That question received an answer in Parliament in December 2025 through Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 2110, which asked whether the Government had reviewed the effectiveness of the policy, monitored compliance by Ministries and Departments, and considered making consultation and legislative impact assessment requirements legally binding. In response, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Minister of State for Law and Justice, stated on behalf of the Union Government that the policy had never been evaluated and that no records were maintained showing whether Ministries and Departments complied with it. Citizens may be invited to participate, but the State cannot say whether that invitation is ever meaningfully honoured.

The answer is more revealing than it first appears. The PLCP was introduced in 2014 after years of criticism that public debate often began too late, sometimes only after a Bill had already reached Parliament. Consultation was meant to happen before that stage. Citizens would get a chance to see draft laws and respond while changes were still possible.

Yet more than ten years later, there is remarkably little public information about how the framework operates in practice. The government cannot say how often it is followed or whether it has had any measurable effect.

That leaves the PLCP in an unusual position. Citizens may be invited to participate, but the State cannot say whether participation consistently occurs or influences legislation. The PLCP creates an expectation of consultation without creating mechanisms to verify it.

The Promise of 2014

The PLCP emerged from a familiar criticism of law-making. By the time many Bills reached Parliament, the drafting process was already complete, and public debate had little practical effect on the final text.

A Committee of Secretaries formulated the policy on 10 January 2014. Ministries and Departments were expected to place draft Bills in the public domain for at least thirty days before introduction. Stakeholders and members of the public could then submit comments. Draft legislation was also to be accompanied by explanatory material explaining its purpose, major provisions, and likely effects.

None of this altered the formal legislative process. The policy simply inserted a stage of public engagement before a Bill entered Parliament.

The reasoning was straightforward: people should be able to examine and comment on proposed laws before they begin to govern them. In that sense, the PLCP reflected a formal acceptance that citizens could play a role in the legislative process before Parliament began debating a Bill.

Whether that acceptance translated into institutional practice is a different question.

Consultation Without Accountability

The most striking feature of the PLCP is not that it is sometimes ignored. It is that there is no reliable way of knowing how often.

When Parliament sought answers in December 2025, the Union Government stated that it had never evaluated the policy. Nor did it maintain records showing which Ministries complied with it. More than ten years after the framework was introduced, there was still no official account of how frequently consultations occurred or whether they affected legislative drafting in any meaningful way.

The problem is not merely imperfect compliance. It is the absence of any institutional mechanism capable of showing what implementation actually looks like.

Accountability depends upon visibility. Although the PLCP envisages a limited oversight role for the Ministry of Law and Justice during the legislative vetting process, there is no publicly available system of compliance monitoring or reporting.

The available data point in the same direction. According to an analysis of compliance with the PLCP during the 16th and 17th Lok Sabhas, public consultation remained the exception rather than the norm. Between June 2014 and May 2019, 186 Bills were introduced in Parliament, but only 44 were published for public comment. Of those, 24 did not comply with the policy's thirty-day consultation requirement. Similar patterns continued during the 17th Lok Sabha, where only 30 of 115 Bills were published for comments, and more than half of those failed to meet the prescribed consultation period.

Questions remain unanswered: Which Ministries comply most frequently? Has compliance improved over time? Does consultation alter the final form of legislation?

The PLCP provides no transparent mechanism through which citizens can verify compliance. There are no routine compliance reviews, public assessments, or institutional mechanisms dedicated to examining implementation. In practice, adherence depends largely on individual Ministries.

The PLCP also contains an important exception. Clause 11 allows Ministries to bypass consultation where it is considered "not feasible" or "undesirable", provided reasons are recorded. However, there is no public record showing how often this exception is invoked or how those reasons are assessed.

Parliament was also informed that there was no proposal to make either pre-legislative consultation or legislative impact assessments mandatory. The PLCP, therefore, continues to operate as guidance rather than law.

A framework that cannot demonstrate compliance offers little assurance that it occurs in practice. In effect, the PLCP institutionalises consultation without institutionalising responsibility for consultation.

Even where consultation does occur, a separate question remains: what obligation exists to engage with the feedback received?

Consultation Without Deliberation

The PLCP tells Ministries to invite comments on draft legislation. While the PLCP requires summaries of feedback to be prepared, it does not require a detailed public explanation of how specific recommendations influenced the final text of a Bill. Consultation invites participation. Deliberation requires some engagement with what participants have said.

A Ministry may receive extensive feedback on a proposed Bill and still proceed without explaining how that feedback was treated. The framework does not require responses to submissions, reasons for accepting or rejecting recommendations, or any account of how public comments influenced the final draft.

That absence is easy to miss because consultation is often treated as an end in itself. Once a draft Bill is published and comments are invited, the process is assumed to have worked. The harder question comes afterwards. How does the public know whether its participation made any difference?

Governments are not expected to accept every recommendation. The issue is whether recommendations were considered. Consultation and influence are not the same thing. Democratic participation acquires meaning when participation is visibly connected to decision-making.

Under the present framework, a Ministry may invite comments, close the consultation period, and proceed with legislation without publicly engaging with the submissions it received. The consultation is visible; what follows is not.

The PLCP creates a channel through which citizens may speak, but imposes few obligations on the government to explain its response. Participation becomes visible, but decision-making does not.

A framework that invites participation without showing how participation shaped decision-making risks separating participation from impact.

The PLCP was meant to move public participation earlier in the legislative process. Citizens would not merely react to laws after they were introduced; they would have an opportunity to engage with them while they were still being shaped.

More than ten years later, there is still no clarity about how often consultation occurs, how consistently Ministries follow the framework, or what happens to comments once consultation ends.

That is what makes the government's 2025 response to Parliament so revealing. The most important question surrounding the PLCP is no longer whether consultation should occur. It is whether a consultation framework can command public confidence when nobody is required to show that it is being followed.

The difficulty with the PLCP is that it institutionalises participation without institutionalising responsibility for consultation. Consultation derives its value from the ability to see participation reflected in public decision-making.

Citizens may be allowed to speak. The harder question is whether the State can demonstrate that those voices made any difference.