The Indian Evidence Act, 1872 · Ch. V — OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

Section 81 — Presumption as to Gazettes, newspapers, private Acts of Parliament and other documents

The Court shall presume the genuineness of every document purporting to be the London Gazette or [any Official Gazette, or the Government Gazette] of any colony, dependency or possession of the British Crown, or to be a newspaper or journal, or to be a copy of a private Act of Parliament [of the United Kingdom] printed by the Queen’s Printer and of every document purporting to be a document directed by any law to be kept by any person, if such document is kept substantially in the form required by law and is produced from proper custody.

How offences under the IEA are classified

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.

Arrest: Cognizable
Bail: Non-bailable
Triable by: Court of Session

If punishable with imprisonment for 3 years and upwards but not more than 7 years.

Arrest: Cognizable
Bail: Non-bailable
Triable by: Magistrate of the first class

If punishable with imprisonment for less than 3 years or with fine only.

Arrest: Non-cognizable
Bail: Bailable
Triable by: Any Magistrate

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.

Old law ⇄ new law

Renumberedold law ⇄ new law

Old lawIEA Section 81Presumption as to Gazettes, newspapers, private Acts of Parliament and other documents New lawBSA Section 80Presumption as to Gazettes, newspapers, and other documents

IEA Section 81 → BSA Section 80 per the official NCRB Sankalan table.

BSA Section 80 — Presumption as to Gazettes, newspapers, and other documents· the later provision, in full

This is the text of BSA Section 80, not of the section above. Read both before relying on either.

The Court shall presume the genuineness of every document purporting to be the Official Gazette, or to be a newspaper or journal, and of every document purporting to be a document directed by any law to be kept by any person, if such document is kept substantially in the form required by law and is produced from proper custody.

Explanation.—For the purposes of this section and section 92, document is said to be in proper custody if it is in the place in which, and looked after by the person with whom such document is required to be kept; but no custody is improper if it is proved to have had a legitimate origin, or if the circumstances of the particular case are such as to render that origin probable.

Open BSA Section 80 on its own page →

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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.

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