New Delhi, Nov. 10 -- I have long argued that we need to make our law legible to digital systems. As early as 2016, I spoke of the promise of regulatory technology, or regtech, and argued that if we could build compliance into the infrastructure, we could dramatically change how we enforce It.

More recently, Manish Sabharwal and I made the case for establishing a single source of truth-one canonical repository of every instrument that has the power to legally bind us, accessible for all to see. It would make the law available in a legislative markup language for India so that the digital systems that automate compliance can directly engage with it.

But even when this ambition comes to pass, it will only address compliance obligations at...