This article examines whether the sequencing and design of regulatory reform, rather than the ideological choice between regulation and deregulation, determines institutional durability and consumer-welfare outcomes. It employs a structured comparative-doctrinal method, analysing enabling legislation, regulatory mandates, appellate arrangements, judicial decisions, agency materials, and multilateral institutional assessments. The study compares India, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Brazil between 1980 and 2025, with banking and telecommunications as its two principal sectors; energy and transportation are used only as contextual comparators. The article advances three propositions. First, reforms that establish operationally independent regulators with technical capacity and effective appellate oversight before competitive market opening are more likely to yield durable outcomes than reforms that liberalise first and regulate later. Second, regulatory capture is a systemic institutional risk requiring structural, rather than exclusively procedural, safeguards. Third, Indian regulatory law is broadly capable of supporting adaptive governance but retains identifiable gaps in accountability, independence, and anti-capture design. By disaggregating the regulation–deregulation binary into sequencing, agency independence, appellate architecture, stakeholder engagement, anti-capture safeguards, and adaptive capacity, the analysis identifies institutional combinations associated with resilient regulatory systems. The comparative findings support a reform agenda centred on pre-liberalisation institutional investment; transparent, independent data capacity; fixed and protected regulatory appointments; cooling-off restrictions; and stronger legal protection for the autonomy of systemically significant agencies. For India, the article recommends circumscribing executive direction powers and considering enhanced constitutional or other higher-order legal safeguards for key regulators. The analysis is deliberately doctrinal and institutional, not econometric: it does not claim to establish universal causal effects or measure sectoral outcomes exhaustively. Its conclusions are therefore limited to the five selected jurisdictions, the two primary sectors, and the 1980–2025 period. Within those limits, the article offers a transferable framework for evaluating regulatory reform.