Accountability of regulators a crisis in India: Goyal

“The one very, very serious crisis that the nation is facing today is the accountability of regulators. There is almost no accountability of regulators. And in the garb of independence of regulation, it occasionally goes to another extreme,” says the Union Minister of State for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines.

At a seminar on ‘Ease of Doing Business— Regulators as Facilitators’ at Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2017 here, he said the sector suffered due to “over regulation as regulators are not able to justify many decisions”. “The environment sector has suffered due to over regulation and very often regulators are not able to justify many decisions. So, you have a situation, where there is nothing like forest for an area called forest, no satellite image, no ground report says there is a single tree in that area,” Goyal said adding that seeking building permission or regulatory permission for such areas causes a lot of trouble. 

Seminar attendees included Ashish Bahuguna, Chairman, Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, Devendra Kumar Sikri, Chairman, Competition Commission of India and Gireesh Pradhan, Chairman, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission. “Transparency is another area, when we look at the regulatory process. Regulators should be open about their working, hearings should as far as possible be more and more in public domain, and speaking orders, with a logical approach, should be available in public domain so that others should benchmark their business process to whatever is decided by regulators,” he told the audience. 

“And regulators should also be user-friendly rather than being under the shroud of what really was the intent of regulators and intent of law. Lastly, it is important to target regulation on what the problem is, so that we don’t tend to go haywire and over-exceed our brief,” Goyal said.