The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 · Ch. V — OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
Section 61 — Proof of contents of documents
The contents of documents may be proved either by primary or by secondary evidence.
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The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 · Ch. V — OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
The contents of documents may be proved either by primary or by secondary evidence.
Sections of the IEA are not classified one by one by any First Schedule. Part II of the First Schedule to the BNSS classifies offences under every other law by the punishment they carry — and the CRPC’s First Schedule sets out the same three bands.
If punishable with death, imprisonment for life, or imprisonment for more than 7 years.
If punishable with imprisonment for 3 years and upwards but not more than 7 years.
If punishable with imprisonment for less than 3 years or with fine only.
Read it against the punishment in the section above. Vidhara does not place a section in a band for you — that turns on the exact wording of its punishment, which is the section’s to say and not ours.
And a special or local law may provide otherwise: see BNSS section 5, which saves any special jurisdiction, power or procedure another law lays down.
IEA Section 61 → BSA Section 56 per the official NCRB Sankalan table.
This is the text of BSA Section 56, not of the section above. Read both before relying on either.
The contents of documents may be proved either by primary or by secondary evidence.
Source & version
Official text: India Code (official) ↗
Official India Code text: The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (1 of 1872), English PDF (bitstream indian_evidence_act.pdf, 452,020 bytes, sha256 a36ef40d…) fetched from indiacode.gov.in on 2026-08-29 via the DSpace 7 REST API (item handle 123456789/547821, CENTRAL community › Acts collection; the portal migrated from indiacode.nic.in and re-issued every handle). Replaces an Internet Archive Wayback snapshot with a direct fetch from the official portal. Repealed by the BSA 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and the @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Amendment footnotes set at body height were removed before parsing (D-085): the parser's body-height floor is now scaled to the document's own modal type size, per page, so a footnote set smaller than the body reaches the footnote latch instead of the statute text.
Spotted a mistake in this text or its mapping? Report an issue with IEA Section 61
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