Dhara

Research assistant for Indian criminal law

Ask anything about Indian criminal law.

Offences, bail, arrest, evidence, procedure. Dhara reads the new codes, the old ones and the Supreme Court’s criminal judgments together, and answers with the sources it used, under both section numbers.

Answers cite the statute and Supreme Court judgments they rely on.

Everything a criminal practice needs during the switch

Research is the core. The others answer the questions that come up every day since 1 July 2024.

Research

  • +Ask about any offence, procedure or rule of evidence
  • +Finds precedent under old and new section numbers
  • +Every statement cites its source
  • +Follow-up questions keep the context

9,686 Supreme Court judgments

Open

Judgments in today’s numbers

  • +Search by section, case name or citation
  • +A BNS search finds the IPC-era judgments
  • +Every old section in the text shows its new number

159,686 section references linked

Open

Check a draft

  • +Paste a draft, FIR or chargesheet
  • +Catches repealed and wrong-code sections
  • +Suggests the right section for the offence date

Every citation checked

Open

Why ordinary search falls short now

In Supreme Court criminal judgments decided after July 2024, old-code citations still outnumber new-code ones by about nineteen to one. A search that reads only “BNS 103” misses more than three thousand judgments on IPC 302. Dhara searches both numberings at once, so the precedent is there whichever code your question uses.

BNS sections cited by their new number
58
Reachable through the old code
321

What Dhara answers from

Every answer comes from these sources and cites them, so civil, tax and family law are out of scope. Questions clearly outside criminal law are declined rather than guessed.

The six criminal codes

BNS, BNSS and BSA, and the IPC, CrPC and Evidence Act they replaced: 2,353 sections, with the BNSS First Schedule.

NCRB Sankalan and India Code

The official old-to-new tables

1,310 links between the old and new sections, down to the subsection, each marked renumbered, merged, split or new.

NCRB correspondence tables

Supreme Court judgments

9,686 criminal judgments of the Supreme Court of India, May 1950 to September 2026, with every section they cite.

Supreme Court reports, via AWS Open Data

What’s out there, and what it misses

The free options each cover one piece. None connects the new codes to the judgments written under the old ones.

  • Official text of the new codes, with the section each one replaced

    Government portals
    Yes

    NCRB Sankalan

    Court judgment search
    No
    General AI chatbots
    Partly

    From memory, unchecked

    Dhara
    Yes

    Both, linked part by part

  • Judgments on IPC 302 when you ask about BNS 103

    Government portals
    No

    Statutes only

    Court judgment search
    Partly

    Only if you type the old number

    General AI chatbots
    No

    No judgment corpus

    Dhara
    Yes

    Searches both numberings at once

  • Ask in plain words, get an answer

    Government portals
    No

    Look up by section or keyword

    Court judgment search
    No

    Party, date or keyword

    General AI chatbots
    Yes
    Dhara
    Yes

  • Every statement tied to a passage you can read

    Government portals
    No
    Court judgment search
    No
    General AI chatbots
    No

    Citations are not checked

    Dhara
    Yes

    Unsupported statements removed

  • The law as it stood on a given date

    Government portals
    Partly

    Commencement notes

    Court judgment search
    No
    General AI chatbots
    No
    Dhara
    Yes

    Old code before 1 July 2024, new after

  • Accuracy measured on held-out questions

    Government portals
    No
    Court judgment search
    No
    General AI chatbots
    No
    Dhara
    Yes

    Published on the Method page