Digital Forensics and Electronic Evidence under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023: Judicial Trends and Challenges in Cybercrime Trials

Abstract

The replacement of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (‘BSA’) marks a consequential moment in Indian evidence law, arriving at a time when cybercrime prosecutions increasingly turn on the reliability of digital forensic material. This article examines, first, the statutory architecture governing digital forensics and the admissibility of electronic evidence under the BSA read together with the Information Technology Act, 2000 (‘IT Act’) and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (‘BNSS’); and second, the judicial trends that continue to shape how courts receive and evaluate such evidence in cybercrime trials. The research problem addressed is that legislative re-codification has not, of itself, resolved the doctrinal uncertainties that attended Section 65B of the former Evidence Act, and that courts remain confronted with unresolved questions of certification, timing, chain of custody, and the appreciation of technically complex material. Adopting a doctrinal and analytical methodology grounded in statutory interpretation and case-law analysis, the article traces the transition from State (NCT of Delhi) v Navjot Sandhu through Anvar P.V. v P.K. Basheer, Tomaso Bruno v State of Uttar Pradesh, Shafhi Mohammad v State of Himachal Pradesh and Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, and assesses the extent to which Section 63 of the BSA consolidates or merely re-labels this jurisprudence. The comparative dimension situates Indian practice against the authentication regimes of the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, Australia and the European Union. The principal findings are that the BSA introduces incremental refinements — notably a dual-signature certificate and statutory flexibility where certification is genuinely unobtainable — without addressing structural weaknesses in forensic laboratory capacity, cross-border data access, or judicial training in technical appraisal. Where no verified empirical data exists on a given point — for instance, the operational rate of certificate compliance nationally — the article expressly acknowledges this evidentiary gap rather than supplying invented figures. The article's original contribution lies in reading the BSA, the IT Act and the BNSS as a single interlocking evidentiary-procedural regime, rather than as three separately administered statutes, and in deriving from that reading a reform agenda addressed to forensic accreditation, judicial capacity-building and cross-border cooperation.