Two Years of BNS, BNSS and BSA: What Actually Changed in Practice

By Bhaskar Subramanian, Advocate, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors

Published 24 October 2026 · Law stated as on 19 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam came into force on 1 July 2024, replacing the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Evidence Act. Two years on, enough courts have ruled on enough provisions to say with some confidence what changed in day-to-day practice, and what is still being worked out.

Two Years In: What the Numbers and the Courts Show

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) came into force together on 1 July 2024, replacing the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 across the country. The change touched every criminal filing in India overnight, from a cheque-bounce complaint in a magistrate's court to a Section 420 cheating case before a Sessions judge, now numbered and often reworded under the new codes.

Data reported in mid-2026 gives a sense of scale rather than precision. FIR registrations are reported to have risen from 17.90 lakh in the first year to a cumulative 74.41 lakh between 1 July 2024 and 26 June 2026, with chargesheets up by about 275 per cent over the same period, and the rate of chargesheets filed within the new sixty-day deadline climbing from roughly 51 per cent to about 67 per cent. These figures come from a single reported source and I have not found independent confirmation of the exact percentages, so they are best read as indicative of a strong upward trend in filing activity and timeline compliance, not as precisely verified statistics.

What is better documented is the pattern of litigation the new codes have generated. Two kinds of dispute dominate the reported case law so far. The first is interpretive: what does a renumbered or reworded provision actually require, where the BNSS or BSA departs from the CrPC or Evidence Act wording it replaced. The second is compliance: whether the police and the lower courts are actually following the new procedural mandates, several of which, unusually for Indian criminal procedure, carry fairly specific safeguards and timeframes.

This piece works through five areas where that litigation has produced enough clarity to matter: cheque dishonour procedure, investigation and trial timelines, electronic evidence, search and seizure videography, and two provisions with no precedent in the old codes, trial in absentia and statutory organised crime.

Cheque Dishonour Meets the New Procedure: Section 138 and BNSS Section 223

Cheque dishonour complaints under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881 are by far the largest single category of criminal litigation in India's district courts, and the transition to BNSS has produced one significant procedural ruling on how they are to be handled. BNSS Section 223 generally requires a Magistrate, before taking cognizance of a complaint, to give the proposed accused an opportunity of being heard. Read literally, that would have added a pre-cognizance hearing to every cheque-bounce complaint, at a stage where the accused has not yet even been summoned.

The Supreme Court closed that question in Sanjabij Tari v. Kishore S. Borcar, decided on 25 September 2025 (2025 INSC 1158, Manmohan and N.V. Anjaria, JJ.). Agreeing with the Karnataka High Court's reasoning in Ashok v. Fayaz Ahmad, the Court held that the Negotiable Instruments Act is a special enactment and that a Magistrate taking cognizance of a Section 138 complaint need not issue summons to the accused or hear them at the pre-cognizance stage under Section 223. The ruling is confined to Section 138 complaints; the general requirement under Section 223 for other complaint cases is unaffected. The same judgment also issued directions aimed at reducing the backlog of cheque-bounce cases, which commentary places at roughly six and a half lakh pending matters in Delhi's district courts alone as of September 2025, and several High Courts, including Delhi in November 2025 and Jammu and Kashmir in December 2025, have since circulated the directions to their subordinate courts.

A separate 2026 ruling, Sumit Bansal v. MGI Developers (2026 INSC 40), addressed a different procedural question: whether an accused can resist multiple Section 138 complaints arising from the dishonour of several cheques drawn in a single transaction. The Supreme Court held that each dishonoured cheque gives rise to its own cause of action once presentation, dishonour, notice and non-payment are complete, so a High Court cannot quash the complaints merely because several were filed. Together, the two rulings keep the substantive law of Section 138 intact while confirming that the BNSS's general procedural safeguards do not slow down what remains, numerically, India's busiest category of criminal complaint. A business drafting cheque-related covenants or deciding whether to issue a statutory notice should take comfort that the shift to BNSS has not added a procedural hurdle at the cognizance stage, and should expect multiple cheques from one transaction to support multiple, independently maintainable complaints.

The New Timelines for Investigation and Trial

One of the more concrete changes in the BNSS is a set of investigation deadlines that did not exist in the same form under the CrPC. Section 193 requires the police to complete investigation and file their report without unnecessary delay, and several High Courts, Kerala's among them, have read the provision as setting ninety days for offences punishable with seven years' imprisonment or more and sixty days for other offences, treating these as ordinarily binding rather than merely aspirational. Where the deadline is missed, Section 193(3) requires the investigating officer to record reasons in writing and inform the Magistrate. Courts applying the provision have described it as mandatory in nature, and at least one High Court has found an investigation unreasonably delayed where no final report had been filed and no reasons recorded within time.

A second timeline affects the defence rather than the investigation. Section 230 requires the prosecution to supply the accused with copies of the police report, the FIR and other relied-upon documents, and commentary on the provision records a fourteen-day period for this to happen once the accused appears or is produced before the court, a step that previously had no fixed deadline under the CrPC and routinely dragged on. Taken with the Section 193 investigation deadline, the combined effect is meant to compress the period between an FIR being registered and the trial actually opening on the merits.

Government figures reported in 2026 suggest these deadlines are being taken seriously operationally, if unevenly: officials in at least one state have described active monitoring of chargesheet filing against the sixty and ninety day windows, and the national sixty-day compliance rate is reported to have risen substantially over the two years since the codes commenced, though, as noted earlier, that specific percentage rests on a single reported source. What the case law adds, beyond the raw numbers, is that these timelines now have teeth in individual cases: an accused facing a stalled investigation has a specific statutory peg, Section 193(3), to argue delay before a court, in a way the CrPC's more open-ended language did not as clearly provide.

For litigants and counsel, the practical change is less about any single provision and more about a shift in posture. Timelines that were previously treated as directory guidance are increasingly argued, and in a growing number of cases accepted by courts, as binding commitments with consequences for delay, which changes how a bail application, a quashing petition or a discharge application is now framed around the investigation's own compliance record.

Electronic Evidence Under the BSA: The Section 63 Certificate

The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam replaced the Indian Evidence Act's long-litigated Section 65B with Section 63, governing the admissibility of electronic and digital records. The core requirement survives: an electronic record generally needs an accompanying certificate before a court will admit it as evidence of the facts it contains, rather than being tendered as if it were an ordinary document. What has changed is the certificate's structure and, on one reading, its reach.

Section 63's Schedule introduces a two-part certificate. Part A is completed by the person responsible for the computer or device on which the record was produced, addressing matters such as how the device operated and how the record was generated. Part B is completed by an expert and must record the record's hash value, computed using a recognised algorithm, so that the record's integrity can later be verified against that fingerprint. Commentators describe the addition of mandatory hash-value certification as the most significant technical change from the old Section 65B regime, since the Evidence Act never required cryptographic verification of this kind.

Where commentary divides sharply is on whether Section 63 preserves or removes the limited exception the Supreme Court recognised in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal (2020) 7 SCC 1, which allowed an original electronic device itself, produced in court, to be admitted without a Section 65B certificate in some circumstances. Some commentary reads Section 61 together with Section 63 as making every electronic record's legal effect conditional on a certificate, original devices included, which would remove that exception. Other commentary reads Section 63(4) as preserving the essential structure of the old provision, meaning Arjun Panditrao continues to govern. No reported decision has yet resolved this conflict squarely, and the position should be treated as unsettled rather than decided either way.

Until a higher court resolves that question, the safer course for any litigant relying on electronic evidence, whether a recorded call, a WhatsApp chat, CCTV footage or an email, is to obtain a full two-part Section 63 certificate as a matter of course, including for original devices tendered in court, rather than assume the Arjun Panditrao exception will be read across into the new Act.

Search, Seizure and the Videography Mandate

BNSS Section 105 requires that search and seizure be recorded through audio-video electronic means, and that the recording be sent to the Magistrate without delay, a requirement with no direct counterpart in the CrPC. The provision was meant to curb disputed recoveries and planted evidence, a recurring complaint in criminal trials, by creating a contemporaneous visual record of what was found and how.

Two years in, compliance is patchy enough that it has become its own source of litigation. The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, in an anticipatory bail order, described compliance with Section 105 as practically not implemented on the ground, despite a July 2025 circular from the Uttar Pradesh police leadership directing officers to follow it, and said the obligation should not be treated by investigating officers as burdensome. The statute itself is silent on consequence: it does not say what happens to a recovery made without the required recording, and High Courts have filled that gap differently. The Allahabad High Court has treated a missing recording as casting doubt on a disputed recovery and granted bail on that basis, and the Bombay High Court has gone further, in one matter holding a search of a residence illegal for want of videography and awarding compensation to the person searched. By contrast, the Delhi High Court, dealing with a seizure carried out before the BNSS came into force, treated the absence of videography as a deficiency that could not by itself vitiate an otherwise valid seizure, a ruling necessarily limited by its timing.

Some states have moved to make the consequence explicit by rule rather than wait for case law to settle. The Delhi BNSS (Identification of Case Property) Rules, 2025 expressly allow photographs and videography of seized property to be used as evidence of identification, formalising at the rule level what Section 105 only required procedurally.

For defence counsel, the immediate, practical point is that a search or seizure carried out after 1 July 2024 without the mandated recording is now a live, arguable ground, not merely a technicality, though its weight still depends on which High Court's approach a trial court follows and on how directly the missing recording bears on a disputed fact such as the location or ownership of what was seized.

Zero FIR and Electronic Filing

BNSS Section 173 puts the pre-existing administrative practice of the Zero FIR onto a statutory footing. Under Section 173(3), a person can lodge information about a cognizable offence at any police station, regardless of where the offence occurred, and that station must register it and transfer it to the station with territorial jurisdiction, which then renumbers it as a regular FIR and investigates. Section 173(1) separately recognises that information can be given, and an FIR can accordingly be registered, through electronic communication, a mode the CrPC never expressly addressed, with the informant typically required to appear and sign the recorded statement within a short window, commonly cited as three days, for it to stand as a valid FIR.

The most visible application of this electronic route has been the e-Zero FIR pilot, launched under the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre in Delhi in May 2025, under which cyber financial fraud complaints above ten lakh rupees reported through the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal or the 1930 helpline are automatically converted into Zero FIRs without the complainant separately visiting a police station to lodge one. Given how much financial fraud now moves across state lines within hours, a provision that lets a complainant lodge a Zero FIR from wherever they are, electronically, has particular relevance for any business or individual that is a victim of cyber-enabled payment fraud, where the earlier practice of waiting to identify and visit the territorially correct station could cost days that matter for freezing accounts and tracing funds.

The safeguards built around the provision matter as much as the facility itself: a refusal to register a Zero FIR or a regular FIR can be appealed in writing to the Superintendent of Police under Section 173(4), and the informant is entitled to a free copy of what was recorded under Section 173(2). Two years on, the statutory basis for Zero FIR and electronic filing looks settled as a matter of text; what remains uneven, as with the videography mandate, is how consistently it is actually followed at the station level, a point on which the reported case law is still thin.

New Statutory Offences: Organised and Petty Organised Crime

BNS Sections 111 and 112 created something the Indian Penal Code never had: a general, nationwide statutory offence of organised crime, applicable outside the states that had their own special organised crime legislation. Section 111 is the higher tier, triable only by a Sessions Court, cognizable and non-bailable. Its threshold is demanding and backward-looking: it requires that more than one chargesheet has already been filed against the relevant syndicate before a competent court within the preceding ten years, on which that court has taken cognizance, and that the underlying activity is itself a cognizable offence punishable with three years' imprisonment or more.

Section 112 sits below it as a new, lower offence with no IPC equivalent at all: petty organised crime, covering acts such as theft, snatching, cheating, unauthorised ticket sale, unauthorised betting or gambling, or selling leaked examination papers, where committed by a member of a group or gang, without needing the prior-chargesheet history that Section 111 demands. It carries a sentence of one to seven years together with a fine, and is treated by commentators as non-bailable.

Because Section 111's threshold turns on a documented history of prior chargesheets and cognizance against the same syndicate, prosecutors have had to work out in practice which section fits a given set of facts, and at least one 2026 High Court ruling, reported only in secondary commentary and not independently verified here, is said to have held that a Section 111 charge could not stand without that prior-chargesheet history being shown, directing the trial court to consider Section 112 instead. Pending clearer appellate guidance, the overlap between the two provisions should be treated as unsettled.

For a business dealing with organised fraud, extortion or counterfeiting rings, typically as a complainant or victim rather than an accused, the practical significance is that a syndicate with a documented history of prior cases can now potentially be prosecuted under the more serious Section 111 framework, with asset-forfeiture consequences generally associated with organised crime statutes, rather than only under the older individual offences such as cheating or criminal conspiracy that applied before 1 July 2024.

Trial in Absentia for Proclaimed Offenders

BNSS Section 356 introduced a mechanism absent from the CrPC: the ability to try, and conclude the trial of, an accused who has absconded, without their physical presence, subject to a defined set of pre-conditions. The accused must first have been declared a proclaimed offender under Section 84 of the BNSS, the successor to Section 82 of the CrPC, and commentary ties the provision's practical use to offences carrying death, life imprisonment or a minimum sentence of ten years, reflecting the seriousness Parliament evidently intended before dispensing with an accused's presence.

The safeguards built into the provision are specific rather than general. Commentary describes a requirement of multiple arrest warrants issued and returned unexecuted over a period of weeks, a public notice published in both an English and a vernacular newspaper, and a waiting period measured in months from the framing of charges before the court may proceed in the accused's absence. Where the trial does proceed, the state must provide and fund defence counsel, typically an amicus curiae, to represent the absent accused's interests through the proceeding, a safeguard the Allahabad High Court has treated as central to the provision's constitutionality in a 2026 ruling setting out detailed guidelines for trial courts applying Section 356.

Under Section 356(6), a trial conducted in this manner can proceed all the way to judgment even if the accused later appears or is arrested before it concludes, and under Section 356(7) that judgment can be challenged only once the proclaimed offender actually appears before the court, which as a practical matter removes any incentive to stay away indefinitely in the hope of avoiding a verdict altogether.

The provision is squarely aimed at an old and specific problem: economic-offence and other serious accused who leave the country, or simply disappear, once an FIR is registered, leaving the prosecution unable to proceed for years. Two years in, reported use of Section 356 is still limited, but the Allahabad High Court's guidelines suggest trial courts are now expected to invoke it routinely once the statutory conditions for proclamation are met, rather than treat an absconding accused as an indefinite bar to moving the case forward.

What This Means for Businesses and Litigants

For a business that files or defends criminal complaints as part of ordinary commercial life, cheque dishonour chief among them, the two-year mark brings a measure of settled ground. Sanjabij Tari confirms that Section 138 complaints move to cognizance without an added pre-hearing step, and Sumit Bansal confirms that multiple cheques from one transaction can each found their own complaint, so drafting and litigation strategy around dishonoured cheques should proceed on the assumption that the BNSS has not disturbed either point.

Anyone relying on electronic evidence, whether call recordings, emails, CCTV footage or payment app logs, should now obtain the full two-part Section 63 certificate as routine practice, including for original devices, given that the continued availability of the Arjun Panditrao exception for original devices is genuinely unsettled under the new Act and should not be assumed.

A party on the receiving end of a search, whether in a tax raid, a regulatory inspection with police involvement, or any other search touching business premises, should insist on and document videography under Section 105 at the time, since the consequence of its absence is still being worked out differently across High Courts and a contemporaneous objection preserves the point far better than raising it only after the fact. A victim of financial fraud, particularly cyber-enabled fraud crossing state lines, should use the electronic and Zero FIR routes under Section 173 immediately rather than waiting to identify the correct police station, since speed in freezing accounts and tracing funds depends on it.

None of this amounts to a wholesale rewriting of criminal liability; the substantive offences a business is likely to encounter, cheating, criminal breach of trust, forgery, remain recognisably the same conduct under new section numbers. What has genuinely changed is procedure, timelines and evidentiary mechanics, and it is there, rather than in the substantive law, that two years of litigation have done the most to clarify how the new codes actually operate.

Two years is enough time to see which parts of a procedural reform bed down quietly and which keep generating litigation. Cheque dishonour procedure and the organised-crime provisions have had sharp, relatively recent appellate attention and now sit on comparatively firm ground. Electronic evidence under Section 63 and the consequence of skipping mandatory videography under Section 105 remain genuinely contested, with High Courts taking different positions and the Supreme Court yet to resolve either squarely.

The sensible position for practice, pending that resolution, is to comply with the stricter reading of each disputed provision rather than wait for a court to decide the point favourably: full Section 63 certification regardless of whether the record is an original or a copy, and insistence on contemporaneous videography at every search, whatever a particular trial court might later excuse. The codes have not finished being tested, and a litigant who assumes the most permissive reading of an unsettled provision is taking a risk the case law does not yet justify.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions, rulings and official documents below were relied on for this article, which states the law as on 19 October 2026. The position can change with amendments, rules and later decisions, so check the current text before acting on any of it.

1. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, Sections 111 and 112 (organised crime and petty organised crime)
2. Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, Section 84 (proclaimed offender), Section 105 (audio-video recording of search and seizure), Section 173 (FIR, Zero FIR and electronic filing), Section 193 (completion of investigation), Section 223 (pre-cognizance hearing), Section 230 (supply of documents to accused), Section 356 (trial in absentia)
3. Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, Sections 61 and 63 and the Schedule thereto (electronic record certification)
4. Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, Section 138 (dishonour of cheque for insufficiency of funds)
5. Sanjabij Tari v. Kishore S. Borcar, Criminal Appeal No. 1755/2010, Supreme Court of India, 2025 INSC 1158, decided 25 September 2025 (Manmohan and N.V. Anjaria, JJ.)
6. Sumit Bansal v. MGI Developers and Promoters, 2026 INSC 40, Supreme Court of India
7. Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, (2020) 7 SCC 1
8. Ravi alias Ravindra Singh v. State of U.P., 2026 AHC 101857, Allahabad High Court (guidelines on Section 356 BNSS trial in absentia)
9. Allahabad High Court (Lucknow Bench), anticipatory bail order on non-compliance with Section 105 BNSS videography mandate (2026)
10. Delhi BNSS (Identification of Case Property) Rules, 2025
11. Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, e-Zero FIR pilot, Delhi, launched May 2025

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