The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam is the law of evidence for criminal and civil proceedings in India. It replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 from 1 July 2024. In structure and substance it is the most conservative of the three new criminal laws, keeping most of the 1872 framework on relevance, admissions, burden of proof, presumptions and witness examination, but reorganising it into 170 sections and modernising the treatment of digital material.
The central change is how electronic records are handled. Under the old Act, a printout or a copy of a computer record was secondary evidence that had to clear the hurdle of Section 65B. The new Act treats electronic and digital records as primary documentary evidence in their own right, and expressly brings in information stored on servers, semiconductor memory, smartphones and cloud services. That reflects how ordinary evidence now actually looks: WhatsApp messages, CCTV footage, call detail records, emails and location logs.
The certification requirement has not disappeared. Section 63 carries forward and expands the old Section 65B certificate, so a party relying on an electronic record still needs a proper certificate from the person responsible for the device or system. Courts have continued to enforce this strictly.
The Act also allows oral evidence to be given electronically, which makes video conference testimony a normal feature rather than an exception. Protections around confessions are retained: a confession to a police officer is not admissible, and one made in custody counts only if made before a Magistrate.