Early in June, assistant sub-inspector of police Sharafat Ali took a break from his regular duties at a police station in Noida, near Delhi, to attend a day-long training session to learn criminal law afresh.
The session was necessitated by the unprecedented overhaul of India’s criminal justice system looming ahead.
On July 1, the three main criminal laws that had formed the foundation of this system – the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 and the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 – shall cease to remain in operation.
They will be replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 – that were passed in Parliament in December.
To prepare for such a seismic change in the legal system that forms the bedrock of their work, police departments across India have been busy training police officers in the new laws.
Ali attended one such training session. “We were taken through how sections in the new laws relate to the sections in the existing laws as well as the changes introduced in the new laws,” he said.
“We also went through the new forms for the police to fill up, introduced in the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita,” he added. Finally, they went through common case scenarios – snatching, rape, dowry death – and how the police would proceed under the new laws, he said.
After the session ended, he was asked to revise the content of the new laws through a mobile phone app. However, he could not name the app and did not have it on his phone.
“I’m too old to learn from smartphones,” Ali, in his late 50s, said, laughing.
His colleague at the Noida Phase 2 police station, assistant sub-inspector Renu Kumar, was yet to undergo any training as of June 20, just 10 days before the new laws kick in.
Kumar said that he was scheduled for a three-day training course before the end of June, but he was not sure when it would commence.
At police stations that Scroll visited in and around Delhi, many officers were reluctant to speak about whether they were familiar enough with the news laws to be able to implement them smoothly. Those who agreed to speak admitted that they had only received minimal classroom training for a handful of days and that they were still coming up to speed with the provisions of the new laws.
The police officers acknowledged that transitioning to the new legal system from next month would be challenging and take several months to become seamless. At the same time, there was a weary acceptance that they had no option but to deal with the challenge of operationalising the new laws that “had come from above”.
Minimal training
Since the beginning of the year, police departments in India have launched massive capacity building drives to train thousands of their officers and staff. They have also prepared a host of training material, some of which is available online.
Each department has held separate classroom training sessions for different ranks of police personnel that vary in length and content.
The training is crucial for the lower-ranked staff – sub-inspectors and constables – who form the rank and file of a police station. All their work, from filing first information reports, chargesheets and police diaries to conducting investigations, will be governed by the new laws.
However, across police stations in Delhi, Faridabad and Gurgaon in Haryana, and Noida in Uttar Pradesh, sub-inspectors and constables said they had received minimal training in the new laws.
A constable working as a computer operator at a police station in Noida, requesting anonymity, told Scroll that he had received a single day’s training.
According to Inspector Ganesh Kumar at the Badarpur police station in Delhi, constables and sub-inspectors had been administered training for only a few days because “12th pass and intermediate-level persons cannot be expected to follow legal training”.
Assistant sub-inspector Ram Kumar, also at the Badarpur police station, agreed. “We will learn the new laws with time and experience,” he said. “The police are used to working like this, under pressure.”
Many police stations have, in fact, devised their own ways of training their clerical staff and constabulary.
At the Badarpur police station, for instance, the staff is being trained through dummy case registration. As proof, Inspector Ganesh Kumar pulled out the daily diary of the police station, which serves as a record of all actions taken by the staff.
In the diary, for each complaint and first information report entry, the section numbers for offences made under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita were being jotted down in brackets next to the section numbers of offences under the currently operational Indian Penal Code.
Old or new laws?
However, most of the police officers Scroll spoke with expressed confusion and lack of clarity regarding basic questions about the application of the new laws.
One of the most contentious questions regarding the new laws is whether they will apply retrospectively: that is, if an offence was committed before July 1 but the complaint is made on or after July 1, would the first information report invoke the old Indian Penal Code or the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita?
The uncertainty over this has been flagged by senior advocates.
Not surprisingly, police officers were stumped by the question too.
Both Inspector Ganesh Kumar and the station house officer at a police station in Faridabad who requested anonymity said that the offence would be prosecuted as per the date on which it was committed. If an offence was committed before July 1, it would be proceeded with under the Indian Penal Code, they affirmed.
On the other hand, assistant sub-inspector Gaurav Malik of the Noida Phase 2 police station and the head constable of a police station in Gurgaon, who did not wish to be identified, said that the date of registration of first information report was key. According to them, if a complaint is lodged in or after July, it would be proceeded with under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, regardless of when the offence was committed.
Most of the other police officers that Scroll spoke with were unable to take a position on this and said that they would simply proceed as per the orders received from superior officers in this regard.
The uncertainty over such a basic question of application only about a week before the new laws come into effect does not augur well.
“Any loopholes or difficulties in the new provisions will get resolved with time,” the station house officer in Faridabad optimistically said.
Inspector Ganesh Kumar had a more grounded take. “Courts’ interpretation shall have to be awaited on a lot of contentious and ambiguous provisions,” he said.
What is beyond question, though, is that the police will have to juggle two systems of law simultaneously: using the old laws to proceed with offences registered before July and the new laws for those registered from July onward.
Video-recording concerns
A challenge flagged by several police personnel that Scroll spoke with was the requirement in the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita that any search or seizure at the crime scene and witness and victim statements must be recorded through “audio-video electronic means preferably mobile phone”.
Many of them admitted that they had not been provided any specific training or guidance on how to carry out such recordings. They questioned how they were expected to carry out the recording simultaneously with their investigation work and pointed out the practical difficulty of recording hundreds of videos on their phones every day.
What if our phone memory runs out in the middle of recording – this was a common refrain.
“For video recording, the department should provide high-quality digital equipment,” assistant sub-inspector Malik said.
Daunting transition
Almost all the police officers that Scroll spoke with said that there are not too many differences between the old and the new laws, with only the section numbers having been rearranged.
Scroll had reported last year that the new statutes are only mildly revised versions of the extant criminal laws.
Ganesh Kumar said that the section numbers for offences in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita should have been kept the same as similar offences in the Indian Penal Code. “There is bound to be confusion among police staff due to the new section numbers,” he said.
An assistant sub inspector at the Sarai Khawaja police station in Faridabad told Scroll, on the condition of anonymity, that he will have to keep the new statute books open with him on his desk while writing any first information reports, chargesheets or diary entries for the next few months to remember the section numbers of the new laws.
The transition into the new system would be difficult, most of the police officers Scroll spoke with agreed.
“It will take us at least six months to get accustomed to the new system,” the head constable from Gurgaon said.
Two police personnel pointed out that the Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems online portal had not been updated to reflect the new criminal laws’ provisions as on June 20. All data generated by police stations, including the first information reports registered by them, are meant to be digitally available on this portal.
Assistant sub-inspector Renu Kumar from Noida said that his biggest concern was that ordinary people might get confused by these changes. “Everyone knows the Indian Penal Code provisions for common offences like murder and cheating,” he said. “Now, when we start using new section numbers, they will suspect and question us.”
Assistant sub-inspector Malik suggested that the public should be sensitised about the new laws as well.
The assistant sub-inspector from Faridabad said in a matter-of-fact tone, “The government has enacted this. Now we must implement it.”
