Digital Criminal Justice: Evaluating the Digital Reforms Introduced under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita

India’s 2023 criminal law overhaul through the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) marks a decisive statutory turn towards a technology-enabled criminal process, expressly integrating electronic communication, audio-video electronic means and digital records across investigation, trial and appeal. This paper examines the digital criminal-justice reforms embedded in these new codes, focusing on provisions relating to e-FIRs, electronic service of summons and warrants, audio-video recording of evidence, online proceedings under Section 530 BNSS, and the reconfiguration of offences to address cyber-enabled harms under BNS. It situates these reforms against earlier, largely ad hoc reliance on video-conferencing and electronic evidence, and against Supreme Court jurisprudence in Lalita Kumari, Anvar P.V., Shafhi Mohammad and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy on FIR registration, electronic evidence standards and privacy. Using a qualitative doctrinal methodology, the paper analyses statutory text, leading case law and emerging commentary to evaluate whether digitisation, as envisaged by BNS and BNSS, advances access to justice, efficiency and cyber-crime governance without compromising fair-trial guarantees and informational privacy. It argues that while the new codes significantly enhance the legal infrastructure for digital complaints, electronic process, virtual hearings and cyber-crime prosecution, they defer critical questions of authentication, data protection, standardisation and capacity-building to subordinate rules and institutional practice, risking uneven or rights-insensitive implementation. The paper concludes with normative recommendations: comprehensive procedural rules on electronic communication and evidence, robust privacy and data-protection safeguards tailored to criminal-justice data, measures to bridge the digital divide, sustained capacity-building for criminal-justice actors, and doctrinal clarification on electronic evidence and remote hearings under the new regime. These measures, it contends, are essential if India’s move towards digital criminal justice is to remain consistent with constitutional commitments to equality, dignity and due process.