New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- The Government of India Act, 1935, was the last gasp of a colonial empire trying to stave off demands for democracy. In 1950, our 299 Constituent Assembly members wrote a constitution that has delivered elections and given citizens a voice, but the unelected power of our administrative state has struggled to shift from ruling to governing.

The immense promise of recent policy initiatives around Jan Vishwas, aimed at trusting citizens through deregulation, decriminalization and digitization, could be accelerated by officially adopting a markup language for legislative publication called Bharat Niti Lipi (BNL).

The case for a single source of live, organized and searchable digital legislative truth is obvious. Anythi...