Supreme Court Upholds Section 63(4) BSA: What the Electronic Evidence Certificate Ruling Means for Advocates

In Pune Bar Association v. Union of India (2026 SCC OnLine SC 1297, decided 22 May 2026), a three-judge bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi rejected a challenge to the constitutional validity of Section 63(4) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) - the provision that replaced Section 65B of the old Evidence Act after the BSA took effect in July 2024.

The Pune Bar Association had argued that Section 63(4)'s certification requirements for electronic records were manifestly arbitrary and unduly onerous. The Court disagreed, holding that requiring a certificate disclosing the hash value of an electronic record, along with expert certification, serves a legitimate purpose: verifying that the record hasn't been altered since it was captured.

Under Section 63(4) BSA, an electronic record offered as secondary evidence generally needs an accompanying certificate identifying the device it came from, disclosing the record's hash value (a cryptographic fingerprint that changes if even a single bit of the file is altered), and certifying the process used to produce the copy.

This is the same basic structure the Supreme Court had already required under Section 65B of the old Evidence Act in Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer (2014) and Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal (2020) - the BSA carried the certificate requirement forward rather than removing it.

One genuinely useful clarification came out of this case: the Court held that the 'expert' who signs Part B of the standard-form certificate isn't limited to examiners specifically notified under Section 79A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Any individual with genuine special skill and expertise in computer science and cyber forensics can validly sign that part of the certificate.

This matters in practice because Section 79A-notified examiners are a limited, often backlogged resource. Widening the pool of who can competently certify a record reduces one of the practical bottlenecks advocates have faced when trying to get digital evidence - WhatsApp chats, emails, CCTV footage, call detail records - into a case file on time.

The Court's judgment addressed the constitutional-validity challenge and the scope of 'expert' for certification purposes - it did not rewrite the underlying certificate requirement itself, and further questions about certification standards in specific fact patterns may still come up in later cases. Advocates relying on this ruling for a specific filing should read the judgment text directly rather than relying on secondary summaries, including this one.

This ruling is a useful reminder that 'the document looks authentic' has never been the legal standard for digital evidence in India - a verifiable chain from device to hash value to certificate is. That's the same principle LegalDreams is being built around for AI-assisted document review: a citation or an extracted fact is only useful if it's tied to a checkable source, not just plausible-looking output.