The Indian Penal Code, 1860

§255 — Counterfeiting Government stamp

Whoever counterfeits, or knowingly performs any part of the process of counterfeiting, any stamp issued by Government for the purpose of revenue shall be punished with [imprisonment for life] or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Explanation.—A person commits this offence who counterfeits by causing a genuine stamps of one denomination to appear like a genuine stamp of a different denomination.

Old law ⇄ new law

Mergedold law ⇄ new law

Old lawIPC §255Counterfeiting Government stamp New lawBNS §178Counterfeiting coin, Government stamps, currency-notes or bank-notes

IPC §255 → BNS §178 per the official NCRB Sankalan table. BNS §178 consolidates multiple IPC sections.

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Source & version

Official text: India Code (official) ↗

Official India Code text: The Indian Penal Code, 1860 (45 of 1860), English PDF (A1860-45.pdf) retrieved via Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshot 2020-04-21 of indiacode.nic.in (portal unreachable from ingest network). Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser on 2026-07-15. Repealed by BNS 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Eleven State-inserted sections that had been published as central law were removed on 2026-08-02 after the D-052 guard identified them: 354E, 376F, 509A and 509B (Chhattisgarh Act 25 of 2015), 379A and 379B (Gujarat Act 6 of 2019) and 382B-382F (Tripura Act 4 of 2019). They are now recorded as State amendments against the sections they attach to, not as sections of the Code (D-053).

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