The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 · Ch. II — SEXUAL OFFENCES AGAINST CHILDREN A.—P ENETRATIVE SEXUAL ASSAULT AND PUNISHMENT THEREFOR
Whoever, commits sexual assault, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than three years but which may extend to five years, and shall also be liable to fine. D.
Sections of the POCSO 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.
Source & version
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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