The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023

What the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita is, and what the name means

"Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita" translates roughly as "Indian Justice Code" — bharatiya meaning Indian, nyaya meaning justice, sanhita meaning a code or compilation. It is usually shortened to BNS. It is the law that defines crimes and their punishments in India: murder, theft, cheating, assault, and several hundred other offences.

It is Act 45 of 2023. Parliament passed it in December 2023, it received assent on 25 December 2023, and it came into force on 1 July 2024. On that date it replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860 — a statute that had been in continuous operation for 164 years, drafted under colonial rule and amended piecemeal ever since.

The Sanhita was one of three Acts that came into force together, and they are best understood as a set. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam replaced the Indian Evidence Act. Between them they cover what is an offence, how it is investigated and tried, and what may be proved in court.

The Sanhita is not a rewrite of Indian criminal law from first principles. Most of what was an offence before 1 July 2024 is still an offence, often in words carried across unchanged. What changed comprehensively is the arrangement — and therefore the numbers.

Which Code governs your matter — the date of the conduct, not the date of the complaint

This is the question to settle before any other, and it is the one most often got wrong. The applicable Code is fixed by when the offence was committed. It is not fixed by when the complaint was made, when the FIR was registered, or when the case came up for hearing.

An offence committed on 30 June 2024 and reported in 2026 is a Penal Code offence, charged under the Penal Code and tried under it. An offence committed on 2 July 2024 is a Sanhita offence even if nobody reports it for years. There is no cut-over by filing date and no discretion about it.

The Sanhita says so itself. Section 358 repeals the Penal Code, and then provides that the repeal does not affect "any penalty, or punishment incurred in respect of any offences committed against the Code so repealed", nor "any investigation or remedy in respect of any such penalty, or punishment" — and that any such proceeding may be instituted, continued or enforced "as if that Code had not been repealed".

So an IPC section number in a live case file is not an error to be corrected. It may be exactly right. Both numbering systems will remain in use for as long as it takes pre-July-2024 conduct to work through investigation, trial and appeal, which is a matter of years rather than months.

That rule is for the offence, and only the offence. Procedure and evidence follow a different test: the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam keep the old Acts alive only for an investigation, inquiry, trial or appeal that was already pending immediately before 1 July 2024. So an offence committed in May 2024 and reported in August 2024 is charged under the Indian Penal Code, but investigated under the BNSS and proved under the BSA. The two tests are easy to run together and give different answers.

How the Sanhita is organised, and what happened to the old numbers

The Sanhita has 358 sections across 20 chapters. The Penal Code had 511 sections across 23. The reduction is not repeal on a large scale — it is consolidation. The old Code habitually spread one subject across several sections: one defining the offence, another punishing it, others for aggravated forms. The Sanhita gathers those into a single section with sub-sections.

Cheating is the clearest case. IPC 415 defined it, 417 punished it, 418 covered cheating by someone bound to protect the victim’s interest, and 420 covered cheating with dishonest inducement to deliver property. All four are now parts of BNS 318, and personation, which was IPC 416 and 419, became BNS 319.

The chapters were also reordered around a different principle. The Penal Code opened its offence chapters with offences against the State. The Sanhita puts offences against the human body and offences against women and children early — Chapters V and VI — which is a drafting choice that reflects what the bulk of criminal practice actually concerns.

The consequence for anyone reading older material is blunt: almost no section number transfers. Of the old provisions in the Government’s own comparison table, only a minority were simply renumbered, and a reader who assumes their number survived will land on an unrelated offence more often than not.

What the Sanhita created, and what it dropped

16 provisions of the Sanhita are listed in the Government’s table as new provisions with no Penal Code counterpart. Not all of them are offences. Four are definitions or machinery — commencement (section 1(2)), the definition of "child" (2(3)), the cross-reference to terms defined in the IT Act and the BNSS (2(39)), and repeal and savings (358) — and section 48 extends the existing law of abetment to abetment from outside India of an act in India.

The rest create punishable conduct: sexual intercourse obtained by deceitful means or a false promise of marriage (69), hiring or engaging a child to commit an offence (95), organised crime (111), petty organised crime (112), terrorist act (113), acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India (152), snatching (304), mischief causing loss of one lakh rupees or more (324(5)), possessing or using a counterfeit seal or plate (341(3) and (4)) — and causing death by rash and negligent driving and escaping without reporting (106(2)), which is not in force. The commencement notification, S.O. 850(E) of 23 February 2024, appointed 1 July 2024 for the whole Sanhita "except the provision of sub-section (2) of section 106"; the BNSS notification of the same date, S.O. 848(E), excepted the corresponding First Schedule entry; and the Ministry of Home Affairs restated the exclusion in December 2024. No later notification bringing it into force was found, so this page treats 106(2) as not operative.

Organised crime and terrorism are the most consequential additions. Both were previously dealt with by separate special legislation — State organised-crime Acts and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act — and bringing them into the general criminal code changes which court hears them and which procedure applies.

Going the other way, 15 provisions were repealed with nothing put in their place. Most are unremarkable: obsolete definitions, provisions about false weights and measures that other legislation covers. Three are not.

Section 377 and section 497 had already been dealt with by the Supreme Court before the Sanhita was drafted — 377 read down so far as consensual conduct between adults was concerned, 497 struck down outright. The Sanhita carries neither. In the case of 377 that has been widely noticed as leaving a gap, because the section also covered non-consensual acts that no other provision obviously reaches, and the point is argued rather than settled.

Section 124A, sedition, is the one most often mis-stated. It is not in the Sanhita, and the Government’s comparison table marks it deleted. BNS 152 — endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India — is frequently described as replacing it, but the same table lists BNS 152 as having no Penal Code predecessor, and its ingredients are not the ingredients of 124A. The mapping settles that the numbers do not correspond. It does not settle how courts will read section 152, or how far reasoning from sedition decisions will be treated as persuasive — those are questions for the courts, case by case.

Community service: a punishment the Penal Code never had

Section 4 lists the punishments available under the Sanhita: death, imprisonment for life, imprisonment (rigorous or simple), forfeiture of property, fine — and, at clause (f), community service. The Penal Code had no such punishment. This is the single clearest substantive innovation in the Sanhita, and the one most likely to affect an ordinary defendant.

It is not available generally. Six sections provide for it, all at the minor end: a public servant unlawfully engaging in trade (section 202), non-appearance in response to a proclamation (209), attempting suicide to compel or restrain a public servant from discharging official duty (226), misconduct in public by a drunken person (355), defamation (356(2)), and theft — but only where the property is worth less than five thousand rupees, the offender returns it or restores its value, and it is a first offence (proviso to 303(2)).

The theft provision is worth pausing on, because it is the one an ordinary person is most likely to encounter. It converts what was a prison-first offence into one where returning what was taken produces community service instead, on a first offence. The Schedule to the BNSS treats that case separately as well: petty first-time theft of this kind is non-cognizable and bailable, where theft generally is neither.

The Sanhita does not define community service; the BNSS does. The Explanation to its section 23 describes it as work a court may order a convict to perform as a punishment that benefits the community, without pay — and lets a Magistrate of the first or second class impose it.

Three things people get wrong about the BNS

A fourth is worth adding, because it cuts the other way. The Sanhita is often described as a wholesale rewrite of Indian criminal law. It is not. The great majority of its provisions carry the Penal Code’s language across with the numbers changed, and a good deal of the case law decided under the old Code continues to apply to the new one where the words are the same. What changed comprehensively is the arrangement; what changed substantively is a minority, and the Government’s own table marks which.

1. 1"The new law applies to my case because it was filed after July 2024." It does not. The Code is fixed by when the conduct happened. This is the mistake that sends people to the wrong provision, and it is the commonest one.
2. 2"IPC 420 is now BNS 318." True but incomplete, and incomplete in a way that matters. BNS 318 absorbed four old provisions into its sub-sections. Section 318(2) carries up to three years and is bailable; 318(4), the one that corresponds to the old 420, carries up to seven and is not. Citing the section without the sub-section leaves out both the punishment and whether bail is a right.
3. 3"BNS 152 is the new sedition." The official mapping says otherwise on both sides: 124A is marked deleted, and 152 is listed as having no predecessor. Treating them as one offence under two numbers assumes the answer to a question the courts have still to work through: how far anything decided about 124A bears on a differently worded provision.