New Delhi, March 26 (IANS): In a first of its kind in India, consumer protection society CUTS International is conducting a workshop here on Regulatory Impact Assessment -- an area devoted to devising ways to cut down red tape for ease of doing business.

The two-day workshop is part of a CUTS project on Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIA) in the financial sector supported by the British government, the NGO said in a release on Thursday.

RIA is a tool used to assess the costs and benefits of a regulation before it is adopted, or when existing laws need to be rectified.

"It is evolving quickly as it is mainstreamed into policy processes around the world," CUTS said in the statement.

Emphasising the need for the country to undertake rigorous cost-benefit assessment of laws and regulations to help remove impediments to national growth, Amitabh Kant, secretary in the department of industrial policy and promotion, told the workshop that "RIA can help measure the laws and regulation that hurt national growth".

Pradeep S. Mehta, secretary general, CUTS, said "the absence of RIA in policy framework in India results in formulation of a bunch of avoidable regulations".

"India needs to launch regulatory impact assessments to weed out laws that hurt business growth," he averred.