options.

Now given that, the need of the hour is to institutionalize and adopt RIA because we have already created a basis that we need RIA. India has agreed to it. So the very first step in order to do so is to give a legal backing to this RIA. Many countries, including Pakistan and South Korea, have done so.

Create an independent RIA oversight body. The most famous example is from UK. They have a two-tier system where they have the policy regulatory committee at the top and cross-sectoral regulatory bodies which do RIA impact assessment at their end. And one famous example is of GEMA from UK, which looks into the regulatory impact assessment for the energy sector.

Now we also need a proportionate RIA. By this I mean that we do a simplified review for the low-impact regulations and a comprehensive RIA exercise for high-impact regulations. We need to have a skilled RIA pool of professionals in order to do or conduct this exercise.

And last but not the least, periodic reviews or ex-post analysis of RIA is heavily important. We need to have sunset clauses in growth. And for example, in UK and also in Australia, we have the one-in, two-out rule, which means if we are introducing one new regulation, then we are also scrapping down two old ones.

Having said that, we also know that we will agree with the fact that every tool has certain disadvantages, and so does RIA. It comes with certain concerns which have been highlighted over the years. Many will say that it adds to another bureaucratic layer and government is often resistive towards accountability.

But here I would like to make my point that it’s not about reinventing the wheel. There are many mechanisms already in place. When we come out with draft rules, we ask for public consultations. We do stakeholder consultations. But these are subsets of RIA. There has to be a systematic process for mitigating the risk of unintended undesirable consequences so that it doesn’t happen, so that those impacts are not borne by our businesses.

Many say that there are data gaps and quantifying impacts, reliance on assumptions and proxies. Of course, it is an economic tool, so it will have some assumptions and proxies. But the idea to it is that what we have to do is you explicitly disclose the assumptions and the proxies you have taken. You do an extensive stakeholder consultation. You run pilots, you do RCTs.

It is heavily resource intensive, but there are evidences from literature which shows that in US there was a time when 15 RIAs were done, and it was seen that three out of those 15 RIAs showed increase in societal benefit of US dollar 10 billion, whereas the cost of conducting all those 15 RIAs were US dollar 10 million.

And lastly, when we say that it’s time consuming process, but we have to again do partial RIA or undertake a proportionate RIA. We can also do regulatory bulletin, which is a three-way step towards legality, institutionality, necessity and proportionality. So it reduces some part or it is a subset of RIA.

And lastly, at CUTS, we have conducted sector-wise pilot studies for regulators as well as state governments, and currently we are doing it for the financial sector. We do capacity building of officials through customized training. We did it for TRAI. We write research papers, white papers, briefing papers and opinion pieces on RIA for advocating for the process and show how other jurisdictions have benefited from this tool.

And lastly, provide comments on draft regulations and policies available for public consultation.

So I hope this benefited the audience, and thank you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present today.