Section 115 BNS — Hurt, and Section 117 — Grievous Hurt

What changed on 1 July 2024

The Indian Penal Code dealt with injury in Sections 319 to 338. From 1 July 2024 those provisions live in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, at Sections 114 to 125. The structure was tidied — where the Code kept the definition and the punishment in separate sections, the Sanhita usually puts them in one section with sub-sections — and along the way several things moved that are easy to miss.

Here is the whole run, old to new. If you are holding an FIR copy or a charge-sheet, this is the table you need.

Hurt and grievous hurt — the two definitions

Everything in this chapter turns on which of two definitions the injury falls into.

"Hurt" (Section 114) is bodily pain, disease or infirmity. It is deliberately open-ended. A slap that leaves no mark can be hurt if it caused pain. There is no threshold of seriousness.

"Grievous hurt" (Section 116) is the opposite — a closed list. The section says that the following kinds of hurt only are designated as grievous. That word "only" does real work: courts read the list strictly, and an injury that is not within one of the clauses remains simple hurt no matter how much it hurt or how long it took to heal.

The eight clauses, now lettered (a) to (h) instead of the Code's "Firstly" to "Eighthly":

The fifteen-day change

This is the single most-missed change in the chapter, and it widens grievous hurt for everybody.

Under IPC 320 Eighthly, an injury became grievous if it caused the sufferer to be, for the space of twenty days, in severe bodily pain or unable to follow ordinary pursuits. Section 116(h) of the Sanhita reproduces that clause with one alteration: the period is now fifteen days.

The consequence is not small. An injury that keeps a person from working for sixteen, seventeen or eighteen days used to be simple hurt — one year, non-cognizable, no FIR without a Magistrate's order, compoundable at will, one-year limitation. The same injury today is grievous hurt — seven years, cognizable, an FIR at the police station, compoundable only with the court's permission, and no limitation period at all. Five days of the calendar now separate two entirely different cases.

Clause (h) has three alternative limbs, and any one of them is enough: hurt that endangers life; hurt causing severe bodily pain for the period; or hurt making the person unable to follow ordinary pursuits for the period. The second and third limbs have to be proved with something — a discharge summary, follow-up cards, leave records, a plaster removal date. A doctor writing "grievous" on the report without any evidence of the fifteen days does not establish clause (h).

Section 115 — simple hurt

Section 115 has two sub-sections. 115(1) defines voluntarily causing hurt — doing something with the intention of causing hurt, or knowing it is likely to cause hurt, and actually causing it. 115(2) is the punishment.

Two things about this section are worth pausing on.

It is non-cognizable, and people find that out the hard way. A person who has been slapped or pushed, with an injury report showing abrasions and contusions and nothing more, goes to the police station expecting an FIR and does not get one. That is not the police refusing to do their job; that is what the classification requires. The route is different, and it is set out in the Delhi section below.

The limitation runs, and it runs quietly. Because the maximum is one year, a court cannot take cognizance of the offence more than one year after it was committed, unless the delay is properly explained and condoned. That period is about cognizance, not about registration or investigation, and it is a real bar. A person who spends fourteen months trying to settle a marpeet matter privately and then decides to go to court is starting from behind.

Section 117 — grievous hurt, and the two new sub-sections

Section 117 is where the Sanhita did its real work in this chapter. It has four sub-sections, and two of them did not exist before.

117(1) and 117(2) — the familiar part

117(1) defines voluntarily causing grievous hurt, with an Explanation that has been carried over intact: a person is not said to voluntarily cause grievous hurt unless he both causes grievous hurt and intends or knows himself likely to cause grievous hurt — though it does not matter that the kind of grievous hurt caused was not the kind he intended. 117(2) is the punishment: up to seven years, and a fine. The fine is not an alternative here; it is additional.

Nothing about 117(2) changed from IPC 325. What people get wrong is its classification, and several widely-read pages have it wrong in both directions.

117(3) — permanent disability or a vegetative state

This is new. The Penal Code had no general provision for grievous hurt that leaves a person permanently disabled or in a persistent vegetative state; the only analogue was the acid-attack provision, IPC 326A. The Sanhita generalises that consequence to any means.

Note what that does. It is the first minimum sentence in the general hurt chapter — ten years of rigorous imprisonment, with no judicial discretion to go below it. It is cognizable, non-bailable, triable by a Court of Session, and not compoundable. An injury that would have been charged under IPC 325 with a seven-year ceiling can now, if the disability is permanent, carry a ten-year floor.

117(4) — grievous hurt by a group of five or more

Also new, and it is the grievous-hurt tier of the Sanhita's identity-based group-violence scheme, whose murder tier is the lynching provision at Section 103(2) — covered on our page on Section 103 BNS.

The practical consequence is that a complainant in a caste-motivated or community-motivated group assault should ask for 117(4) by name. Investigating officers working from decades of Penal Code habit will default to 117(2) or 118(2), because those are the sections they know. There is, as far as we have been able to find, no reported judgment on Section 117(4) yet — so nobody can tell you how courts will read "acting in concert" or "any other similar ground". We would rather say that than invent a case.

Section 118 — dangerous weapons, and what really changed

Section 118 has two sub-sections and there is no third; sources that describe a 118(3) are wrong.

118(1) is hurt caused by an instrument for shooting, stabbing or cutting, or any instrument which used as a weapon of offence is likely to cause death, or by fire or a heated substance, poison, a corrosive substance, an explosive, a substance deleterious to inhale or swallow, or by means of an animal. Up to three years, or a fine up to ₹20,000, or both.

118(2) is the same means causing grievous hurt: imprisonment for life, or one to ten years, and fine.

The punishment for neither changed. What changed is procedural, and for an ordinary Delhi assault case it is the most consequential change in the whole chapter.

The IPC 324 story, and why it matters now

Under the Penal Code, whether Section 324 was bailable and compoundable was genuinely contested — and the reason is a piece of legislative history that almost nobody carries.

The Code of Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 2005 contained provisions that would have removed IPC 324 from the compoundable list and made it non-bailable. Neither was ever brought into force. The commencement notification of June 2006 expressly excluded them. So IPC 324 legally remained bailable, and compoundable with the permission of the court — as the official First Schedule to the Code of Criminal Procedure itself recorded. In practice a great many police stations, and some courts, treated it as non-bailable and non-compoundable anyway.

The BNSS First Schedule has now settled the question in the other direction. Section 118(1) is classified as cognizable and non-bailable, and Section 118 appears nowhere in either table of the compounding provision. The amendment Parliament declined to notify in 2006 has effectively arrived through the new Schedule.

One more thing about 118(1), which is genuinely useful and appears nowhere: because its maximum is three years, it falls inside the band where the Sanhita permits a preliminary enquiry of up to fourteen days before an FIR is registered, with the prior permission of an officer not below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police. Section 117(2), at seven years, does not fall inside that band — the provision covers offences of three years or more but less than seven. So a complainant alleging a weapon injury who is told the police are "enquiring first" may be hearing something lawful. Fourteen days is the ceiling, not an open-ended pause.

The rest of the chapter, 119 to 125

The remaining sections come up less often, but two of them carry silent increases that nobody flags.

The acid provisions were carried over intact, including both provisos — that the fine must be just and reasonable to meet the victim's medical expenses, and that it is payable to the victim. Sections 125, 125(a) and 125(b) are the road and workplace negligence provisions; where a death results the section is not here at all but at Section 106, dealt with on our page on murder, culpable homicide and death by negligence.

The full classification table

This is the table that decides what actually happens to a case — whether the police can act on their own, whether there will be an arrest, which court hears it, and whether it can be settled.

Which section fits your facts

Run through it in this order. The answer changes the case completely, so it is worth doing carefully.

On a kick or a punch: Section 118(1) lists instruments and means. A bare hand is neither, and High Courts have held that human teeth are not a dangerous weapon, so a bite injury falls under the simple-hurt section and not 118. The safe position is that a kick or punch will ordinarily be 115(2) — and, if it produces a fracture, 117(2), not 118. We have not found a reported case deciding the kick point itself, so we put that as reasoning from the statute, not as authority.

The medico-legal report decides the case

If you take one thing from this page, take this. In a marpeet case the section applied — and therefore whether there is an FIR at all, whether the offence is bailable, whether it can be compounded, whether it goes to a Magistrate or a Sessions court, and whether there is a limitation period — is decided almost entirely by the medical documentation. Everything else is downstream of it.

What happens in a Delhi hospital: a registered medical practitioner who thinks an injury has legal implications registers it as a medico-legal case. The MLC records the person's details, the date and time, the history as alleged by the patient, the nature and site of each injury, and an opinion on the nature of the injury. Very often that first opinion reads "opinion reserved pending X-ray" — which means the document everyone later argues about has not been written yet.

Get all of the following, and keep them:

• The MLC number and a copy of the MLC itself.
• The final or supplementary opinion issued after the X-ray. This is the one that matters; the initial MLC frequently says nothing conclusive.
• The X-ray plate and the radiologist's report. Convictions for grievous hurt have been set aside where the doctor called the injury grievous but the plate was never proved.
• The discharge summary, and every prescription and bill.
• The OPD or follow-up card. This is your proof of the fifteen days under clause (h), and it is the document people throw away.
• Dated photographs of visible injuries.

A case can be moved from one section to another, and often is. During the investigation the officer adds or drops sections as the final opinion and X-ray come in — an FIR that started at 115(2) becomes 117(2) when a fracture is confirmed. At the charge stage the court frames charges on the material, not on what the charge-sheet calls it. And the Sanhita expressly allows a court to alter or add to any charge at any time before judgment, with the alteration read and explained to the accused. The Supreme Court held in 2025 that this power permits addition and alteration but not deletion — a charge cannot simply be removed under it; that requires discharge or acquittal.

Grievous hurt or attempt to murder

This is where injury cases are actually won and lost, because attempt to murder — Section 109 BNS, the old IPC 307 — is Sessions-triable, non-bailable, and carries up to imprisonment for life.

Two propositions govern, and they pull in opposite directions. Both have to be stated together or you will misread the law.

First: the injury need not have been capable of causing death. The Supreme Court held in 1983, in State of Maharashtra v. Balram Bama Patil, that it is not necessary for there to have been bodily harm capable of causing death to support a conviction for attempt to murder; the intention may be inferred from the circumstances, and in some situations without reference to the actual injuries at all. A High Court acquittal that had rested on the injuries being "minor" was reversed.

Second: the gravity of the injury cannot by itself supply the intention. In Roshan Lal v. State of Haryana, decided in May 2026, the accused had struck the complainant on the head with lathis, fracturing both parietal bones and causing neurological complications and a long hospitalisation. The Supreme Court held that the intention to commit murder cannot be presumed merely because injuries were ultimately opined to be dangerous to life, and that the gravity of an injury is not by itself determinative unless the prosecution establishes the required mental element. Because the assault arose suddenly when the injured intervened and was a spontaneous reaction in the heat of the moment, the attempt-to-murder charge failed. The conviction was altered from attempt to murder to voluntarily causing grievous hurt — the equivalent of Section 117(2) read with the common-intention provision — and the sentence reduced to the period already undergone with a fine payable to the injured.

The factors from which murderous intention is read, as that judgment has been summarised:

What counts as a dangerous weapon

Section 118 turns on whether the thing used was an instrument for shooting, stabbing or cutting, or an instrument which, used as a weapon of offence, is likely to cause death. The courts have consistently refused to make a list.

Because the classification consequences of 118(1) are now so severe — non-bailable and non-compoundable where the same injury without a weapon would be neither — the question of whether the object was a dangerous weapon is worth contesting seriously and early, at the bail stage, not saved for trial.

Arrest — the notice is the rule

All three of the everyday sections — 115(2) at one year, 118(1) at three, 117(2) at seven — fall within the band of offences punishable with imprisonment up to seven years. For that band the Sanhita requires the police officer, where arrest is not required, to issue a notice directing the person to appear.

In January 2026 the Supreme Court restated this in terms: for offences punishable with imprisonment up to seven years, a notice of appearance is the rule, and arrest after such a notice is not a matter of routine but an exception.

Where the section is non-bailable — 118(1) most commonly — anticipatory bail is the thing to consider first, and to consider before an arrest rather than after one.

What actually happens in Delhi

Step one — the hospital

Go to a hospital before you go to a police station. Under a long-settled Supreme Court direction, no hospital, government or private, may refuse or delay emergency treatment for medico-legal formalities. Treatment comes first and paperwork second.

The casualty will register the MLC and send intimation to the local police post. In practice every Delhi hospital does this for an assault injury. But — and this is the point people miss — the MLC intimation is not an FIR. It tells the police an injury exists. It does not start a case. The police usually come to the hospital and record a statement, but the injured person should not assume that a case has been registered simply because the hospital informed them.

Step two — the police station

An assault case cannot be filed as an e-FIR in Delhi. The Delhi Police online facilities cover lost articles, motor vehicle theft and certain property thefts; violent offences are outside them. You need the police station, or the police to come to you.

Information about a cognizable offence may be given by electronic communication — but the Sanhita provides that it goes on record only on being signed within three days by the person who gave it. An emailed complaint is not a registered FIR until that happens. Two other things worth knowing: a copy of the recorded information must be given to the informant free of cost and forthwith, and a Zero FIR may be registered irrespective of the area in which the offence was committed — so the wrong police station is not a reason to be sent away.

Step three, if the offence is non-cognizable

The commonest Delhi scenario: a scuffle, no weapon, no fracture. That is Section 115(2), and it is non-cognizable. The station will not register an FIR. What it must do instead:

1. Enter the substance of the information in the non-cognizable register — the "NCR" — and refer you to the Magistrate. The Sanhita has added something new here: the station must also forward a fortnightly report of all such cases to the Magistrate. There was no such requirement under the old Code.
2. Not investigate without the Magistrate's order. This is express: no police officer may investigate a non-cognizable case without the order of a Magistrate having power to try it.
3. Once that order is made, the police get the powers of a cognizable-case investigation except the power to arrest without a warrant.

There is also a private complaint route, straight to the Magistrate, where the Magistrate examines the complainant on oath. One change matters here: the Sanhita adds a proviso requiring the Magistrate to give the proposed accused an opportunity of being heard before taking cognizance on a complaint. There was no such requirement under the old Code, and it changes the shape of the first hearings.

And one provision that solves a great many marpeet cases: where a case involves two or more offences of which at least one is cognizable, the whole case is deemed cognizable. So a scuffle that also involves a threat, a weapon, or damage becomes a cognizable case, and the non-cognizable problem disappears.

The section-number crib

Which court

Delhi has eleven judicial districts housed in seven district court complexes — Tis Hazari, Karkardooma, Saket, Rohini, Dwarka, Patiala House and Rouse Avenue. An ordinary hurt case goes to the Magistrate's court of the district in which the police station lies. Sections 118(2), 119(1), 120(1), 121(1) and 122(2) go to a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class; 117(3), 117(4), 119(2), 120(2), 121(2), 123 and 124 are committed to a Court of Session.

If the police will not register

Where the offence is cognizable — a weapon, a fracture, a grievous injury — and the station still will not register an FIR, the Sanhita gives a ladder, and it has to be climbed in order.

1. Send the substance of the information in writing, by post, to the Deputy Commissioner of Police. If the DCP is satisfied that a cognizable offence is disclosed, they must investigate or direct an investigation. Keep the postal receipt — the next step depends on it.
2. Apply to the Magistrate to direct an investigation. This route has become more demanding than it was: the Magistrate now requires an affidavit from the applicant showing the earlier written complaint, may make an inquiry, and must consider the police officer's submissions before ordering. It is no longer the near-automatic order it once was.
3. Or file a private complaint before the Magistrate and lead evidence yourself, remembering the new proviso that the proposed accused gets a hearing before cognizance.

Settlement — compounding, Lok Adalat, quashing

Most marpeet cases in Delhi end in a settlement rather than a verdict. Which mechanism is available depends entirely on the section.

Lok Adalat has a hard limit that people do not expect. The Legal Services Authorities Act provides that a Lok Adalat has no jurisdiction over an offence that is not compoundable under any law, and that such a matter shall not be settled there. So a Lok Adalat can dispose of a 115(2) marpeet — its award is deemed a decree of a civil court, final and binding, with no appeal — but it cannot touch a 118(1) case however willing both sides are.

Mediation follows the same logic. The Delhi High Court's position is that criminal cases should be referred to mediation only where the offence is compoundable, or where the High Court would have no inhibition in quashing it afterwards. Delhi's mediation infrastructure — the Delhi Mediation Centre and the district court mediation centres — is used heavily in this area, but within that limit.

For the non-compoundable sections, quashing is the route, and it works. The High Court's inherent power extends to quashing a non-compoundable offence that is predominantly private in character where continuing it would be an abuse of process. In December 2025 the Delhi High Court did exactly that in a case under Section 118(1) read with the common-intention provision: the parties had settled, a compromise deed was on record, money had been paid, the injured had no objection, and the FIR was quashed — on condition that the petitioners deposit a sum with the Delhi State Legal Services Authority. That costs condition is common and should be expected. Our page on quashing an FIR under Section 528 BNSS sets out how that petition is actually run.

Victim compensation, without waiting for the trial

This is the most valuable and least-known part of this page.

The Sanhita requires every State Government to run a scheme compensating victims who have suffered loss or injury and need rehabilitation. Delhi's is the Delhi Victims Compensation Scheme, 2018, administered by the Delhi State Legal Services Authority and the District Legal Services Authorities. Grievous physical injury from an assault is covered.

The features that matter:

• You do not need a conviction. Compensation may be granted even where the offender was never traced or identified.
• You can apply on the recommendation of the Station House Officer, on a court's order, or directly to the District Legal Services Authority at your district court complex.
• The Authority is to verify the claim within two months, and may order immediate first aid or medical benefit at any stage.
• Minors receive up to fifty per cent more than the stated limits.
• The claim must be made within three years of the offence or the conclusion of the trial.

The published schedule of amounts, for the categories relevant to an assault:

One amendment is worth knowing about: in January 2024 the definition of "victim" in the Delhi scheme was expanded to include injury due to mob violence and mob lynching, with interim relief to be provided within thirty days of the offence for those categories. That pairs directly with the new Section 117(4) — the group-assault provision and the compensation route for its victims arrived at about the same time.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, the Delhi State Legal Services Authority provides free legal aid, and every Delhi district court complex has a legal services front office and clinic. Legal aid is available to the complainant and to the accused. The published helplines are 15100 and 1516.

Cross-FIRs, and Section 3(5)

Two practical realities that no explainer covers and every marpeet case involves.

Cross-FIRs are the norm. In a fight both sides are injured, both go to hospital, and both produce an MLC. Neither the Sanhita nor the Sanhita's procedure code says anything about how to handle two FIRs arising from one incident. In practice they are tried together, and in Delhi they are very often ended together — cross-quashing on a settlement, with both petitions listed and disposed of at once. If you are on either side of a cross-FIR, plan for both cases from day one, not for yours alone.

Section 3(5) is the new Section 34. Common intention — where a criminal act is done by several persons in furtherance of a common intention, each is liable as if he had done it alone — has moved from IPC 34 to BNS 3(5). Almost every group marpeet FIR in Delhi now reads "115(2)/3(5)" or "118(1)/3(5)". If you are reading an FIR copy and cannot find "3(5)" explained anywhere, that is what it is. It is not a separate offence; it is the provision that makes everyone present liable for what one person did.

The mistakes that cost the most

1. Not collecting the final medical opinion. The initial MLC often says "opinion reserved". The final opinion, issued after the X-ray, is the document that decides the section. People collect the first and never go back for the second.
2. Throwing away the follow-up card. It is the only ordinary proof of the fifteen-day incapacity under clause (h), and it is the difference between a one-year offence and a seven-year one.
3. Sitting on a simple-hurt complaint for more than a year. The limitation is on cognizance, and it is real.
4. Assuming the hospital's intimation started a case. It did not. Make your own complaint.
5. Treating an "opinion: grievous" endorsement as conclusive — on either side. It is evidence whose weight depends on the reasons behind it, and a grievous-hurt case has collapsed for want of the X-ray plate.
6. Advising a settlement at the police station in a Section 118 case. That offence cannot be compounded. Money changes hands, the complainant loses interest, and the case still exists — until somebody files a quashing petition in the High Court, which is what should have been planned from the start.
7. Absconding after a notice of appearance. The notice is the protection. Not attending is what removes it.
8. Never applying for victim compensation. It does not depend on the conviction, or even on the offender being caught, and the window is three years.
9. Using the wrong section numbers because the source was the withdrawn Bill. Check any section number you are given against a second source.

If you have been accused

1. Get the FIR copy and read the sections and sub-sections, not just the section numbers. "117" tells you nothing; 117(2) is bailable and 117(3) carries a ten-year minimum.
2. Find out what the medical documentation actually says — whether there is a fracture, whether the opinion is final, whether an X-ray exists.
3. If the section is 118, deal with bail first. It is non-bailable despite the low maximum, and it cannot be compounded later, so the strategy is different from the start.
4. Contest the "dangerous weapon" characterisation early if there is anything in it. Whether the object was likely to cause death is a question of fact, and it decides bail as well as the section.
5. If the allegation is attempt to murder, the six factors above are the argument — weapon, words, background, where the blow landed, the injury, the manner of the assault. Gravity alone does not make it attempt to murder.
6. If there was provocation, say so from the first day and document it. Section 122 is a separate and far lighter section, not merely a mitigating plea.
7. If a settlement is realistic, establish first whether the section can be compounded at all. That answer determines whether you are heading for a compromise application or a High Court petition.

Frequently asked questions

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