I. Introduction
On 1 July 2024, three statutes replaced legislation that had structured Indian criminal justice for well over a century. [1] The Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Indian Evidence Act gave way, respectively, to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita ("BNS"), [2] the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita ("BNSS"), [3] and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam ("BSA"). [4] The government described the exercise as one of decolonisation: a victim-centric, technologically literate framework replacing statutes substantially drafted by nineteenth-century colonial administrators. [5] Critics offered a narrower reading - a renaming exercise riding on genuine but incomplete procedural reform, enacted during a parliamentary session from which much of the opposition had been suspended.
Both descriptions capture something real, and neither is complete on its own. This article does not try to settle that argument in the abstract. It instead follows four threads through the new codes - arrest and policing, bail and undertrial detention, prison oversight, and the law of evidence - to see how far the reforms move India's criminal process toward the speed, fairness, and technological competence they promise, and where old difficulties persist under new section numbers.
II. From Colonial Codes to Bharatiya Sanhitas
The three codes were not built from nothing. Roughly ninety per cent of the substantive content of the CrPC and the Evidence Act reappears in the BNSS and BSA, renumbered and occasionally rearranged; the BNS retains most of the IPC's offence structure while adding provisions on organised crime, terrorism, and mob lynching that had previously lived, if at all, in special statutes. What is new is concentrated in a handful of areas: timelines for investigation and trial, the treatment of electronic evidence, forensic mandates, and - the subject of the most sustained litigation to date - the bail provision governing long-detained undertrials.
It is worth being honest about scale. A change of this size, touching three codes that police stations, courts, and prisons across a federal system of twenty-eight states and eight union territories must apply simultaneously, was never going to be a clean transition. Training programmes for police and prosecutors were rolled out in the months before commencement, and the National Crime Records Bureau reworked its case-tracking software to map old offence numbers onto new ones - an exercise that, by most accounts, produced its own share of confusion in the first months after July 2024. The interesting question for a paper written after that transition period is not whether disruption occurred, but whether the underlying rules are better than what they replaced.
III. Policing and Arrest: Old Discretion in New Language
Two changes stand out on the policing side. The first concerns how a criminal case begins. The BNSS permits information about a cognizable offence to be given electronically, with the complainant required to sign the recorded statement within three days, [6] and it formalises the "zero FIR" practice by allowing a first information report to be registered at any police station regardless of where the alleged offence occurred, with the file transferred afterward to the station with territorial jurisdiction. [7] Both provisions respond to a familiar complaint under the old Code: police stations turning away complainants on jurisdictional grounds, often at exactly the moment - an assault, a missing child - when delay does the most damage.
The second change concerns the arrest itself. Section 35 narrows the circumstances in which police may arrest without a warrant for offences carrying sentences under three years, adding protections for elderly and infirm accused persons, [8] while Section 47 requires that an arrested person be told, without delay, both the grounds of arrest and the fact that they may be entitled to bail. [9] Section 37 obliges every police station to designate an officer responsible for maintaining and displaying arrest records and requires that a nominated person be informed of the arrest. [10] None of this is invented from scratch - it largely codifies safeguards the Supreme Court had already read into the Constitution in D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal [11] and, later, in Arnesh Kumar v.
State of Bihar [12], which had criticised the routine, almost reflexive use of arrest as a first response to any complaint. Putting judicial guidelines into the text of the Code is not a trivial achievement: guidelines scattered across case law are easy for a busy or indifferent station house officer to ignore, while a statutory duty is at least, in principle, easier to enforce through departmental discipline and habeas corpus practice.
Investigation itself has been pushed toward forensic science. Section 176(3) makes a forensic expert's visit to the crime scene mandatory for offences punishable with seven years' imprisonment or more, [13] and Section 105 requires videography of search and seizure. [14] The ambition is a conviction rate less dependent on eyewitness testimony, which in the Indian context is notoriously vulnerable to delay, intimidation, and simple forgetting across trials that can run for a decade or longer. Ambition and capacity, however, are different things: India's forensic science laboratories were already overburdened before this mandate arrived, and a duty that cannot be resourced tends to become either a source of routine delay or a box quietly left unchecked. Whether Section 176(3) reshapes investigative practice or becomes a dead letter will depend less on the text than on state governments' willingness to fund forensic infrastructure, something the statute itself cannot compel.
IV. Bail and the Undertrial Crisis
Nowhere has the new framework generated more litigation, commentary, and disagreement than Section 479 of the BNSS, the successor to Section 436A of the old Code. The provision responds to a genuine crisis: undertrial prisoners - people neither convicted nor acquitted, simply waiting - made up more than three-quarters of India's prison population in the years before the new codes were enacted. [15] Section 479(1) provides that a person who has been detained for one-half of the maximum sentence prescribed for the alleged offence must be released on bail; for a first-time offender, the threshold drops to one-third. [16] On its face this is a meaningful liberalisation, and courts have not been shy about calling it that.
The difficulty sits in Section 479(2), which withholds this benefit from anyone against whom proceedings are pending for more than one offence, and excludes altogether any offence carrying a sentence of death or life imprisonment. [17] Neither exclusion existed under Section 436A. The life-imprisonment carve-out is hard to square with the constitutional logic the Supreme Court built in Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar [18], where the Court first held that prolonged pretrial detention offends Article 21's guarantee of a speedy trial - a principle that, if anything, bites hardest on prisoners facing the longest possible sentences. The multiple-offence bar is broader still: as commentators have pointed out, it applies with equal force to a person facing two serious charges and to a person facing one serious charge plus a minor, arguably vexatious, second complaint, denying both the same statutory relief regardless of how thin the second case may be. [19]
The Supreme Court addressed part of this tension in August 2024, holding in the long-running prison-conditions proceeding that Section 479 applies retrospectively to undertrials charged before the new law commenced, so that the benefit is not confined to prosecutions begun after 1 July 2024. [20] That ruling, together with the Court's earlier directions in Satender Kumar Antil v. CBI [21] urging trial courts to treat bail as the rule rather than the exception, has done real work in the months since. It has not, however, resolved the drafting problems in sub-section (2), which continue to generate inconsistent rulings across different High Courts on questions as basic as how the detention period should be calculated and whether the multiple-offence bar applies to offences under different statutes charged in the same case.
The Law Commission's 2017 recommendation of a dedicated Bail Act, addressing these questions comprehensively rather than through amendments to a procedural code, remains unimplemented and, on this evidence, still worth taking seriously. [22]
One structural change deserves separate mention: Section 479(3) makes it the statutory duty of the jail superintendent, not the prisoner's lawyer, to apply to the court once the relevant detention period has run. [23] This shifts the burden of tracking release eligibility away from prisoners who frequently have no lawyer at all, and onto an institutional actor with the records to do it properly. Whether prison administrations - chronically understaffed and, in many states, running on colonial-era infrastructure - actually discharge that duty is an empirical question this article cannot answer from the statute alone, but the design is sound, and sound design is not nothing.
V. Prison Reform: Oversight Without an Overhaul
The new codes are procedural instruments and were never going to rebuild India's prisons directly; the Prisons Act, 1894 and the model prison manuals that actually govern day-to-day incarceration lie outside their scope. Their contribution to prison reform is therefore indirect, running through the bail provisions discussed above and through continuing judicial oversight of the kind exercised in the Supreme Court's long-running suo motu prison-conditions proceeding, initiated after a former Chief Justice wrote to the Court describing overcrowding, unexplained deaths in custody, and chronic understaffing among prison personnel.
This indirection is worth naming rather than glossing over. A reduction in the undertrial population achieved through Section 479 relieves pressure on overcrowded barracks without touching the conditions inside them for those who remain - convicted prisoners, those denied bail under sub-section (2), and those whose release orders are delayed by an under-resourced jail administration. Genuine prison reform, as opposed to a lighter flow of admissions, would require investment in staffing, healthcare, and legal aid infrastructure that no amount of clever drafting in a procedural code can substitute for. The 2003 Malimath Committee said as much two decades ago [24], and the diagnosis has not gone stale simply because the statute book has been rewritten.
VI. Evidence in a Digital Register
The BSA's central move is to place electronic and digital records on the same footing as paper: Section 57 treats them as documents capable of being led as primary evidence, [25] while Sections 61 to 63 set out the conditions - including a certificate requirement modelled on the old Section 65B - under which such records are admissible. [26] This is less a break with the past than a consolidation of case law the Supreme Court had already produced under the 1872 Act, from the strict certificate rule in Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer [27] to its later relaxation in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal [28]. Codifying that jurisprudence gives trial courts, many of which struggled to apply the certificate rule consistently, a clearer statutory anchor than a decade of sometimes conflicting judgments could provide.
The practical significance is largest in exactly the categories of crime that have grown fastest and were worst served by a nineteenth-century evidentiary framework: financial fraud, cybercrime, and offences where call records, chat logs, or CCTV footage carry more weight than any witness's memory. Complementing this, Section 530 of the BNSS permits trials, inquiries, and the service of summons to proceed in electronic form, [29] a change accelerated, as in many jurisdictions, by the pandemic-era experience of virtual hearings. Taken together, these provisions push India's trial process toward the digital-evidence practice that investigators and litigants had, in effect, already been improvising around the edges of the old statute.
Not every headline change survived contact with implementation. Section 106(2) of the BNS, which would have created an enhanced sentence for drivers who cause death by rash driving and flee without reporting to the police, was excluded from the July 2024 commencement notification after transport unions protested that it would encourage drivers involved in accidents to abandon injured victims rather than risk the harsher penalty for fleeing. [30] The episode is a useful reminder that a reform enacted by Parliament is not self-executing: implementation remains a bargaining process between the state and the constituencies its rules will bind, and a provision can be law on paper for over a year without being law in practice.
VII. An Assessment
Judged against their own stated ambition - a faster, more victim-centred, more technologically competent criminal process - the three codes deliver a mixed but not negligible result. The arrest safeguards in Sections 35, 37, and 47 of the BNSS give statutory teeth to protections the courts had already announced but police compliance had often ignored. The evidentiary framework in the BSA catches the law up to two decades of digital-evidence litigation that trial courts had been navigating without much statutory guidance. Section 479's undertrial-release mechanism, whatever its flaws, has already produced concrete releases through the Supreme Court's August 2024 ruling - a result the old Section 436A, weaker on paper and inconsistently applied in practice, rarely achieved at comparable scale.
Set against this are real gaps. The multiple-offence and life-imprisonment exclusions in Section 479(2) sit uneasily with the constitutional reasoning the provision is supposed to advance, and they remain unresolved by anything short of further litigation or amendment. Forensic and prison-infrastructure mandates depend on state-level funding the central statute cannot itself supply. And the deferred commencement of Section 106(2) shows that even provisions Parliament thought it had settled can be renegotiated once affected groups organise against them. None of this makes the reform illusory. It does mean that the more accurate description of where India's criminal process now stands is not "transformed" but "in transition" - a set of genuinely improved default rules operating inside institutions, from underfunded forensic labs to overcrowded prisons, that the statute book alone cannot rebuild.
VIII. Conclusion
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam are not, in the main, a rupture with what came before; they are closer to a substantial renovation of a building whose foundations were laid under colonial rule and then reworked, unevenly, by decades of Indian case law. That renovation has real value - clearer arrest procedures, a statutory anchor for digital evidence, and a bail provision that, imperfect as it is, has already put people out of jail who would otherwise still be waiting for a trial date. Whether the renovation holds will be decided less by the text of these three Acts than by whether India funds the forensic laboratories, staffs the prisons, and trains the police officers the new codes assume already exist. Legislative drafting can rewrite the rules; it cannot, by itself, rebuild the institutions that apply them.
Endnotes
[1] Ministry of Home Affairs, Notification No. S.O. 1058(E) (Feb. 23, 2024) (India) (bringing the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 into force from July 1, 2024).
[2] Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, No. 45 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India) [hereinafter BNS].
[3] Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, No. 46 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India) [hereinafter BNSS].
[4] Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, No. 47 of 2023, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India) [hereinafter BSA].
[5] See generally Ministry of Law and Justice, Statement of Objects and Reasons, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill, 2023 (India) (describing the reforms as removing "colonial vestiges" from the criminal law).
[6] BNSS § 173(1) (permitting an information relating to a cognizable offence to be given electronically and requiring signature within three days).
[7] BNSS § 173(4) (zero FIR provision, permitting registration of an FIR at any police station irrespective of territorial jurisdiction, with subsequent transfer).
[8] BNSS § 35(7) (arrest for offences punishable with imprisonment of less than three years, where the person is infirm or above sixty years, generally requiring prior permission of an officer not below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police).
[9] BNSS § 47 (duty to inform the arrested person, without delay, of the grounds of arrest and of the right to bail).
[10] BNSS § 37 (requiring police stations to designate an officer to maintain records of arrests and to display such information, and requiring the arrested person's family or a nominated person to be informed).
[11] D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, A.I.R. 1997 S.C. 610 (India).
[12] Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar, (2014) 8 S.C.C. 273 (India).
[13] BNSS § 176(3) (mandating forensic examination of the crime scene by a forensic expert for offences punishable with seven years' imprisonment or more).
[14] BNSS § 105 (requiring videography of the search and seizure process).
[15] National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics India 2022, at 12-14 (Ministry of Home Affairs 2023) (recording that undertrial prisoners constituted over three-quarters of the total prison population).
[16] BNSS § 479(1) (providing for release on bail of an undertrial who has undergone detention for one-half, or, for a first-time offender, one-third, of the maximum sentence prescribed for the offence).
[17] BNSS § 479(2) (excluding from the benefit of sub-section (1) any person against whom proceedings are pending in more than one offence, and any offence punishable with death or life imprisonment).
[18] Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar, A.I.R. 1979 S.C. 1369 (India).
[19] See Abhinav Sekhri, The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Bail Under the BNSS, 4 Ind. L. Rev. 112, 118-121 (2024) (arguing that Section 479(2)'s multiple-offence bar reproduces the "culture of denial" the Supreme Court had criticised under the CrPC).
[20] In re: Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons, W.P. (Civil) No. 406 of 2013, order dated Aug. 23, 2024 (India) (holding that Section 479, BNSS applies retrospectively to undertrial prisoners charged before July 1, 2024).
[21] Satender Kumar Antil v. Central Bureau of Investigation, (2022) 10 S.C.C. 51 (India).
[22] Law Commission of India, Report No. 268, Amendments to Criminal Procedure Code, 1973 - Provisions Relating to Bail, at 21-34 (2017) (recommending a standalone Bail Act).
[23] BNSS § 479(3) (placing a statutory duty on the Superintendent of Jail to apply to the court for release once the relevant period of detention has been completed).
[24] Justice V.S. Malimath, Committee on Reforms of Criminal Justice System, Government of India, Report, vol. I (2003).
[25] BSA § 57 (deeming electronic and digital records to be documents and permitting their admission as primary evidence).
[26] BSA §§ 61-63 (conditions for admissibility of electronic records, including the requirement of a certificate under Section 63(4)).
[27] Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, (2014) 10 S.C.C. 473 (India) (holding that secondary electronic evidence is inadmissible without a certificate under Section 65B(4) of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872).
[28] Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, (2020) 7 S.C.C. 1 (India) (clarifying and relaxing the certificate requirement).
[29] BNSS § 530 (authorising trials, inquiries, and proceedings, including the service of summons, to be conducted in electronic form).
[30] BNS § 106(2) (creating an enhanced ten-year sentence for hit-and-run offences involving failure to report to police, later kept in abeyance pending consultation with transport associations); Ministry of Home Affairs, Notification No. S.O. 1058(E) (Feb. 23, 2024) (India) (excluding Section 106(2) from the notified commencement).