Investigation under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 begins at the crime scene, and Section 176(3) fixes what must happen there. It requires a forensic expert to visit the scene and the collection to be videographed in every offence punishable with seven years or more.
Parliament attached both of those requirements, the expert visit and the video record, to a much looser earlier position. Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, whether a forensic team reached a scene at all was a matter for the investigating officer’s judgment and for what the district happened to have, and nothing in that Code obliged an officer to call a scientist to a murder. Section 176(3) converts that judgment into a duty for one defined class of offence, and it makes the collection auditable by requiring the process of collection, rather than the scene at large, to be recorded.
That duty does not begin everywhere on the same day. The sub-section states that the officer’s obligation runs “from such date, as may be notified within a period of five years by the State Government in this regard”, so the same investigation, conducted the same way, can be compliant in one State and deficient in another. Goa issued such a notification on 24 February 2025, gave it effect from 1 July 2024, and named the Goa State Forensic Science Laboratory at Verna as the source of the expert. For most States no comparable notification is publicly traceable, so the position has to be checked State by State.
Courts have not waited for the notifications to arrive. In a 2025 ruling, in Suresh v. State of Kerala, a Division Bench of the Kerala High Court set aside a conviction for murder on the quality of the investigation. The Bench then issued systemic directions, requiring forensic association at scenes covered by Section 176(3) and the use of the e-Sakshya platform, or an equivalent, for recording crime scenes, searches and statements. The registry was directed to forward the judgment to the State Police Chief and the Home Department for compliance.
Both halves of the sub-section, the expert visit and the video record, are easiest to see working on one set of facts. A man is found dead in a rented room in a district town, and the offence alleged is punishable with imprisonment for life. The station house officer photographs the room, prepares a site plan, seizes a stained bedsheet and a glass tumbler, and closes the scene by the evening. No forensic team attends, because the nearest laboratory is four hours away and has no mobile unit on duty that night.
Two difficulties then appear on the record. The first is that nobody with forensic training lifted the bedsheet or the tumbler, so the defence can ask at trial how each article was lifted, packed and sealed, and no witness will be able to answer from training. The second is that no video exists of the collection itself, which removes the audit trail the sub-section was designed to create.
The answer to both turns on a date. If that State has notified a date under Section 176(3), the omission is a breach of a statutory duty and the prosecution has to explain it. If it has not, the omission is argued as an ordinary deficiency in the investigation, and Section 511 of the Sanhita then asks whether a failure of justice has in fact been occasioned before any finding is disturbed. On neither footing does the trial collapse on the omission alone, which is why the class of offence is the first thing to fix.
Offences that bring Section 176(3) BNSS into play
Section 176(3) is triggered by information about an offence “made punishable for seven years or more”, which is the punishment the offence carries in law and not the sentence a court is expected to award on the facts. The trigger is the receipt of that information at the police station, so the duty attaches at the same moment as the officer’s duty under Section 176(1) to send a report to the Magistrate and to proceed in person, or depute a subordinate officer, to the spot.
Seven years exactly sits inside the class. The gazetted phrase is “seven years or more”, and a gloss such as “more than seven years”, which appeared in reporting when the Sanhita came into force on 1 July 2024, would exclude every offence whose maximum is precisely seven years. Offences at that boundary are not rare, so the difference decides whether a forensic team is owed at all.
The class the phrase describes is wide. Murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, rape, dowry death, kidnapping for ransom and organised crime under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 all carry maximum sentences above seven years, as do a long list of grievous hurt and property offences. The Union Cabinet recorded in June 2024 that the new codes were expected to produce a significant increase in the workload of forensic science laboratories. The seven-year class does not map onto the custody limits in Section 187(3), which allow ninety days only where the offence is punishable with death, imprisonment for life or ten years or more, and sixty days for everything else, after which default bail follows.
Reading the punishment clause of the section charged
Working the threshold in a live case means reading the punishment limb of the section charged rather than the description of the offence. Where that limb fixes a maximum of seven years or above, Section 176(3) is engaged, and where it fixes a lower maximum the sub-section does not apply however serious the facts appear.
Two drafting patterns complicate the reading. An offence punishable with imprisonment “which may extend to seven years” falls inside the class, because seven years is the maximum the section makes available. An offence punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both, stays outside it even where an accused faces several such counts, because the threshold is applied to the offence and not to the aggregate exposure.
Reading it wrongly costs something either way. An officer who takes the threshold too narrowly loses the expert visit in a case where it was owed, and the omission is then on the record for the defence to use for the rest of the trial. An officer who takes it too widely sends a scarce forensic team to a scene where the Sanhita did not require one, in a system whose shortage of trained forensic manpower the Union government has itself put on record.
State notification and the five-year window in Section 176(3)
The duty under Section 176(3) begins to run in a State from the date that State notifies, and each State Government has five years from the commencement of the Sanhita to publish that date. Commencement was 1 July 2024, which puts the outer limit at 30 June 2029.
That commencement condition sits in the middle of the sub-section rather than in a clause of its own. The officer in charge “shall, from such date, as may be notified within a period of five years by the State Government in this regard, cause the forensic expert to visit the crime scene to collect forensic evidence in the offence and also cause videography of the process on mobile phone or any other electronic device”. Until a State publishes a date, the sub-section supplies no date from which the officer’s obligation operates.
The Union government’s own description of the provision reads differently. Its press material states that it has become mandatory for forensic experts to visit crime scenes in offences punishable with seven years or more, and that the collection will be mandatorily videographed, without any qualification about a notified date. Both positions can stand together: the sub-section has been in force since 1 July 2024, and the duty inside it is keyed to a date that each State sets for itself.
Goa’s notification under Section 176(3) as a worked example
Goa notified the date on 24 February 2025, by notification 2-10-2025HD(G)-section 176-BNSS-586, published in the Official Gazette, Series I No. 49, dated 6 March 2025, with effect from 1 July 2024. The operative words track the sub-section closely: the officer in charge of a police station, on receipt of every information relating to the commission of an offence made punishable for seven years or more, is to “cause the forensic expert from Goa State Forensic Science Laboratory, Verna to visit the scene of crime to collect forensic evidence in the offence and also cause videography of the process on mobile phone or any other electronic device”.
Three features of that drafting do practical work. It fixes a date, it names the laboratory the expert is to come from, and it repeats the statutory description of the offence class instead of substituting a list of sections that a later amendment could renumber. A State that names its laboratory also answers, for its own police, the question the Sanhita leaves open about who the forensic expert is.
Where a State has published nothing equivalent, the investigating officer is not left without obligations. Section 176(1) still requires the officer to investigate the facts and circumstances of the case, Section 105 still requires search and seizure to be recorded through audio-video electronic means, and the Kerala High Court has treated forensic association as expected of a competent investigation irrespective of how far a State’s notification position has moved. The duty to register the information in the first place, which is where all of this starts, is dealt with separately in the guide to filing an FIR under Section 173 BNSS.
The duty to call a forensic expert and videograph the collection
The sub-section places three connected duties on the officer in charge of the police station, and each is expressed as something the officer must cause to happen rather than do personally. The officer must cause a forensic expert to visit the crime scene, cause that expert to collect the forensic evidence in the offence, and cause videography of the process on a mobile phone or any other electronic device.
That phrasing decides several practical questions. An officer who lifts a bloodstain personally and sends it to the laboratory has not complied, because the visit is itself the thing required. An officer who records a panoramic video of the room but not the lifting, packing and sealing has not complied either, because the words attach the videography to “the process” of collection rather than to the scene at large. Both failures show on the case diary, which is where a defence cross-examination on the point begins.
Persons who qualify as a forensic expert for the purposes of the section
The Sanhita does not define “forensic expert” anywhere in Section 176, and the omission is a real difficulty for an officer deciding whom to call at two in the morning. What the Sanhita supplies instead is a list assembled for a different purpose.
Section 329 names the Government scientific experts whose reports a court may use. That list includes the Director, Deputy Director or Assistant Director of a Central Forensic Science Laboratory or a State Forensic Science Laboratory, the Chief Controller of Explosives, the Director of the Finger Print Bureau, the Chemical Examiner to Government and the Serologist to the Government, together with any other scientific expert certified by notification by the State Government or the Central Government. Section 328 then makes a report under the hand of a gazetted officer of a Forensic Department, or of a Division of a Forensic Science Laboratory, usable as evidence without that officer being called to prove it.
Neither section says who has to attend a scene. A laboratory director does not travel to every murder in a district, so the person who arrives is drawn from the laboratory’s field staff or from a mobile forensic unit working under its authority. The distance between the person who collects an article and the person who signs the report on it is therefore built into the scheme, and it is closed in practice by the laboratory’s own chain of custody records rather than by anything in the Sanhita.
A State notification of the Goa kind settles the question locally by naming the laboratory the expert comes from. Where no notification exists, the safer reading for an investigating officer is that the expert should come from a Forensic Science Laboratory or a Forensic Department, because those are the institutions the Sanhita itself recognises in Sections 328 and 329. A report from anywhere else has to be proved in the ordinary way, through a witness in the box.
From the videography to the courtroom record
The video of the collection reaches the court as an electronic record, which means it travels through Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 rather than through the ordinary rules for documents. Section 63(4) requires a certificate, in the form specified in the Schedule and signed both by the person in charge of the device and by an expert, to be submitted along with the electronic record at each instance where it is offered for admission, a requirement examined at length in the guide to electronic evidence under the BSA, 2023.
The Union government built e-Sakshya for exactly this journey. The application lets an officer record video and photographs at a crime scene, at a post-mortem examination or during a search and seizure, and it caps each recording at four minutes. The clips are uploaded against a single first information report, together with a selfie for authenticity, to a cloud platform from which a court can retrieve them. In Suresh v. State of Kerala the Division Bench directed the Kerala police to use e-Sakshya, or any other capable platform, for searches under Section 105, crime scenes under Section 176(3) and statements recorded under Sections 180 and 183.
Which devices count is itself a matter some States have settled by notification. Goa declared the permitted audio-video electronic means on 26 February 2025, listing the investigating officer’s cell phone carrying a SIM card issued by Goa Police, cameras, body-worn cameras, tablets, drones, audio recorders and webcams issued by the competent authority, and footage from CCTV cameras stored on a network or digital video recorder or in the cloud. Adoption of the platform itself has been uneven: by 2 July 2025, a year after the three new codes came into force, 11 States and Union Territories had notified rules for e-Sakshya, namely Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Manipur, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Puducherry, while 21 had not. The wider scheme of proof that these recordings enter is set out in the complete guide to the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023.
Section 105, the parallel recording duty, shows what happens when a requirement of this kind is not met. Search and seizure “shall be recorded through any audio-video electronic means preferably mobile phone”, and the police officer is to forward the recording without delay to the District Magistrate, the Sub-divisional Magistrate or the Judicial Magistrate of the first class. In an order reported in August 2026, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court recorded that this mandate was practically not implemented, observing that it could not understand why compliance with such a simple statutory requirement was a difficulty for police authorities.
Borrowed forensic facilities under the section’s proviso
Where the forensic facility for an offence is not available in a State, the proviso to Section 176(3) obliges that State Government to notify the utilisation of another State’s facility until the facility is developed or made in its own territory. The obligation falls on the State Government rather than on the station house officer, and the proviso expresses it as a “shall”. Police and public order are State subjects under the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution, which is why both the commencement date and the fallback arrangement are left to the State rather than fixed centrally.
That proviso was drafted around a capacity problem the Union government has acknowledged in writing. The Cabinet approved the National Forensic Infrastructure Enhancement Scheme on 19 June 2024, with an outlay of Rs 2,254.43 crore for the years 2024-25 to 2028-29. That approval recorded a significant shortage of trained forensic manpower in the forensic science laboratories in the country, and tied the scheme to the new criminal laws, which mandate forensic investigation for offences involving punishment of seven years or more.
Building the capacity that approval envisaged is still under way. Seven Central Forensic Science Laboratories operate under the Directorate of Forensic Science Services, at Chandigarh, Delhi, Kamrup in Assam, Kolkata, Bhopal, Pune and Hyderabad, alongside 32 State and 97 Regional Forensic Science Laboratories as of December 2024. Seven further Central laboratories were approved under the scheme for Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan at an outlay of Rs 860.3 crore, and by 1 April 2026 the States had allotted land for only three of them, at Raipur, Khordha and Chengalpattu. Separately, Rs 245.29 crore of Nirbhaya funding was approved for 30 States and Union Territories to strengthen DNA analysis and cyber forensic capacity in State laboratories.
The proviso does not extend the five-year window in the main part of the sub-section, so a State that borrows another State’s laboratory is still required to notify its own commencement date within that period. It also does not convert the duty into something conditional on convenience, because unavailability triggers an obligation to arrange an alternative rather than a permission to proceed without one. An accused taking the point at trial can therefore ask what arrangement the State made, and not only what the officer did on the night.
Consequences of non-compliance with Section 176(3) at trial
No reported decision holds that an omitted forensic visit by itself vitiates a trial, and the general rule in the Sanhita points the other way. Section 511(1) provides that no finding, sentence or order passed by a court of competent jurisdiction is to be reversed or altered on appeal, confirmation or revision on account of any error, omission or irregularity in the proceedings, unless in the opinion of that court a failure of justice has in fact been occasioned.
Section 511(2) attaches a timing test to that enquiry. In determining whether an omission has occasioned a failure of justice, the court is directed to have regard to whether the objection could and should have been raised at an earlier stage in the proceedings, which puts a premium on taking the point while the investigating officer is in the witness box rather than for the first time in appeal.
The Supreme Court settled the underlying principle long before the Sanhita was drafted. In C. Muniappan v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2010) 9 SCC 567, decided on 30 August 2010, the Court held that a defect in the investigation cannot by itself be a ground for acquittal. Where the investigating agency has been negligent, a court is obliged to examine the remaining prosecution evidence dehors those lapses, with great and extra caution, to see how far it is reliable. Suresh v. State of Kerala, decided on 23 July 2025, ran on that footing: the conviction was set aside because the scene mahazar and the site plan were of no use and no scientific evidence had been collected at all, and the directions the Bench issued afterwards were addressed to the State machinery rather than to the outcome of that appeal.
Arguments the defence takes from a missing forensic report
A missing forensic collection is used at trial to attack the weight of what remains, and not to seek an automatic acquittal. The cross-examination is of the investigating officer, and it establishes three things: that the offence was in the seven-year class, that no expert attended the scene, and that no video record of any collection exists.
Where the scene evidence was the case, that attack can be decisive. A prosecution resting on articles lifted by a police constable, with no expert to speak to how they were collected and no recording to show it, leaves a court very little against which to test the handling. Benefit of doubt then follows from the gap in the evidence rather than from the breach of the sub-section itself.
The prosecution’s answer runs along the C. Muniappan line. Where the remaining evidence is itself reliable, whether it is eyewitness testimony, a recovery at the instance of the accused or a laboratory report on articles sent in later, the omission does not carry the defence far, and the court assesses that evidence on its own merits. Both arguments turn on the case diary, which is the document that records whether a forensic team was called and when, and both are made at the stage of the trial described in the walk-through of the stages of a criminal trial under the BNSS.
Frequently asked questions
Is forensic investigation compulsory for every offence under the BNSS? Forensic investigation is compulsory only for offences punishable with seven years or more, which is the class Section 176(3) describes. For offences below that threshold the officer in charge investigates under Section 176(1), and whether forensic assistance is sought stays a matter of the officer’s judgment and of what the district has available.
Does Section 176(3) apply in a State that has not issued a notification? The duty runs from the date the State Government notifies, so until that date is published the sub-section supplies no date from which the officer’s obligation operates. Each State has five years from 1 July 2024 to publish one, which fixes the outer limit at 30 June 2029. Goa issued its notification on 24 February 2025 and gave it effect from 1 July 2024.
Who is the forensic expert that Section 176(3) refers to? Section 176 does not define the term. Section 329 lists the Government scientific experts whose reports a court may use, including the Director, Deputy Director or Assistant Director of a Central or a State Forensic Science Laboratory, and Section 328 makes a report under the hand of a gazetted officer of a Forensic Science Laboratory usable without formal proof. A State notification that names its own laboratory, as the Goa notification does, settles the question for that State.
Can a case be dismissed because no forensic team visited the crime scene? No reported decision has gone that far. Section 511 requires a failure of justice to have in fact been occasioned before a finding is disturbed, and C. Muniappan v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2010) 9 SCC 567 holds that a defect in the investigation is not by itself a ground for acquittal. The omission goes to the weight of the prosecution evidence that survives it.
What videography does Section 176(3) require, and on what device? Videography of the process of collecting the forensic evidence, recorded on a mobile phone or any other electronic device. The recording covers the collection rather than the scene at large, and it reaches the court as an electronic record under Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. The Kerala High Court has directed the use of the e-Sakshya platform, or an equivalent, for storing and transmitting such recordings.
References
Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (sections cited: 105, 176, 328, 329, 511), gazetted text, Ministry of Home Affairs
Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, Section 63
Government of Goa, notification 2-10-2025HD(G)-section 176-BNSS-586 dated 24 February 2025, issued under sub-section (3) of Section 176 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, published in the Official Gazette, Series I No. 49, dated 6 March 2025
Government of Goa, notification 2-15-2025-HD(G)-Section 2(1)-BNSS/610 dated 26 February 2025, declaring the audio-video electronic means for the purposes of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, published in the same issue
Suresh v. State of Kerala, Crl. A No. 602 of 2019 (High Court of Kerala, 23 July 2025), reported as 2025 LiveLaw (Ker) 456
C. Muniappan v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2010) 9 SCC 567 (Supreme Court of India, 30 August 2010)
Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench, on non-compliance with Section 105 BNSS, reported 24 August 2026
Press Information Bureau, Cabinet approves the National Forensic Infrastructure Enhancement Scheme, 19 June 2024
Press Information Bureau, key features of the new criminal laws
Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Forensic Labs, 18 December 2024 (7 Central, 32 State and 97 Regional Forensic Science Laboratories)
Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Central Forensic Sciences Laboratories, 1 April 2026 (seven new Central laboratories approved under the NFIES and the land position)
Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Expansion of Forensic Science Laboratories, 12 March 2025 (Nirbhaya funding for State laboratories)
National Informatics Centre, e-Sakshya application
The Tribune, e-Sakshya rules notified by 11 States and Union Territories, 2 July 2025
Disclaimer
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The date from which the duty under Section 176(3) operates is fixed by each State Government by notification, so the position differs between States and should be checked against the relevant State gazette. Readers should consult a qualified advocate on the facts of a specific case.