Tiresome rules out, trust-based model in

Syllabus: Governance

Source: LM, ET

Context: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman emphasized trust-based governance in her budget speech

Recent steps taken by the government for TBG (including those announced in the recent Budget):

Legislative steps:
- The government has introduced the Jan Vishwas Bill to amend 42 Central Acts
- Ease of doing business: The government has proposed to reduce 39,000 compliances and decriminalize 3,400 legal provisions.

E-Government steps
- Paperless Governance: Third time in a row that the government presented the budget in a paperless form.
- Entity Digi Locker: It will be set up for use by MSMEs, large businesses and charitable trusts, to share documents online securely, whenever needed by authorities for regulatory purposes
- A permanent Account Number (PAN)will be made a common identifier for all digital systems of specified government agencies.
- National Data Governance Policy will be brought out. This will enable access to anonymized data

Delayering, the delegation of power and digitalisation in governance: Initiatives –
- E-Office 7.0: Enables users to create and manage electronic documents that can be viewed, searched and shared.
- Swachhta Special Campaign 2.0
- Prashasan Gaon Ki Ore 2022: It is a nationwide campaign for the redressal of public grievances and improving service delivery which is being held in all Districts, States, and UTs of India.

Executive steps:
- Unified Filing Process: For obviating the need for separate submission of the same information to different government agencies, a system of ‘Unified Filing Process’ will be set-up
- Simplifying the KYC process by adopting a ‘risk-based’ instead of a ‘one size fits all’ approach
- Delegate powers under the SEZ Act to International Financial Services Centres Authority. It will avoid dual regulation and set up a single-window IT system for registration and approval from IFSCA, SEZ authorities, GSTN, RBI, SEBI and IRDAI.
- The whole of government Approach: So that departments don’t work in ‘Silos’ e.g. 3C (Collaboration, Congruence, Competition) approach to Aspirational District Programme.

Financing measures:
- Result-Based Financing of schemes: To better allocate scarce resources for competing for development needs, the financing of select schemes will be changed, on a pilot basis, from ‘input-based’ to ‘result-based’.

Dispute settlement:
- Vivad Se Vishwas 2: The government will bring another dispute resolution scheme under Vivad Se Vishwas-2 to settle commercial disputes
  - The Vivad Se Vishwas scheme provides for the settlement of commercial disputes on payment of 100 per cent of the disputed tax and 25 per cent of the disputed penalty or interest or fee.
- A voluntary settlement schemewill be introduced to settle the contractual disputes between the government and government undertakings, under court proceedings.

Some concerns:

The budget had widened the tax authorities’ power to withhold any refunds to a taxpayer.
It could result in an increased load of over-burdened constitutional courts

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Trust-based Governance is quintessential to achieving Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas and Sabka Vishwas. Elaborate. (10M)