The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam completed two years in force this month. The anniversary produced the usual seminar circuit — ministers citing decolonisation, retired judges citing continuity, bar associations citing inconvenience. What it did not produce is an audit. Here is an attempt at one, from the trial-court floor where the codes actually live.
Start with what has worked, because some of it genuinely has. The BNSS's timeline architecture — 90 days for charge-sheets with judicial extension, 60-day committal windows, judgment deadlines — has moved numbers. Charge-sheet compliance within the statutory window is up in every state that publishes data. Zero-FIR registration, e-FIR portals and the audio-video recording of searches have reduced the procedural impunity that the old CrPC tolerated by silence. These are real gains and it is bad advocacy to deny them.
The Section 63 problem is now a conviction problem
The failure that matters most is technical and therefore under-discussed. The BSA's Section 63 carried forward the electronic-evidence certificate regime — the old 65B — into an era where virtually every serious prosecution is digital at its core. Two years in, the certificate remains the single most common point of evidentiary collapse. Police stations obtain chat records without platform certificates. Prosecutors discover the defect at trial, years too late to cure. Courts, bound by the Constitution Bench's mandatory-certificate rule, exclude the evidence and acquit.
The fix is administrative, not legislative: standing certificate protocols with the major platforms and telecom operators, certificate checklists at the charge-sheet scrutiny stage, and forensic units that treat the certificate as part of the seizure, not an afterthought. Two years was enough time to build this. The third year should be judged on it.
Remand culture survived the new code
The BNSS was drafted with bail-reform language Parliament advertised loudly — the expanded default-bail provisions, the undertrial release mandates tied to one-third of maximum sentence. The prison statistics answer the advertisement: undertrial share of the prison population has moved two percentage points in two years. Magistrates still remand mechanically; prosecutors still oppose bail as institutional reflex; the new sections are cited most often in appellate judgments reversing orders that ignored them.
The Supreme Court has done what it can from above. But bail culture is made in the first thirty seconds of a remand hearing, and no statute reaches there without trial-court training that treats liberty as the default the code says it is.
What the third year should measure
Three metrics would tell us whether the codes are working better than any anniversary seminar: the electronic-evidence exclusion rate in serious trials, the undertrial ratio, and the median time from FIR to judgment in the fast-track categories the BNSS created. All three are countable today. None is published as a series.
A legal system that renames its codes has exercised sovereignty. A legal system that measures them has exercised seriousness. Two years in, we have proven the first beyond doubt. The second is still on offer.
Adv. Bhavya Razshree is an Advocate practising at the Delhi High Court.
