Vidhara

The Indian Penal Code, 1860

§304Punishment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder

Whoever commits culpable homicide not amounting to murder, shall be punished with [imprisonment for life], or imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine, if the act by which the death is caused is done with the intention of causing death, or of causing such bodily injury as is likely to cause death; or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, or with fine, or with both, if the act is done with the knowledge that it is likely to cause death, but without any intention to cause death, or to cause such bodily injury as is likely to cause death.

Old law ⇄ new law

State amendments

This section has been amended in its application to Himachal Pradesh. The text above is the central provision and is what applies everywhere else — these amendments are law only in the State that made them.

Reproduced from the same official PDF as the section above, as the amending Act words it — not a consolidated State version of the section. Check the source before relying on it.

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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 Repealed by BNS 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01.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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