As many as 38 British Acts of Parliament relating to Indian railways are set to be repealed, following recommendations made by the country's influential Law Commission published on Wednesday.

The proposals for repealing up to 800 laws, some dating back many centuries, have been made by the Law Commission for England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission in an effort to get rid of laws that were either “spent, obsolete, unnecessary or otherwise not now of practical utility.”

While many laws relate to obscure British domestic issues such as the demolition of a specific local government hall, or a 16th Century law for a local church, a significant number relate to the numerous pieces of legislation passed between 1849 and 1942 that were key to the construction of various railway lines across India during British rule.

The report and consultation document which preceded it provide an interesting historical account of the development of the railway system, and the shifting roles of the state and private enterprise, and what “in the consultation – it describes as the nationalisation of the railway system by a protracted process of piecemeal acquisition and direct build.” The legislation include laws such as the 1897 Assam Railways and Trading Company Act, “ which allowed the company to deem certain classes of shares fully paid-up, to arrange an orderly distribution of proceeds in the event that the government exercised its purchase option, and to reduce the company's capital when shares were paid off.

The assets of the company were acquired by the government in 1945, and though the company itself had no rail operating assets in India, it continued to exist as a non-trading company, part of Duncan Macneill Group, a UK-based firm. Others include the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company Act of 1849, facilitating the creation of a rail network linking Mumbai with other parts of the country, and the Madras Railway Act of 1853, authorising the formation of a company to build and maintain an “experimental line of railway” between Chennai and the West Coast.

The Law Commission initiated a consultation on the Indian Railways-related laws in 2007, including a consultation with Indian authorities. A spokesperson for the commission said that the current list of repeal recommendations in the law encompassed all known laws relating to Indian railways.

The recommendations will be passed on to Britain's Ministry of Justice and will then go through a parliamentary process of approval before the Acts can be appealed.

The latest repeals report is the 19th so far to be published by the Law Commission, an influential body made up of senior judges and lawyers, charged with ensuring that Britain's laws are “fair, modern, simple and as cost effective as possible.”

“Getting rid of statutory dead wood helps to simplify and modernise our law, making it more intelligible,” said Sir James Munby, Chairman of the Law Commission of England and Wales.

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