The Old Code and the New: How Courts Are Sorting Out the IPC-to-BNS Transition

A year after India's criminal codes were replaced, the Supreme Court's recurring case round-ups keep circling back to one recurring legal seam — which law, old or new, governs a case that straddles 1 July 2024.

Somewhere in a district court right now, a magistrate is looking at a chargesheet that cites a section of the Indian Penal Code for an act allegedly committed in May 2024, while the accused's bail application refers to procedure under a law that did not exist when the act was done. This is not an isolated oddity. It is the everyday reality of Indian criminal courts since 1 July 2024, when three colonial-era statutes — the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 — were replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS), and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Nearly two years on, the Supreme Court's steady stream of weekly and monthly digests continues to feature judgments that, directly or indirectly, turn on this single question: which code applies, and to what?