Your Statute Book Still Cites the IPC

The Indian Penal Code was repealed on the 1st of July 2024. So were the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act. Section 358(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita says it in five words — "The Indian Penal Code (45 of 1860) is hereby repealed" — and section 531(1) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita does the same for the CrPC. Two years on, most practitioners have made their peace with the new numbering, or at least keep a concordance table open in another tab.

Here is the part nobody made their peace with. We ran the count against our own record of Central Acts on the 12th of August 2026:

• 988 sections, across 380 Central Acts, still name the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure or the Indian Evidence Act. That excludes the three repealed codes themselves.
• The Acts doing it are not obscure. The Companies Act 2013, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the Income Tax Act, the Juvenile Justice Act, the NDPS Act, the Railways Act, the CGST Act and the Delhi Police Act are all on the list.
• The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act is on it too. Section 31(3) tells a Magistrate that while framing charges for breach of a protection order, he "may also frame charges under section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (45 of 1860)."

Not one of those sections is wrong. They say what Parliament enacted. The statute book is a historical document as much as a working one, and rewriting the text of the PWDVA so that it points at section 85 of the BNS instead would be falsifying it. Every judgment that quotes section 31(3), every pleading that pinpoints it, every commentary that reproduces it, would stop matching the source. So the text stays as it is, and the reader is expected to do the bridging.

The bridge exists, and it is quieter than people think

Section 8 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 does the work. Where a Central Act repeals and re-enacts a provision, a reference in some other enactment to the repealed provision is construed as a reference to the re-enacted one, unless a different intention appears. So the PWDVA's reference to section 498A IPC is read today as a reference to section 85 of the BNS, and the machinery of the law carries on without anybody having to pass 380 amending Acts.

That is elegant, and it is completely invisible on the page. A section that says "498A of the Indian Penal Code" is not annotated. It does not carry a footnote. If you are a lawyer who has been doing 498A work for fifteen years, you supply the bridge without noticing you are doing it. If you are a second-year associate, or a citizen reading the DV Act because something happened at home last week, you read a live statute pointing at a dead one and you have no way of knowing which of those two things you are looking at.

And both books are live at the same time, on purpose

This is the part that catches people who think the transition is finished.

Section 358(2)(c) of the BNS says the repeal does not affect "any penalty, or punishment incurred in respect of any offences committed against the Code so repealed." Section 531(2)(a) of the BNSS goes further and says that any appeal, application, trial, inquiry or investigation that was pending immediately before the 1st of July 2024 shall be disposed of, continued, held or made under the old Code, as if this Sanhita had not come into force.

Read that literally, because it means what it says. The date that decides which code applies is the date of the offence, not the date you are standing in court. An FIR registered in June 2024 is investigated under the CrPC. A trial that was part-heard on the 30th of June 2024 finishes under the CrPC. A revision arising out of it, filed next year, is still a CrPC matter. Given how long Indian criminal matters run, there will be lawyers arguing under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 well into the 2030s, in the same building, on the same morning, as lawyers arguing under the BNSS.

So the working answer to "which code applies" is never "the new one". It is: what is the date of the offence, and was anything pending on 1 July 2024? Two questions, asked every time, before the numbering question is worth asking at all.

Why the renumbering is not a lookup table

There is a temptation to treat this as a mapping problem — 302 becomes 103, 420 becomes 318, 498A becomes 85 — and to think that once you have the table you are done.

The counts alone say otherwise. The IPC ran to 511 sections. The BNS has 357. The CrPC had 484; the BNSS has 533. The Evidence Act had 167; the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam has 171. Sections were merged, split, moved between chapters, given new sub-sections and in some cases dropped. A table that pairs an old number with a new one tells you where to look. It does not tell you whether the ingredients of the offence changed, whether a proviso survived, or whether the punishment moved.

The honest version of the question is not "what is 420 now". It is "does this provision still say the same thing, and if not, which version governs my facts" — and that has to be answered against the two texts, not against a concordance.

What we do about it

Miss Lucy holds all three new codes in full — 357 sections of the BNS, 533 of the BNSS and 171 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam — alongside the repealed codes, which we keep precisely because so much live work still runs on them. The three old codes are marked repealed in the record, so she knows what she is reading.

When she reads a section of some other Act that names the IPC, the CrPC or the Evidence Act — one of those 988 — the point is not to quietly swap the number. It is to hand you the section as enacted, name the successor provision, and put the offence-date question in front of you rather than answering it silently on your behalf. Sections 358 and 531 are not footnotes here; they are the first thing that decides the answer.

We built it this way for the reason that runs through everything else we build. A tool that silently modernises a citation is doing something worse than getting it wrong — it is making a legal decision on your facts, without telling you it made one, in a place where you will not think to look for it. The transition is not a formatting problem. It is a question about your matter, and it belongs to you.

For the two-thirds of criminal practice that is still running on the old codes, and for every one of those 380 Acts that quietly points at a statute that no longer exists, that distinction is the whole of the work.

---

Counts run against Miss Lucy's record of Central Acts on 12 August 2026. Coverage grows every week, so the figures move. Statutory text quoted from the sections as enacted.