BSA vs Indian Evidence Act: A Practical Working Guide

The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA), Act No. 47 of 2023, replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 on 1 July 2024. It restructures evidence law across 170 sections in 12 chapters and 4 parts, and applies to all judicial proceedings before a court, excluding proceedings before arbitrators. By most assessments, the BSA retains roughly 90% of the prior Act's substance - this is a modernization of a small number of provisions rather than a ground-up rewrite of evidence law.

The BSA's most consequential change for current practice is expanding the definition of documents and electronic records to explicitly include information stored in semiconductor memory or communication devices - smartphones and laptops, not just conventional computer output - and treating such electronic records as primary evidence in their own right, rather than secondary evidence requiring the older, narrower certification route.

We've covered the specific Supreme Court ruling on the Section 63(4) certificate requirement for such records in a dedicated article - see the related link below - since that provision has already generated significant litigation over what counts as a qualified 'expert' for certification purposes.

Because most matter-relevant material today - WhatsApp messages, emails, scanned documents - is inherently electronic, the BSA's treatment of electronic records as primary evidence is the provision most likely to actually come up in day-to-day drafting and evidence preparation, more often than the sections that simply renumber familiar Evidence Act concepts like relevancy or burden of proof.

As with the BNS and BNSS, the applicable law generally turns on the timing of the underlying proceeding rather than a blanket cutover - evidentiary questions in matters that straddle 1 July 2024 are worth checking against the BSA's own transitional provisions rather than assuming either the old or new Act applies wholesale.