LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Penal Laws 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

The problem the Act solves is narrow and practical. Indian law was written for paper. A contract had to be signed, a document had to be filed, a record had to be retained, and every one of those words assumed something you could hold. The Act does not rewrite the law of contract or evidence. It supplies a rule of equivalence: what the older law demands on paper is satisfied electronically if the Act's conditions are met.

The salient features, chapter by chapter

Legal recognition of electronic records and signatures. Section 4 provides that where any law requires information to be in writing, that requirement is satisfied if the information is rendered in an electronic form and accessible for subsequent reference. Section 5 does the same for signatures. Section 7 covers retention of records and section 8 the publication of rules and notifications in an Electronic Gazette.

Electronic governance. Sections 6, 6A and 7A allow filing, issue and payment in electronic form and permit the Government to authorise service providers to deliver services. Section 9 is the safeguard: nothing in sections 6, 7 and 8 confers a right to insist that any Ministry or department accept a document in electronic form.

Offences. Chapter XI, sections 65 to 78, creates the criminal offences. Chapter XII, section 79, gives an intermediary a conditional exemption from liability, and section 81 gives the Act overriding effect. Section 75 extends the Act to offences committed outside India where a computer or computer system located in India is involved.

What the Act does not touch. The First Schedule, read with section 1(4), excludes negotiable instruments other than a cheque, powers of attorney, trusts, wills and contracts for the sale or conveyance of immovable property. A will cannot be made electronically in India, and that exclusion has survived every amendment.

Digital signature: what section 3 actually requires

Section 2(1)(p) defines a digital signature as authentication of an electronic record by a subscriber by means of an electronic method or procedure in accordance with section 3. The definition is therefore empty until you read section 3, which is where the technical requirement sits.

Section 15 adds a further tier. A secure electronic signature is one where the signature creation data was, at the time of affixing the signature, under the exclusive control of the signatory and no other person, and was stored and affixed in such exclusive manner as may be prescribed. The Explanation says that in the case of a digital signature the signature creation data means the private key of the subscriber. A secure signature is what the law of evidence attaches a presumption to: section 85B of the old Evidence Act, now section 86 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023.

Section 3A and the shift to technology neutrality

The Act as passed in 2000 was tied to one technology. Only public key cryptography counted. The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, which came into force on 27 October 2009, inserted section 3A and recognised an electronic signature, defined in section 2(1)(ta), as authentication by any technique specified in the Second Schedule. The Central Government may add to that Schedule by notification under section 3A(2), and has done so: the Second Schedule now carries e-authentication using Aadhaar or other e-KYC services, which is how the great majority of Indian documents are signed today.

Legal recognition, and what a court actually does with it

Section 5 is the operative recognition. Where any law requires information to be authenticated by affixing a signature, that requirement is satisfied if the information is authenticated by an electronic signature affixed in the prescribed manner. Section 10 empowers the Central Government to prescribe the type of signature, the manner of affixing it and the procedure for identifying the signatory.

Recognition also reached older statutes. Section 93 of the IT Act, read with its Third Schedule, substituted section 2(8) of the Bankers' Books Evidence Act, 1891 and inserted section 2A into it with effect from 17 October 2000, so that a printout of a bank entry became a certified copy if accompanied by the two certificates section 2A prescribes. Sections 91 to 94 of the IT Act and its Third and Fourth Schedules were themselves omitted as spent by the 2008 amendment with effect from 27 October 2009, but the amendments they made stand in the amended Acts.

Trimex International FZE Ltd. v. Vedanta Aluminium Ltd., (2010) 3 SCC 1, shows the commercial consequence. The parties negotiated a supply of bauxite entirely by email and no formal contract was ever executed. The Supreme Court held that a concluded contract had come into existence, because unconditional acceptance had been communicated, and that the absence of a signed paper document did not affect it. Legal recognition of the electronic record is what allowed the Court to treat the exchange as the contract.

The offences that protect the signature

The signature scheme would be worthless if the key and the certificate were not protected, and Chapter XI supplies that protection.

Section 65 punishes knowing or intentional concealment, destruction or alteration of computer source code required to be kept by law, with imprisonment up to three years or fine up to two lakh rupees or both. Section 66 punishes any act referred to in section 43 done dishonestly or fraudulently, with imprisonment up to three years or fine up to five lakh rupees or both. Reading section 66 with section 43 is the standard route to prosecuting unauthorised access to a signing key.

One provision that every textbook still describes as an offence is no longer one. Section 72, breach of confidentiality and privacy by a person who secured access under a power conferred by the Act, and section 72A, disclosure in breach of a lawful contract, were both decriminalised by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 with effect from 30 November 2023. Imprisonment was removed from each. Section 72 now attracts a penalty which may extend to five lakh rupees and section 72A a penalty which may extend to twenty five lakh rupees, and the marginal heading of section 72A was changed from Punishment to Penalty to make the shift explicit.

Two procedural sections complete the chapter. Section 77B makes every offence punishable with three years imprisonment bailable, and section 78 requires investigation by a police officer not below the rank of Inspector.

The third criticism is that the civil remedy has not kept pace. Section 43A, the only compensation provision for a data breach, is due to be omitted when section 44(2) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 commences on 13 May 2027, and it will be replaced by a penalty regime that pays the State rather than the individual whose data was lost.

Conclusion. The Information Technology Act, 2000 is an enabling statute before it is a penal one. Its central achievement is the rule of equivalence in sections 4 and 5, and the digital signature under section 3 is the device that makes that equivalence safe, because an asymmetric key pair and a hash function deliver authentication and integrity together in a way a scanned image of a signature never can. Section 3A then freed the scheme from a single technology, which is why an Aadhaar based e-sign is as good in law today as a cryptographic one. The offences in sections 65, 66, 66C, 66D, 71, 73 and 74 exist to protect that chain of trust rather than to police content, and where the Act has failed it has failed on the enforcement side, in an appellate tribunal allowed to lapse and a struck down section left on the statute book for eight years.

The Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 was enacted to meet that. Its object is stated as making special provision for the prevention and control of, and for coping with, criminal activity by organised crime syndicates or gangs. The scheme is not to create a new list of crimes. It is to attach a much heavier consequence, and a much less protective procedure, to conduct which is already criminal, once that conduct is shown to be organised.

The three definitions that switch the Act on

Nothing in MCOCA applies until section 2(1) is satisfied, and the three clauses interlock.

Section 2(1)(d), continuing unlawful activity, means an activity prohibited by law which is a cognizable offence punishable with imprisonment of three years or more, undertaken singly or jointly as a member of an organised crime syndicate or on its behalf, in respect of which more than one charge sheet has been filed before a competent court within the preceding ten years, and that court has taken cognizance.

The punishments

Section 3(1)(i) provides death or imprisonment for life where the organised crime has resulted in the death of any person, with a minimum fine of one lakh rupees. Section 3(1)(ii) provides not less than five years and up to imprisonment for life in any other case, with a minimum fine of five lakh rupees. Section 3(2) applies the same range to conspiracy, attempt, advocacy, abetment and knowing facilitation, and section 3(3) to harbouring a member.

Section 3(4) is the provision that most sharply separates MCOCA from the general law: mere membership of an organised crime syndicate is punishable with not less than five years and up to life. Section 3(5) punishes holding property derived from organised crime with three years to life and a minimum fine of two lakh rupees. Section 4 punishes a person who holds unaccountable movable or immovable property on behalf of a member with three to ten years and a minimum fine of one lakh, and makes that property liable to attachment and forfeiture under section 20.

The five departures from ordinary criminal procedure

Sections 13 to 16, interception. MCOCA is one of very few Indian statutes to build a complete interception code. Section 13 makes an officer of the Home Department not below the rank of Secretary to Government the Competent Authority. Section 14 requires a written application from a police officer not below Superintendent of Police supervising the investigation, setting out the offence, the facilities to be intercepted and the identity of the target. Section 15 creates a Review Committee of the Chief Secretary as Chairman, the Additional Chief Secretary or senior most Principal Secretary in the Home Department, and the Principal Secretary or Secretary and Remembrancer of Legal Affairs, which must consider every order within ten days. If the Committee disapproves, interception stops forthwith, the material is inadmissible in any case and is ordered destroyed. Section 16 makes unauthorised interception by a police officer itself an offence.

Section 19, witness protection. Proceedings may be held in camera; the Special Court may keep the identity and address of a witness secret, hold the proceedings at a place of its choosing, omit names from its orders and records, and prohibit publication. Contravention is punishable with imprisonment up to one year and fine up to one thousand rupees. That penalty is the weak point of the section and has not been revised since 1999.

It held that in pith and substance sections 13 to 16 relate to public order and police, Entries 1 and 2 of the State List, that interception under MCOCA serves the limited purpose of preventing and investigating organised crime on grounds distinct from those in section 5(2) of the Telegraph Act, and that any encroachment on the Union field was incidental. On section 21(5) it agreed with the High Court: denying bail to a person merely because he was on bail in an offence under any other Act, however unconnected, was an unreasonable classification and violated Article 14. Note precisely what fell. Section 21(5) survives for a person on bail in an offence under MCOCA itself; it is the extension to any other Act that went.

Zameer Ahmed Latifur Rehman Sheikh v. State of Maharashtra, (2010) 5 SCC 246, dealt with the argument that MCOCA's definition of organised crime, in referring to promoting insurgency, trespassed on terrorism, a central subject, and was repugnant to central legislation. The Supreme Court upheld the State's competence and found no repugnancy, holding that the expression had to be read in the context of the whole definition, which is directed at pecuniary and economic advantage.

The criticism

The case against MCOCA is that each departure, defensible on its own, compounds. A police confession is admissible; anticipatory bail is unavailable; regular bail requires the accused to displace a statutory presumption; custody may run to 180 days; and section 22 raises presumptions against him once arms or fingerprints are proved. An accused who cannot get bail for six months while a confession recorded by a Superintendent of Police sits on the record is under enormous pressure to plead. The safeguards are all internal to the police and executive hierarchy, and the Review Committee under section 15 is composed entirely of serving officials of the same Government whose police sought the interception.

The second criticism is drift. MCOCA was justified by the gang violence of 1990s Bombay. It has since been used in cases far from that, and the ten year, two charge sheet gate has been argued to be satisfied by a string of ordinary offences that no one would call a syndicate. The Supreme Court's insistence in Prasad Shrikant Purohit on a real application of mind at the approval stage is the principal judicial answer to that drift.

For full marks, cover: the phrase public offences in this question means Chapter XV of the Sanhita, headed offences affecting the public health, safety, convenience, decency and morals, sections 270 to 297. Open by explaining what makes an offence public rather than private, then work through the chapter group by group, and give the decency and public health groups the fuller treatment the question asks for. The examiner will look for the changes the Sanhita made, so carry the Indian Penal Code numbering alongside and say where the fine has moved.

What makes an offence a public offence

The offences in Chapter XV share a structure. The person injured is not an individual but the public, or a section of the public, or persons who may have occasion to use a public right. There is no complainant with a private wrong; the wrong is the loss of a common amenity or a common protection.

Public health. Section 271 punishes a negligent act likely to spread infection of a disease dangerous to life; section 272 the same act done malignantly, that is knowingly or with intent. Section 273 punishes disobedience to a quarantine rule. Sections 274 and 275 punish adulteration of food or drink intended for sale and the sale of noxious food or drink. Sections 276, 277 and 278 punish adulteration of drugs, sale of adulterated drugs and sale of a drug as a different drug. Sections 279 and 280 punish fouling the water of a public spring or reservoir and making the atmosphere noxious to health.

Public safety. Sections 281 to 291 cover rash driving on a public way, rash navigation, exhibition of a false light or buoy, conveying persons by water in an unsafe or overloaded vessel, danger or obstruction in a public way, and negligent conduct with respect to poisonous substances, fire, explosives, machinery, buildings and animals.

Convenience. Sections 292 and 293 are the residual and the persistent nuisance provisions.

Decency and morals. Sections 294, 295 and 296 deal with obscenity, and section 297 with keeping a lottery office.

The obvious criticism of this group survives the recodification. A one year maximum for adulterating medicine is derisory when set against the harm, which is why prosecutions in practice are brought under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, whose section 27 provides imprisonment which may extend to life where adulterated or spurious drugs cause death or grievous hurt. The Sanhita raised the fine and left the imprisonment where Macaulay put it.

Municipal Corporation of Delhi v. Kacheroo Mal, (1976) 1 SCC 412, is the case to cite on how these offences are proved. The respondent was prosecuted for selling adulterated food, and the question was whether the prosecution had to prove that the seller knew of the adulteration. The Supreme Court treated the statutory offence as one where the act of sale of the offending article is the gravamen, and declined to import a general requirement of knowledge into a public health provision, while insisting that the statutory procedure for sampling and analysis be strictly followed. The bearing is that public health offences are proved by the state of the article and the fact of the sale, and the accused's protection lies in the procedural conditions, not in a mental element.

Murli S. Deora v. Union of India, (2001) 8 SCC 765, applied the same principle to tobacco. The Supreme Court held that smoking in public places amounts to a public nuisance because it inflicts involuntary passive smoking on persons who have no wish to smoke, and prohibited smoking in public places including hospitals, health institutions, educational institutions, libraries, courts, public offices and public transport pending legislation. It is the clearest modern illustration of section 270's rule that common injury is not excused by private convenience, and it led directly to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003.

Decency and morals in detail

Section 294 is the central obscenity provision. Sub-section (1) defines the standard: a book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation, figure or any other object, including display of any content in electronic form, is deemed obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest, or if its effect, taken as a whole, tends to deprave and corrupt persons likely to read, see or hear it. The inclusion of electronic content is new to the Sanhita and matters, because the Indian Penal Code left the electronic field entirely to the Information Technology Act.

Limb (b) is why the erotic sculpture at Khajuraho and Konark is outside the section altogether, and it is a categorical exclusion, not a defence to be weighed. Limb (a)(i) is different: it must be proved to be justified, and the burden is on the person claiming it.

Section 295 punishes sale, hire, distribution, exhibition or circulation of an obscene object to a child, with three years and fine up to two thousand on first conviction and seven years and fine up to five thousand on a second. Section 296 punishes obscene acts in a public place and obscene songs, ballads or words in or near a public place, but only where they are to the annoyance of others, with three months or fine up to one thousand or both.

Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1965 SC 881, is where the Indian law began. A Bombay bookseller was convicted for stocking an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the constitutionality of the section, adopting the test from R. v. Hicklin, (1868) LR 3 QB 360: whether the tendency of the matter is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences. Hidayatullah J. added that the treatment of sex in a manner offensive to public decency and morality is the vice, and that a work of art is not obscene merely because it deals with sex.

Where the chapter is weak

The first weakness is the fine. Most of Chapter XV was drafted in 1860 and the Sanhita has raised the money without raising the imprisonment. A public nuisance under section 292 is punishable with a fine which may extend to one thousand rupees; that is five times the two hundred rupees in section 290 of the Indian Penal Code and is still no deterrent to a commercial polluter.

The second weakness is overlap. Obscenity in electronic form is now covered by section 294 of the Sanhita and by sections 67, 67A and 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Sharat Babu Digumarti v. Govt. (NCT of Delhi), (2017) 2 SCC 18, resolved the earlier version of this conflict. The appellant, an officer of the site that hosted a listing for an obscene video clip, had been discharged under section 67 of the Information Technology Act but was continued under section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. The Supreme Court quashed the residual charge, holding that where the offence relates to an electronic record the Information Technology Act is a special law which, by virtue of section 81, prevails over the general provision in the Penal Code. Since the Sanhita has now written electronic content into section 294(1) itself, that conflict will have to be litigated again.

For full marks, cover: the whole answer turns on one provision, section 15, and you must be able to state its four limbs from memory. Build outward from it: what makes an offence heinous, who conducts the assessment, what the Board may decide, what the Children's Court does next, and what can never be ordered. Do not treat this as a question about whether sixteen year olds should be tried as adults; the examiner wants the statutory machinery, with the policy argument as your criticism section.

What changed in 2015, and why

Until 15 January 2016 the rule in India was absolute. A person below eighteen on the date of the offence was dealt with by the Juvenile Justice Board and by nobody else, whatever the offence. The Delhi gang rape of December 2012 tested that rule in public, because one of the accused was months short of eighteen and, on conviction, was sent to a special home for the statutory maximum of three years.

The three classes of offence

The route only opens for a heinous offence, so the classification is the first thing to get right.

The Board and its composition

Section 4 requires every State Government to constitute one or more Juvenile Justice Boards for every district. A Board is a Bench of three: a Metropolitan Magistrate or Judicial Magistrate of the First Class, who must not be the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate or Chief Judicial Magistrate, with at least three years experience, styled the Principal Magistrate, and two social workers, at least one of whom must be a woman.

Section 4(3) sets the qualification for the social worker members, and it becomes important under section 15. A social worker must have been actively involved in health, education or welfare activities pertaining to children for at least seven years, or be a practising professional with a degree in child psychology, psychiatry, sociology or law. A Board therefore may, but need not, contain a psychologist.

Section 15, the gateway

Section 15(1) provides that in the case of a heinous offence alleged to have been committed by a child who has completed or is above the age of sixteen years, the Board shall conduct a preliminary assessment with regard to:

1. his mental capacity to commit such offence;

If the Board is satisfied on the preliminary assessment that the matter should be disposed of by the Board, section 15(2) requires it to follow, as far as may be, the procedure for a summons case. It then passes an order under section 18. Section 18(1), as amended in 2021, now expressly covers this situation. The orders open to the Board run from advice or admonition, group counselling and community service, through a fine, to release on probation for up to three years and, at the top, an order under section 18(1)(g) sending the child to a special home for up to three years for reformative services.

If the Board decides that there is a need for trial as an adult, section 18(3) requires it to transfer the trial to the Children's Court having jurisdiction. That is the only order by which a child leaves the juvenile system.

Section 20 supplies the second review. When the child attains twenty one and has not completed the term, the Children's Court must have a follow up by the probation officer, the District Child Protection Unit, a social worker or by itself, to evaluate whether the child has undergone reformative change and can be a contributing member of society. It may then either release the child on conditions with a monitoring authority for the remainder of the term, or direct that the remainder be served in jail.

Section 21 is the outer limit and it is absolute: no child in conflict with law shall be sentenced to death or to life imprisonment without the possibility of release, under this Act, the Penal Code or any other law. Section 24 removes the disqualification attaching to a conviction, except for a child above sixteen tried as an adult for a heinous offence.

The Supreme Court held three things that matter. First, the word "may" in the proviso to section 15(1) is to be read as mandatory where the Board does not include a practising professional with a degree in child psychology or psychiatry: such a Board must take expert assistance. Second, mental capacity to commit the offence and the ability to understand its consequences are separate enquiries, and an average or above average IQ score establishes the first but says nothing about the second. Third, the Court recorded the absence of guidelines for conducting the assessment and directed the Central Government and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to frame them; the NCPCR guidelines followed.

The criticism

The strongest objection is that section 15 asks a Board to do something no court is equipped to do. Guilt is a question of past fact and the criminal process is built to find it. Capacity to understand consequences is a psychological judgment about a person, made before any evidence has been tested, on the basis of a social investigation report and an expert interview. Barun Chandra Thakur shows how easily it collapses into an IQ score.

Conclusion. The 2015 Act did not lower the age of criminal majority. It kept eighteen and built a gate at sixteen which opens only for a heinous offence as defined in section 2(33), and only after a preliminary assessment under section 15 which is expressly not a trial. The Board decides whether to keep the case or transfer it under section 18(3); the Children's Court decides again under section 19; the Court of Sessions may hear an appeal under section 101(2) with its own experts; section 19(3) keeps the child in a place of safety until twenty one; section 20 requires a reformative evaluation at that point; and section 21 forbids death and life imprisonment without the possibility of release throughout.

Shilpa Mittal narrowed the gate by holding that only a minimum of seven years counts, and Barun Chandra Thakur tightened the assessment by making expert assistance mandatory where the Board lacks a psychologist. The machinery is careful. Whether the judgment it asks a Board to make can be made at all is the question the criticism has never answered.

Section 147 punishes waging war, attempting to wage war, or abetting the waging of war against the Government of India, with death or imprisonment for life and fine. Section 148 punishes conspiracy, within or without and beyond India, to commit an offence under section 147, or to overawe the Central or a State Government by criminal force or the show of criminal force, with life or up to ten years and fine. Section 149 punishes collecting men, arms or ammunition, or otherwise preparing to wage war, with life or up to ten years and fine. Section 150 punishes concealing the existence of a design to wage war, with up to ten years and fine.

Section 151 punishes assaulting the President or a Governor with intent to compel or restrain the exercise of a lawful power. Section 152 is the provision that replaces sedition and is dealt with separately below. Sections 153 and 154 punish waging war against, and committing depredation on the territories of, a foreign State at peace with India, and section 155 receiving property so taken. Sections 156, 157 and 158 punish a public servant who allows a State prisoner or prisoner of war to escape, negligently suffers such escape, or aids or harbours such a prisoner.

State (NCT of Delhi) v. Navjot Sandhu, (2005) 11 SCC 600, arose out of the attack on Parliament on 13 December 2001. The Supreme Court held that waging war is not to be understood in a technical military sense: what matters is the intention and purpose of the assembly and of the act. An attack on the seat of the legislature by armed men with the object of overawing the Government is waging war within section 121, whatever the number of participants and whatever the prospect of success. The Court convicted Mohd. Afzal under section 121 while acquitting S.A.R. Geelani for want of evidence, which is the part of the judgment that shows the Court applying, not merely reciting, the standard.

Mohd. Ajmal Amir Kasab v. State of Maharashtra, (2012) 9 SCC 1, arose out of the Bombay attacks of 26 November 2008. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction under section 121 and held that the object of the attack was not simply mass murder but to destabilise the Government of India and to strike at its authority, and that the ten men who came from Karachi were waging war though they were not an army. The Court also held that the accused's rights under Article 22 and the fair trial guarantee had not been infringed by the late provision of counsel because he had been offered a lawyer and refused. The case is the fullest modern statement of the offence.

Its history in India is a history of narrowing. In Queen Empress v. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, ILR (1897) 22 Bom 112, Strachey J. directed the jury that disaffection meant absence of affection and that no proof of consequent disorder was needed, which is the reading that made the section an instrument of colonial control. The Federal Court took the opposite view in Niharendu Dutt Majumdar v. King Emperor, AIR 1942 FC 22, holding that public disorder or the reasonable anticipation of it is the gist of the offence. The Privy Council then restored the wider reading in King Emperor v. Sadashiv Narayan Bhalerao, AIR 1947 PC 82.

Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar, AIR 1962 SC 955, resolved the conflict for independent India and is the case the whole modern law rests on. A member of the Forward Communist Party in Bihar had made a speech attacking the Congress Government in violent terms. A Constitution Bench upheld the constitutionality of section 124A but only by reading it down: the section is confined to acts involving an intention or tendency to create disorder, or disturbance of law and order, or incitement to violence. Strongly worded criticism of the Government, however disloyal in sentiment, is not sedition unless it incites violence or public disorder. The Court preferred the Niharendu Dutt reading and disapproved the Privy Council's.

Two are not improvements. The maximum term for the lesser limb has more than doubled, from three years to seven, which changes the offence from one triable as a lesser matter to one squarely in the serious range. And the operative words are wider than section 124A's, not narrower: "subversive activities" and "encourages feelings of separatist activities" are undefined, and the second in particular criminalises the encouragement of a feeling. Nothing in the section requires incitement to violence or a proximate tendency to disorder, which is precisely the limit Kedar Nath Singh had to import into section 124A to save it.

That is why the constitutional question has simply moved. On 8 August 2025 a Bench led by the Chief Justice agreed to examine the validity of section 152 as part of the same challenge, and the matter stands referred for constitutional decision. In May 2026, in Kamran v. State of Madhya Pradesh, the Court modified the 2022 freeze so that a pending trial or appeal may proceed where the accused does not object, typically to obtain an acquittal. Sections 121 to 124 of the Penal Code, meanwhile, continue to govern every offence committed before 1 July 2024, by force of section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 and the saving in section 358 of the Sanhita.

For full marks, cover: the examiner has named two offences, so structure the answer around sections 67 and 67A and then add section 67B, which is the third member of the group and the one the recent case law is about. The marks are in three places: the graded scheme, obscene material then sexually explicit act then children; the proviso that exempts material of literary, artistic or scientific merit; and the relationship between these sections and the general obscenity law, which Sharat Babu Digumarti settled.

Why the Act needed its own obscenity offence

The Indian Penal Code punished the sale, distribution and public exhibition of obscene objects. Those verbs assume a physical article changing hands in a place. A file uploaded to a server in one country, hosted in another and downloaded in a third fits none of them comfortably, and the person who profits from it may never touch the material at all.

Three drafting points earn marks. First, the definition of obscenity is lifted almost verbatim from section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, so the whole body of case law on what is obscene applies unchanged. Second, the fine is very large by Penal Code standards, five lakh against two thousand rupees, which shows Parliament pricing the offence to commercial distribution rather than to a bookseller. Third, and most importantly, the section punishes publication and transmission only. It does not punish possession, viewing or downloading for oneself.

Section 67A: material containing a sexually explicit act

Section 67A punishes whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted in the electronic form any material which contains sexually explicit act or conduct. On first conviction, imprisonment up to five years and fine up to ten lakh rupees; on a second or subsequent conviction, imprisonment up to seven years and fine up to ten lakh rupees.

(a) publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted material in any electronic form which depicts children engaged in a sexually explicit act or conduct; (b) creates text or digital images, collects, seeks, browses, downloads, advertises, promotes, exchanges or distributes material in any electronic form depicting children in an obscene or indecent or sexually explicit manner; (c) cultivates, entices or induces children to an online relationship with one or more children for a sexually explicit act, or in a manner that may offend a reasonable adult; (d) facilitates abusing children online; or (e) records in any electronic form his own abuse, or that of others, pertaining to a sexually explicit act with children.

The punishment is five years and ten lakh rupees on first conviction, seven years and ten lakh on a second. Clause (b) is the crucial one: the verbs collects, seeks, browses and downloads reach the consumer, not merely the distributor, which sections 67 and 67A do not.

The proviso that exempts serious work

The proviso to section 67B applies to sections 67, 67A and 67B together, and it is the electronic counterpart of the Exception to section 294 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. None of the three sections extends to any book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure in electronic form (i) the publication of which is proved to be justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or other objects of general concern, or (ii) which is kept or used bona fide for religious purposes.

Two things follow. The exemption is not automatic; the person claiming it must prove the justification. And the exemption is drafted for works, not for conduct, so it can never protect the recording of an actual act with a child under section 67B(e).

The related provisions

Section 66E punishes intentional capture, publication or transmission of the image of a private area of any person without consent, in circumstances violating privacy, with up to three years or fine up to two lakh rupees or both. It covers the voyeuristic photograph, which is not necessarily obscene and may not depict any act.

Section 77A allows compounding of offences under the Act, but not where the punishment provided is imprisonment for life or for a term exceeding three years. Sections 67A and 67B are therefore not compoundable. Section 78 requires investigation by an officer not below the rank of Inspector. Section 75 extends the Act to conduct outside India involving a computer located in India, which is what makes a foreign hosted site prosecutable here.

The relationship with the general law of obscenity

Sharat Babu Digumarti v. Govt. (NCT of Delhi), (2017) 2 SCC 18, decided on 14 December 2016, settled a conflict that had run for a decade. An obscene video clip filmed by a schoolboy was listed for sale on an online marketplace. The manager responsible for the site's content was charged under sections 292 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act. He was discharged under section 67 but the Penal Code charges were kept alive, and the Delhi High Court declined to quash them.

Criticism

The scheme is criticised on three grounds. It imports a Victorian test of obscenity into section 67 while Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, (2014) 4 SCC 257, has replaced Hicklin with contemporary community standards for the general law, so the same photograph may be judged by two standards depending on the medium. It creates a very large gap between section 67 and section 67A on a distinction, explicit act as against prurient effect, that no statutory definition supports. And enforcement falls almost entirely on intermediaries through the 2021 Rules rather than on publishers, which shifts a censorship function to private companies with strong incentives to over-remove.

For full marks, cover: the paper prints three notes and asks for two, so all three are set out below and you should write the two you know best. A twelve and a half mark note is not a paragraph. Each of these should run to about a page and a half, with the sections, at least one worked case for (a) and (c), and the statutory list for (b).

(a) Religious offences under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023

Chapter XVI of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, sections 298 to 302, reproduces Chapter XV of the Indian Penal Code, sections 295 to 298, with the numbering shifted by three and one substantive addition. The chapter does not protect any religion. It protects public tranquillity and the religious feelings of citizens against deliberate outrage, which is why every section in it requires an intention or a knowledge directed at those feelings.

Section 300 punishes voluntarily causing disturbance to any assembly lawfully engaged in the performance of religious worship or religious ceremonies, with up to one year or fine or both. Section 301 punishes trespass in a place of worship or sepulchre, indignity to a human corpse, or disturbance of persons assembled for funeral ceremonies, where done with intent to wound feelings or insult religion or with knowledge of that likelihood, with up to one year or fine or both. Section 302 punishes uttering a word, making a sound, making a gesture or placing an object in the sight or hearing of a person with the deliberate intention of wounding that person's religious feelings, again up to one year or fine or both. Sections 298 to 301 protect a class; section 302 protects an individual.

Ramji Lal Modi v. State of U.P., AIR 1957 SC 620, upheld section 295A against Article 19(1)(a). The editor of a magazine was prosecuted for an article said to insult a religion. A Constitution Bench held that the section does not penalise every act of insult to religion but only the aggravated form committed with deliberate and malicious intention, and that so confined it is a reasonable restriction in the interests of public order under Article 19(2). The narrowing construction is what saved it.

The criticism of this chapter is that it invites the heckler's veto. Because the offence is complete on outrage to feelings, any sufficiently organised group can generate a complaint, and the cost of the prosecution falls on the speaker long before any court reaches the question of deliberate and malicious intention. The Sanhita has not addressed that, and by adding electronic means to section 299 it has widened the field on which the problem arises.

(b) Different types of homes under Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015

Chapter VII of the 2015 Act, read with the definitions in section 2, creates a graded set of institutions. The classification matters because sending a child to the wrong one is a ground of appeal, and because the Act deliberately separates the child in conflict with law from the child in need of care and protection.

Place of safety against both. Section 2(46) defines it as any place or institution not being a police lockup or a jail, established separately or attached to an observation home or special home, to receive and take care of children alleged or found to be in conflict with law, by an order of the Board or the Children's Court. Section 49 requires every State to set up at least one. It is the institution created by the 2015 Act for the sixteen to eighteen group, and section 19(3) requires a child tried as an adult to be kept there until twenty one before any transfer to jail.

Children's Home against all of them. A Children's Home receives the child in need of care and protection under section 2(14), the child who has been abandoned, is found begging or living on the street, or whose guardian is unfit. No offence is alleged. Placement is by the Child Welfare Committee under section 30, not by the Board.

After care is not a home at all. Section 46 provides support to a person leaving an institution on attaining eighteen, financial or otherwise, to facilitate reintegration, for a period of up to three years. It is the successor to section 44 of the 2000 Act, which provided only for the State Government to make rules for after care organisations.

Section 294(2) punishes selling, letting to hire, distributing, publicly exhibiting or otherwise circulating; making, producing or possessing for those purposes; importing, exporting or conveying; taking part in or receiving profits from such a business; advertising; and offering or attempting any of these. First conviction, up to two years and fine up to five thousand rupees; second or subsequent, up to five years and fine up to ten thousand rupees.

The Exception exempts (a) any book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure (i) the publication of which is proved to be justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or other objects of general concern, or (ii) which is kept or used bona fide for religious purposes; and (b) any representation sculptured, engraved, painted or otherwise represented on or in (i) an ancient monument within the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, or (ii) any temple, or any car used for the conveyance of idols, or kept or used for a religious purpose.

Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1965 SC 881, is the foundation. A partner in a Bombay bookshop was convicted for possessing for sale an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Supreme Court upheld both the conviction and the constitutionality of section 292, and adopted the test from R. v. Hicklin, (1868) LR 3 QB 360, asking whether the tendency of the matter was to deprave and corrupt those whose minds were open to such immoral influences. Hidayatullah J. added the qualification that has outlived the test itself: sex and obscenity are not synonymous, and a work of art is not obscene merely because it treats of sex.

Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, (2014) 4 SCC 257, discarded Hicklin. A Calcutta weekly had reprinted a photograph of the tennis player Boris Becker with his fiancée, both partly nude, first published in a German magazine as a statement against apartheid. The Supreme Court quashed the prosecution and held that Hicklin is no longer the law in India because it judges an isolated passage by its effect on the most susceptible reader, and adopted the contemporary community standards test: whether the work, taken as a whole and in the context of its message, would appeal to the prurient interest of a reasonable person applying the standards of the present day community. The photograph carried an anti racism message, and that message was decisive.

Conclusion. Each of the three notes turns on a provision the recodification touched, and naming that change is what separates a full note from a summary. In (a) it is the insertion of "or through electronic means" into section 299, which extends a 1927 provision to social media while leaving the deliberate and malicious threshold of Ramji Lal Modi intact. In (b) it is the place of safety in sections 49 and 2(46), an institution the 2000 Act did not have, created to hold the sixteen to eighteen group and expressly forbidden from being a police lockup or jail. In (c) it is the inclusion of electronic content in the definition in section 294(1), which reopens the boundary with sections 67 and 67A of the Information Technology Act that Sharat Babu Digumarti had closed. On a paper that permits a choice of two, (a) and (c) are the safer pair because both carry decided cases the examiner will expect by name.