“The next generation of reforms has to be to liberate the industry and citizens at large from this stifling chokehold of rules, regulations, and permissions,” said Rajiv Gauba, a member of the government’s policy think tank, NITI Aayog at GFF 2026. He further stated that they “will scrutinize the maze of laws, regulations, rules, and processes with a fine comb and test them against the touchstone of trust-based governance.” He made these remarks during a brief interaction with Google’s managing director of commerce partnerships for the APAC region, Kunal Guha. 

The digital competition bill is under consideration:

“Regulation has to be principle-based, technology-neutral, and scaled with risk rather than being applied uniformly, which, for example, our digital competition bill, which is under consideration, plans to seek to do by placing obligations only on this system, systemically significant enterprises, and not treating every player the same way,” said the NITI Aayog member.

Mandate licenses only on the risk-based approach: 

“Licenses should be required only for reasons of national security or for activities which pose serious risk to human health or the environment. Otherwise, you should have registration, which is automatic, and not subject to yes or no. Licenses, where they are necessary, will be required. They should have perpetual variety or long-term, 10-year variety. Inspection should not be random. They should be risk-based.” – Rajiv Gauba, NITI Aayog member

He said that they recommend this approach: “permitted unless prohibited; rather than prohibited unless permitted.”

 “Changes in regulations should not be introduced at random, but only they should follow a fixed cycle, or calendar. And all existing and future regulations should be subjected to impact, and regulate the impact assessment and assessment of the cost of improvement,” he added. 

The rationale behind deregulation; cites EU as a lost competition with the US: “Overregulation will push innovation offshore. This is the lesson which, for example, in many areas, EU is that they have lost out in competitiveness to the US, for example, because of the overregulation by the Brussels bureaucracy. On the other hand, underregulation can produce a crisis and a loss of confidence, and then we end it response. So, we have to strike a right balance, which is not static but dynamic”, Gauba explained.

A few more points on how to approach the deregulation: 

• No uniform apply-to-all regulations: “Regulation has to be principle-based, technology-neutral, and scaled with risk rather than being applied uniformly.” 
• Competition without friction: “Regulation should promote competition. New entrants should be able to come in and exit without any friction. So that the threat of competition in itself disciplines the incumbent and obviates the need for a regulator to step in.”
• Equal access to infrastructure and resources: “Non-discriminatory access to underlying infrastructure, which has been the case so far, physical, digital, and financial. And then information symmetry, so that consumers and regulators both have timely, reliable, and open access to data.”
• Working more closely with the private sector: “We can induct professionals laterally into the government. More open-door, revolving-door, two-way-street policy,” he said. “We partner with the private sector to get the state-of-the-art expertise and deliver the quality of services. Essentially, you can say PPP in governments, not just projects.”

“Simplifying and digitizing the regulatory processes has to be a continuing exercise,” he then added. 

The ed-tech platform that the Indian government uses for appraisals: “There is a platform called ‘I Got Karmayogi,’ which is entirely an initiative conceptualized, steered by the Prime Minister, Modi, where a lot of content, generic and specialized, is available online to all employees across the state governments as well. It has been made part of the performance appraisal for officials at all levels, from section officers to the secretaries to the government of India,” said Gauba.

Fintech can use AI to fight fraud: Unrelated to regulations, NITI Ayog member also stated that AI can be used by fintech to fight fraud. “The power of AI should be leveraged by the fintech to strengthen our systems against fraud and to make decisions, whether by shopkeepers or by lenders or by individuals, more nuanced and customized,” he said. He also said that “Insurance needs much greater penetration” for making credit accessible to universal to the small shopkeeper, MSMEs.

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