Vidhara

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012

§22Punishment for false complaint or false information

(1) Any person, who makes false complaint or provides false information against any person, in respect of an offence committed under sections 3, 5, 7 and section 9, solely with the intention to humiliate, extort or threaten or defame him, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months or with fine or with both. (2) Where a false complaint has been made or false information has been provided by a child, no punishment shall be imposed on such child. (3) Whoever, not being a child, makes a false complaint or provides false information against a child, knowing it to be false, thereby victimizing such child in any of the offences under this Act, shall be punished with imprisonment, which may extend to one year or with fine or with both.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2079/1/AA2012-32.pdf, 207,723 bytes, sha256 def90f072fdb6b62...) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-08-03. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and the @nexlex/ingest inline parser. Automated parse; footnotes and amendment history excluded. Spot-verified against the PDF; full clause-level proofread pending.

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