A private complaint used to work like this. You went to a Magistrate, you were examined on oath, the court took cognizance, and the person you had complained about found out when process reached them. They had no right to say anything before that. That changed with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Section 223 replaced section 200 of the old Code and carries a proviso that had no equivalent in it: no cognizance of an offence shall be taken by the Magistrate without giving the accused an opportunity of being heard. Read that again from where you are sitting. The person you are complaining about gets notice, and gets heard, before the court formally takes your case on at all. And the order of the steps is itself a rule. In Basanagouda R. Patil v. Shivananda S. Patil, decided on 27 September 2024, Nagaprasanna J. of the Karnataka High Court set the sequence out: the complaint is presented, the sworn statement is recorded first and cognizance does not arise at that stage, then notice issues to the proposed accused, who is heard, and only then is cognizance taken. A court that sent notice the moment the complaint was filed, before the sworn statement, was held to have got it wrong — and the whole exercise was sent back to be done again. There is a second new gate as well. Where the complaint is against a public servant for something done in the course of official duties, section 223(2) requires that they be allowed to make their assertions and that a report come from their superior officer, before cognizance. None of this makes a complaint case a bad idea. It makes it a different one from the one described in every book printed before 2024, and the first thing to decide is still whether what happened to you is a crime or a civil wrong told angrily.
What is on this page
A criminal proceeding that a private person starts directly before a Magistrate, without the police having registered a case. You are the complainant, the material is yours, and the court tests it before anything happens to anybody.
It is not a police complaint, it is not an FIR, and it is not an application asking the police to do something. Those are different instruments with different consequences, and the word complaint doing duty for all of them is the reason people arrive at the wrong counter.
Its character matters more than its name. Because you brought it, you carry it: you produce the witnesses, you attend the dates, and if you stop, it stops.
The distinction that governs everything below. In a police case the State investigates and prosecutes and you are a witness in it. In a complaint case you are the one running it. The second gives you control and hands you the whole weight.
Four words people use interchangeably, which are not. An FIR is a police registration of a cognizable offence. A police complaint is what you hand in at a station. A criminal complaint, loosely used, can mean either. A complaint case is a proceeding before a Magistrate that you run. Sorting out which one is meant is the first minute of every enquiry we take on this.
There are two ways a matter reaches a Magistrate, and choosing between them is the first real decision.
Through the police: an FIR is registered, the police investigate, and a report comes to the court. Where the police will not register, there is a route asking the Magistrate to direct them to investigate. All of that is the FIR world, and it is set out on our FIR guidance page, with the online route under online FIR assistance and the drafting under police complaint drafting.
Or directly: you place the complaint before the Magistrate yourself. That is this page.
The choice is not about which is better. It is about what your matter needs. If the evidence is in somebody else hands, in a bank, on a server, with people who will not speak to you, an investigation with police powers behind it is worth a great deal and a complaint case cannot substitute for it. If the material is already in your folder, the second door is quicker to reach and entirely in your control.
The question that sorts it. Can I prove this with what I can lawfully obtain myself? Yes points to a complaint case. No points to pressing the FIR route, because what you actually need is somebody with the power to collect.
Most people arrive here because something has already failed. The police declined, or took an application and did nothing, or recorded it and closed it, or told them it was a civil matter.
Sometimes that refusal is wrong and the answer is to press the FIR route up its ladder rather than abandon it. Sometimes the refusal is right in substance and badly expressed, and what the officer meant was that the facts do not disclose an offence.
And sometimes the matter was always going to come this way, because certain offences are in practice brought by private complaint rather than by the police at all. Knowing which of those three you are in is worth an hour before it is worth a filing fee.
A fourth possibility deserves naming, since it happens often and is rarely admitted. Sometimes the police decline because the matter is genuinely borderline and they do not want to carry it. That is not a judgment that you are wrong; it is a judgment about their own workload and risk. A complaint case puts the same facts in front of somebody whose job is to decide rather than to triage.
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It is the provision that governs what a Magistrate does when a complaint arrives. It requires a Magistrate having jurisdiction, on taking cognizance of an offence on a complaint, to examine upon oath the complainant and the witnesses present, with the substance of that examination reduced to writing and signed by the complainant, the witnesses and the Magistrate.
That part is familiar and carries over from the old law. The examination on oath has always been the filter that separates a complaint somebody is prepared to swear to from one they are not.
What is new sits in the provisos, and the first of them changes the shape of the whole exercise.
Notice also the two words added at the start of the provision: a Magistrate having jurisdiction. That phrase was not in the old section. It does little work in practice, since a Magistrate without jurisdiction could not take cognizance in any event, but it is a useful reminder that the jurisdiction question is settled before anything else happens.
The first proviso to section 223(1) provides that no cognizance of an offence shall be taken by the Magistrate without giving the accused an opportunity of being heard.
Section 200 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, which this replaces, had nothing of the kind. Under it the proposed accused had no standing at this stage at all, and the settled position was that they had no right to be heard before the court decided whether to proceed.
First proviso to section 223(1), Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — no cognizance of an offence shall be taken by the Magistrate without giving the accused an opportunity of being heard. No equivalent existed in section 200 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. The second proviso dispenses with examination of the complainant and witnesses where the complaint is made in writing by a public servant acting or purporting to act in the discharge of official duties, or by a Court, or where the Magistrate makes the case over to another Magistrate under section 212. The third proviso provides that where a case is so made over after examination, the Magistrate to whom it is made over need not examine them again.
It is worth being precise about how large a change this is. For decades the settled position was that a proposed accused had no locus to be heard at the pre-cognizance stage, and courts said so expressly when it was argued. The proviso reverses that for every private complaint in the country. It is not a refinement; it is a different stage in the process.
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Take that out of statutory language and into what happens in a room. You file. You are examined on oath. A notice goes to the person you have complained about. They come, or send somebody, and say something. Then the court decides whether to take the matter on.
A complainant who pictured the other side learning of all this only when a summons arrived finds this genuinely jarring, and the place to absorb it is here rather than at the second date.
It is also, read honestly, a fair provision. It exists because a great many private complaints were filed to pressure, and the person on the receiving end previously had no way to say so until they had already been made an accused.
One consequence worth preparing a client for emotionally rather than legally. You will be in the same room as the person you have complained about far earlier than you expected, at a point where nothing has been decided and you may feel exposed. That is normal under the new scheme and it is not a sign that the court is unsympathetic.
Three things, practically.
Your complaint will be read by its target early, so it has to be a document you are content to have read adversarially from day one. Anything overstated in it will be quoted back.
Your sworn statement matters more, because it is the version on the record before the other side responds. And the early part of the case takes longer, because a stage has been inserted that did not exist.
The compensating advantage, and it is real. Under the old law an accused could go to the High Court years later saying they were never heard, and matters stalled there. If they have been heard and the Magistrate has still taken cognizance, that argument is gone. What feels like a disadvantage today makes your order harder to unsettle later.
There is a drafting consequence too, and it runs through everything in the next section group. Write the complaint for two readers at once: the Magistrate, who is deciding whether there is an offence, and the other side, who will be looking for the sentence that overstates. A document that survives the second reader is usually a better document for the first.
Because they were written about section 200, and section 200 is no longer the provision. The change arrived with the new criminal codes and it is recent enough that a great deal of material, including material that looks authoritative, still describes the earlier procedure.
The test to apply to anything you read on private complaints: does it mention that the accused must be given an opportunity of being heard before cognizance. If it does not, it predates the change, whatever date is on it.
We make the same point on the criminal side generally, and it is worth stating twice, because the old procedure is the one most people have heard described by somebody who went through it years ago.
Be sceptical of spoken accounts as well as written ones. Somebody who filed a private complaint three or four years ago went through a different procedure, and their description of what happens, told in good faith, is a description of the old sequence. The experience is real and it is out of date.
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Section 223(2) is also new, and it applies where the person complained against is a public servant and the allegation concerns something done in the course of official functions or duties.
In that case a Magistrate shall not take cognizance except after giving the public servant an opportunity to make assertions as to the situation that led to the incident, and after receiving a report containing the facts and circumstances of the incident from the officer superior to that public servant.
Two gates, not one, and the second is outside your control entirely: it depends on a report arriving from somebody else department. Anybody considering a complaint of this kind should understand that before filing rather than discover it while waiting.
Note how different the two gates are in character. The first is about the public servant: they get to put their side. The second is about their institution: a report has to come from the officer above them. A complainant can do nothing to produce either, which makes this a stage to be waited out rather than driven.
Ask one question before filing against an official. Was the thing complained of done in the course of official functions or duties? If it was personal conduct that merely happened to involve somebody who is a public servant, this sub-section may not be engaged at all, and that distinction is worth settling early.
Having two requirements in one section raises an obvious question. The sworn statement and the hearing of the accused both come before cognizance. Which happens first?
It is not an academic question. Done one way, the court has your evidence before the other side is asked to respond. Done the other way, the person complained against is responding to a complaint that has not yet been sworn to.
The High Court of Karnataka has answered it, and the answer is the practical spine of this page.
It matters for a second reason too. If notice goes out before the sworn statement, the proposed accused is effectively responding to allegations the complainant has not yet been pinned to on oath, and the complainant can then shape their sworn evidence around the defence. That is precisely the mischief the settled sequence avoids.
So the order is not bureaucratic tidiness. Each step is positioned so that one side cannot tailor its account to the other.
In Basanagouda R. Patil v. Shivananda S. Patil, decided on 27 September 2024, Nagaprasanna J. set out the sequence under section 223 and corrected a court that had departed from it.
Sri Basanagouda R. Patil (Yatnal) v. Sri Shivananda S. Patil, High Court of Karnataka, 27 September 2024, Nagaprasanna J. On presentation of the complaint the Magistrate examines the complainant on oath and records the sworn statement, together with that of any witnesses present; the question of taking cognizance does not arise at that juncture. Notice then issues to the proposed accused, who is given the opportunity of being heard that the proviso requires. Only thereafter does the Magistrate take cognizance and regulate the proceedings. The Court held it a procedural aberration that notice had issued to the accused as soon as the complaint was presented, allowed the petition, and remitted the matter so that the exercise could be redone from the beginning.
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The complaint is presented and you are examined on oath about it. Your witnesses who are present are examined too. The substance is written down and signed.
Cognizance has not been taken at this point, and that is the part people find counter-intuitive. The court is gathering the complainant account on oath before it decides anything, including before it decides whether to decide.
Treat this as the most important half hour of the whole exercise. It is your case, under oath, before anybody has contradicted it, and it is the document everything afterwards is measured against.
Prepare for it the way you would prepare for evidence, because that is what it is. Re-read the complaint beforehand. Know your dates. Where you do not know something, say that you do not know rather than filling the gap, because a confident wrong answer on a date is the kind of thing that is produced against you two years later.
The discipline that protects you. Everything you say on oath should be something you could still say, in the same words, after the other side has shown you their documents. If a sentence depends on them not having something, leave it out.
Once the sworn statement is on record, notice goes to the proposed accused so that the opportunity of being heard can be given.
The sequencing protects both sides. The complainant is not asked to commit to a version after hearing the defence, and the accused is not asked to answer something nobody has yet sworn to.
If in your matter notice goes out before you have been examined, that is the error the Karnataka High Court identified, and it is worth raising at once rather than after the court has moved on.
There is a practical point about addresses here. Notice has to reach somebody, and a proposed accused described vaguely or at an old address means the stage simply does not complete. Addresses are worth checking before filing rather than discovering at the third date that nothing has been served.
Cognizance is the court formally taking the offence on. It is not a finding of guilt and it is not the issue of process; it is the court applying its mind to the offence and deciding to proceed.
Under the new scheme it comes after both the sworn statement and the hearing of the proposed accused. Everything before that is preliminary, however long it takes and however much it feels like the case has started.
Three different milestones, regularly confused. Cognizance is the court taking the offence on. Issue of process is the court requiring the accused to attend. Framing of charge is later still. People use all three to mean the case has begun, and they mean different things at different stages.
Knowing where cognizance sits also tells you how to read what your own counsel reports back. "The matter is at the sworn statement stage" and "cognizance has been taken" are very different positions, and a client who understands the difference asks better questions about what is happening and why it is taking the time it is.
Why the word matters to you. Until cognizance is taken there is no case against anybody, whatever has been filed and whatever has been sworn. People describe themselves as having a case from the day they file. On the current scheme that is not accurate until two further stages have been completed.
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The remedy when a court departs from the sequence is what makes this worth knowing: the exercise is set aside and done again.
That cost falls on the complainant as much as on anybody. Months pass, the file goes back to the start, and nothing has been gained by the shortcut. It is a good reason for a complainant and their counsel to keep an eye on the order of the steps rather than assuming the court will.
Where it has already gone wrong, the route is to have the irregularity corrected rather than to carry on and hope. An order passed out of sequence is vulnerable, and it stays vulnerable.
It is also a reason to keep your own note of what happened on each date in the early stage. If the sequence has gone astray, the record of it is what any correction rests on, and a complainant who can say precisely what happened when is in a far better position than one relying on recollection.
A hearing is only an opportunity to be heard if the person knows what they are answering, so the material question is what goes with the notice.
The sensible position, and the one that follows from the purpose of the proviso, is that the proposed accused should have the complaint and the sworn statement, and the statements of any witnesses examined, so that the hearing is about something.
The statute does not spell this out. Practice is settling, and it differs. It is a question to put to counsel in your own court rather than to assume from a page like this one.
From your side, the useful instinct is to assume the fullest version: that the other side will have the complaint, your sworn statement and your witness statements when they come to be heard. Draft on that assumption. If the practice in your court turns out to be narrower, nothing has been lost by having written carefully.
Here the honest answer is that the law has not finished working this out, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.
The provision requires an opportunity of being heard. It does not say whether the proposed accused may file documents, whether they may lead any material, whether what they say goes on the record, or how far the Magistrate may go into it. Those questions are live.
Treat confident answers here with suspicion. Anybody who tells you exactly how far the accused may go at this stage is describing the practice of one court, which may be right there and wrong where you are filing. This is an area where the only reliable answer is a local one.
What can be said with confidence is the negative. It is not a trial, it is not the stage at which guilt or innocence is decided, and it is not an occasion for the complainant to prove the case. It is a stage at which the court hears the person who would be made an accused, before deciding to take the offence on.
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Before any of the procedure matters, the threshold question, and the one most complaints fail.
An offence has ingredients. Each of them has to be made out by facts you can state and support. The test is not whether what happened was wrong, unfair, dishonest in ordinary speech, or ruinous. It is whether the facts fit the ingredients of a defined offence.
Work through them one at a time, in writing. If an ingredient has no fact against it, the complaint does not improve by being written more forcefully, and a Magistrate will see that in the first reading.
Do this before you decide anything about procedure, forums or cost. Every other question on this page is downstream of it, and the most expensive mistake in this whole area is a well-prepared complaint about something that is not a crime.
The exercise, on one sheet. Write the offence at the top. List its ingredients down the left. Against each, write the fact that establishes it and the document or witness that proves that fact. Any ingredient with an empty row is the reason the complaint will fail, and no amount of drafting fills it.
The single largest category of dismissed complaints, and the one clients resist most.
Somebody did not pay. Somebody did not deliver. A partner took more than his share. A builder did not finish. All of these can be genuine wrongs with real losses, and almost all of them are civil disputes. Adding the word cheating to the narrative does not convert one.
What can convert a transaction into an offence is a dishonest intention at the outset rather than a failure afterwards, and that is a question of evidence, not of adjectives. If the only material is that the money did not come back, it is a civil matter.
The question we will ask you, and you should ask yourself. Would you still want this if the only outcome were a conviction and no money? If the honest answer is no, this is a recovery problem, and filing a criminal complaint to solve it is the error this section exists to prevent.
There is one honest exception worth stating, because the rule above is sometimes applied too bluntly. A transaction entered into with no intention of performing it from the start can be an offence, and the facts that show that intention are usually in the conduct around the transaction rather than in its failure. That is a real distinction and it is also the hardest thing in this area to prove.
A complaint goes to a Magistrate having jurisdiction, and jurisdiction is decided by where the offence is said to have taken place rather than by where you live or where it hurt.
That is a question of fact and it is occasionally arguable, particularly where something was published, sent or transmitted from one place and received in another. Getting it wrong costs the filing.
Section 224 deals with the position where a Magistrate is not competent to take cognizance, and section 212 with a case being made over to another Magistrate, so the system has answers for the error. They cost time, which is why the question is settled before filing.
Where the facts genuinely straddle two places, do not simply pick the convenient one and hope. Raise it with counsel, decide on a reasoned basis, and be ready to explain the choice, because an objection to jurisdiction taken early by the other side is a cheap way for them to cost you months.
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The person who was wronged, ordinarily, and the question is less obvious than it sounds once a family or a business is involved.
A complaint has to be brought by somebody who can swear to the facts from their own knowledge. A relative who heard about it, a manager who was told, a father complaining on behalf of an adult son who will not come to court: each of those creates a problem at the sworn statement, because the examination is of the complainant on oath.
Settle this before drafting. The right complainant with a weaker temperament is better than the wrong complainant with a stronger one.
Where more than one person was affected, decide deliberately whether they all complain or one does. Several complainants means several sworn statements and several people who must attend; one complainant is simpler to run but may not be able to speak to parts of the account. Neither is automatically right, and the choice should be made on who can actually prove what.
Structure it so that a Magistrate reading it once can see the offence. Parties. Jurisdiction, and why this court. The facts in dated order. The offence said to arise. The prayer.
Keep the facts to what happened, with dates, in sequence. Resist the urge to characterise as you go. A complaint that says on 4 March the accused sent the following message, with the message set out, is stronger than one that says the accused began a campaign of vilification.
Length is not strength here. A short complaint whose every paragraph goes to an ingredient reads as a case. A long one reads as a grievance, and the reader starts looking for the point rather than finding it.
One structural habit improves almost every complaint we are shown. Number the factual paragraphs and keep one event to one paragraph. It makes the verification straightforward, it makes the sworn statement easier to give, and it lets everybody afterwards refer to paragraph nine rather than to the bit about the second meeting.
A line worth putting near the top. One sentence stating what the complaint is about, before the narrative starts. A reader who knows where a story is going follows it; a reader working it out as they go is looking for the point instead of weighing the facts.
Name them, and say in a line what each one speaks to. A list of names without that is a list the court cannot use and you will be asked about anyway.
Then do the harder thing, which is to ask each of them, before you file, whether they will actually come. People agree readily in the first conversation and are unreachable on the date. In a complaint case, where you produce the witnesses, that is not a minor inconvenience; it is how the case fails.
Three questions for every proposed witness, before filing. What exactly did you see or hear, and when. Will you say that on oath. And can you attend court on dates we do not control. A name that cannot survive those three is better left off the list.
Consider also who you are not calling and why. A witness who saw the central event but will not come is a problem to solve now, not a gap to discover later, and sometimes the honest answer is that the complaint cannot be run without them.
Whatever evidences the facts, indexed, legible, and in the order the narrative uses. Messages with dates and senders visible. Correspondence. Whatever was sent to the police earlier, with its date and whatever came back.
Electronic material needs care, because its form matters as much as its content. A screenshot that does not show who sent it or when is weaker than one that does, and the question of how electronic records are proved is a real one that belongs with counsel early rather than late.
Where anything is in another language, it has to be translated properly rather than summarised, and that is legal translation work.
Keep originals safe and file clean copies, and know where every original is. On a matter that runs for years, the question of who holds the original of a particular document comes up at an awkward moment, and the answer should not be that nobody is sure.
Anything you cannot be examined on. Remember that the document is the basis of your sworn statement, and the other side will read it early and in detail.
Leave out speculation about motive dressed as fact. Leave out what somebody told you somebody else said, unless you identify it as that. Leave out the history of the relationship unless it goes to an ingredient. Leave out every adjective you can.
And leave out offences the facts do not support. Adding sections to make a complaint look heavier is the commonest unforced error in this area: it hands the other side something easy to attack and it makes a court doubt the sections you were right to include.
A simple editing pass catches most of it. Read the draft and strike every sentence that is a conclusion rather than a fact, every sentence you could not give a date or a source for, and every adjective that is doing the work a fact should do. What survives is almost always a stronger document than what went in.
The verification is not decoration beneath the signature. It is your statement of which paragraphs are true to your knowledge and which are on information and belief, and the distinction is exactly what you will be tested on.
Go through the complaint paragraph by paragraph and sort them honestly into those two categories before signing. A complaint that verifies everything as personal knowledge, when half of it came from somebody else, is a complaint with a problem built into it.
Where an affidavit has to accompany the filing, the same discipline applies, and drawing a clean one is affidavit drafting work rather than a form-filling exercise.
Read the final version yourself, aloud, before signing. Not the draft you discussed, the version being filed. Clients sign documents they have skimmed, and the sworn statement is the moment at which that becomes a problem rather than a habit.
Section 225 gives the Magistrate a stage between hearing the complaint and requiring anybody to attend. On receiving a complaint of an offence he is authorised to take cognizance of, or one made over under section 212, he may postpone the issue of process and look closer.
The purpose is stated in the provision itself: to decide whether there is sufficient ground for proceeding. It is the court declining to set the machinery in motion until it is satisfied there is something in it.
Complainants read a postponement as a setback. It is usually the opposite of a dismissal: the court is taking the matter seriously enough to examine it rather than turning it away.
The language of the provision is worth noticing. The Magistrate postpones the issue of process; he does not pause the complaint. The matter is alive and moving through a stage, and a complainant who treats a postponement as the case having stalled misreads what is happening.
Having postponed, the Magistrate has two tools. Inquire into the case personally. Or direct an investigation by a police officer, or by such other person as he thinks fit.
The second is the more significant for a complainant whose problem was that the police would not act, because it can put police powers behind the matter after all, by direction of the court rather than at the station.
Where a person who is not a police officer is directed to investigate, that person is clothed with the powers such an officer ordinarily holds at a police station for that purpose, with one exception that is worth noting: not the power to arrest without warrant.
One limit that catches complainants out. Where the complaint was not made by a Court, an investigation may be directed only after the complainant and the witnesses present have been examined on oath under section 223. The sworn statement is not a formality to be got through; it is a precondition for the court doing the thing you most want it to do.
Where the person complained against resides beyond the area in which the Magistrate exercises jurisdiction, the issue of process is to be postponed. This is not discretionary in the way the rest of section 225 is.
The reason is protective and it is sensible once you see it. Summoning somebody from another district or State is a serious imposition, and the provision ensures a court looks harder before doing it.
For you it means a longer early stage and a real reason to get the address right. A proposed accused described loosely, or at an address they left years ago, turns this into months.
Note also that the test is where the person resides, not where the offence happened or where you are. A complaint filed in the right court about something done locally can still attract this requirement simply because the person complained against has since moved away.
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Where the offence appears to be triable exclusively by the Court of Session, the position changes in a way that surprises people who assumed a graver allegation would be handled more readily.
No investigation may be directed. Instead the Magistrate calls upon the complainant to produce all the witnesses and examines them on oath.
Read that as a workload. On the gravest allegations the complainant has to bring everybody in at the outset, not later and not selectively. Anybody filing such a complaint should know on day one that the whole body of witnesses has to be available, willing, and locatable.
There is a quieter consequence as well. Because all the witnesses are examined on oath at this stage, their accounts are fixed early and in the complainant own case. That cuts both ways: it builds the record, and it leaves no room for a witness whose version is not yet settled.
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Section 226. If, after considering the statements on oath of the complainant and the witnesses and the result of any inquiry or investigation under section 225, the Magistrate is of opinion that there is no sufficient ground for proceeding, he shall dismiss the complaint, and in doing so shall briefly record his reasons.
That is the exit the court has, and it is used. A complaint can be over before the person complained against has had to defend anything substantive, on the basis of what the complainant himself put up.
Section 226, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — dismissal of the complaint where, after considering the statements on oath of the complainant and of the witnesses and the result of any inquiry or investigation under section 225, the Magistrate is of opinion that there is no sufficient ground for proceeding; the Magistrate shall briefly record the reasons for so doing. Section 227 provides for the issue of process where, in the opinion of the Magistrate taking cognizance, there is sufficient ground for proceeding.
Two things worth separating, because a dismissal at this stage is not what people assume.
It is not an acquittal, and it is not a finding that you lied. It is a finding that on what was placed before the court there was not sufficient ground to proceed. The brief reasons the Magistrate records are the useful part, because they tell you which ingredient was not made out.
It is also not the same thing as a discharge, although the vocabulary overlaps. A discharge comes later, on a case built from a police report, on the record as it then stands; that is discharge application territory and reading the underlying material properly is chargesheet analysis. The two use similar words about sufficient ground and arrive at different points in different kinds of case.
Read those brief reasons carefully rather than putting the order away. They are the court telling you, in a few lines, exactly where the complaint fell short, and that is information you would otherwise pay to obtain.
Where the Magistrate taking cognizance is of opinion that there is sufficient ground for proceeding, process issues under section 227. This is the milestone a complainant is working towards.
It is not a finding that the accused did it. It is the court saying there is enough to require them to come and answer. Clients treat it as vindication and it is better understood as permission to proceed.
From here the matter becomes a running case with dates, and the character of your involvement changes from assembling a file to attending a court repeatedly over a long period.
It is also the point at which the costs change character. Up to here the exercise has been preparation and a handful of dates. After it, the matter has a life of its own, with appearances continuing until it is decided, withdrawn or dismissed. Many complainants should make their real decision about whether to go on at this milestone rather than at the filing.
A good moment to take stock. At the issue of process you know the court has found something in it, you know what the other side said when heard, and you know what the matter has cost so far. That is more information than you had at filing, and it is the right point to decide deliberately whether to continue.
What form the process takes is the court decision and depends on the nature of the case rather than on how strongly the complainant feels.
Complainants frequently arrive expecting that the issue of process means somebody will be arrested. Ordinarily it means a summons requiring attendance. Pressing a court for something heavier, on a matter that does not call for it, reads badly and achieves nothing.
Equally, the proposed accused may have moved in advance for anticipatory bail, or may apply for regular bail if matters reach that stage. Neither is a sign that the case is weak; both are ordinary.
What matters far more to the outcome than the form of the process is whether it is actually served. A proposed accused who cannot be found keeps a complaint case alive and going nowhere for a long time, and addresses that were approximate at filing are the usual cause.
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Longer than you expect, and now longer than it used to be, because a stage has been added before cognizance.
Our own window is for preparing and filing. After that the matter runs on the court calendar: the sworn statement on one date, notice and the hearing of the proposed accused across others, any inquiry or investigation under section 225 in its own time, and only then the decision whether to issue process.
Anybody giving you a timeline for all of that is inventing it. What can be planned is your own availability, and that is the thing most worth planning.
Plan in stages rather than in totals. Know what the next stage is, what has to happen in it, and roughly when the following date is. A complainant who thinks in stages copes with a long matter. One who fixed on an expected end date is disappointed every month.
What genuinely shortens it. Complete papers at filing, correct addresses, witnesses who attend when called, and prompt compliance with whatever the court asks for. None of those are glamorous and together they account for most of the avoidable delay in a complaint case.
A complaint case is carried by the complainant, and the court expects you there.
This sounds like an administrative detail until you look at what it costs across a year or two of dates in a court that may not be near you, on days you do not choose, with a business or a job that does not pause. For a self-employed person each date is a day of income.
Count this before filing, not after. Estimate the dates, estimate what a day away costs you, and multiply. People abandon complaint cases for exactly this reason, and an abandoned case is worse than one never filed, because it ends with an order that is not in your favour.
Make the arrangement before you file rather than improvising it. Who covers the shop, who handles the day job, how far the court is, and whether somebody can travel with you if that matters. Complainants who thought about this in advance keep going; those who did not stop in the second year.
The consequence is not that the case waits for you. It is that the case ends.
Complaint cases are dismissed for the non-appearance of the complainant far more often than they are decided on their merits. That is the single most common ending for proceedings of this kind, and it is entirely within the complainant control.
Where attending genuinely becomes impossible for a period, that is something to raise with your counsel in advance, in the proper form, rather than something to discover has happened.
There is a worse version, and it should be said. A complaint dismissed for non-appearance leaves an order on the record that the other side can produce afterwards, in any other proceeding between you, as the end of the matter you started. Not filing at all would have left you in a better position than filing and walking away.
Some offences can be compounded, meaning the parties may settle and the proceeding can be brought to an end. Many cannot, and for those a settlement between the parties does not end the case.
This is a question to ask before filing rather than after, because it determines whether you are starting something you can stop. A complainant who files expecting to use the case as leverage, on an offence that cannot be compounded, has built a machine with no off switch.
Where terms are agreed, record them properly. A clean written understanding, or an affidavit or undertaking where that is appropriate, is a different instrument from a criminal case and is drafting work.
Be careful about informal settlement while a case is running. Money changing hands, or an understanding reached outside court on a matter that cannot be compounded, does not end the proceeding and can create its own difficulties. If terms are agreed, they should be brought into the proceeding properly rather than acted on quietly.
Ask this at the first consultation. Is the offence I am alleging compoundable, and if we later settle, can this proceeding actually be ended? The answer shapes whether filing is a step in a negotiation or a commitment to see something through to a decision.
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There are consequences and they are not theoretical. A complaint made on facts known to be untrue exposes the complainant to proceedings in return, and it does so on a record that includes their own sworn statement.
This is the practical reason for the discipline urged throughout this page. The sworn statement is the trap for a complainant who has overstated: it is on oath, it is early, and it cannot be walked back once the other side has it.
We will not prepare a complaint on facts a client has not told us are true, and where an account changes between conversations we stop. We are not being careful for the sake of it. The client is the person who will be cross-examined on that document.
This is also why exaggeration is a worse strategy than understatement. A complaint that claims slightly more than the facts support invites the whole account to be treated as inflated, and the parts that were true lose their force alongside the part that was not.
Think about what the other side does next, because on a private complaint they very often do something.
A complaint invites a response, and the response may be a complaint of its own on a related set of facts, or a civil claim, or an application to have yours stopped. None of that means your complaint was wrong. It means you have started a contest with somebody who has their own advisers.
Weigh that honestly against what you are trying to achieve. Where the goal is a correction, an apology or a retraction, a legal notice often achieves in weeks what a complaint case does not achieve in years.
Ask yourself one more question before filing: what is the worst realistic outcome, and could I live with it. Not the expected outcome, the worst one. A complainant who has answered that honestly files with clear eyes and stays the course; one who has only imagined winning is the one who abandons the matter when it turns.
The usual route for a person who says the complaint should never have been entertained is to ask the High Court to put an end to it. That is a proceeding of its own and is dealt with as quashing.
It is worth knowing two things about it. It is ordinary rather than exceptional, particularly on complaints that look like converted civil disputes. And it is argued on the complaint and the material, which is another reason the complaint has to be a document that reads well to a stranger.
An order made along the way may also be challenged by way of criminal revision, and an eventual decision by criminal appeal. Those are different instruments at different stages and they are each on their own page.
If it happens, it is not the moment to redraft your complaint. The document will be looked at as it was filed, which is the whole argument for writing it carefully the first time rather than treating the first version as a draft that can be improved later.
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Civil and criminal proceedings on overlapping facts can run at the same time, and frequently do. The existence of a civil suit does not by itself prevent a complaint case, nor the other way round.
What does matter is consistency. Anything you say on oath in one proceeding can be put to you in the other, and two versions of the same events, written by different advisers at different times, is a gift to the other side.
Keep one set of facts and one chronology across everything you file anywhere. With several matters in motion, holding one consistent record across all of them is precisely the job legal file management does.
Tell each of your advisers about the other proceedings. It sounds obvious and it is routinely not done, usually because the matters were started at different times with different people. An adviser who does not know about the other case cannot keep your position consistent with it.
Worth one more section because it is the commonest failure and the most expensive.
The pattern is consistent. A transaction goes wrong, the money is not returned, the civil route looks slow, and somebody suggests that a criminal complaint will produce movement. It sometimes does produce movement, which is precisely why courts are alert to it.
When it fails it fails expensively: the complaint is dismissed or quashed, the order becomes a document the other side uses in the civil matter, and the delay that was being avoided has happened anyway with an adverse finding attached.
If somebody is urging you towards a criminal complaint on a payment dispute, ask them a direct question: what do they expect the criminal court to order that would put money in your hands. Listen to the answer carefully. If it is about pressure rather than about remedy, you have your answer about what is being proposed.
The outcome nobody plans for. The complaint is dismissed or quashed, and that order then appears in the civil suit as evidence of how the dispute has been conducted. You have not merely failed to gain; you have handed the other side something.
A dishonoured cheque is pursued under a specific statutory scheme with its own notice requirement, its own periods and its own procedure, and it is a complaint case in form while being quite unlike the general run of them.
If that is what you have, do not treat this page as your guide to it. Go to cheque bounce, because the steps that matter there, particularly the demand and its timing, have no counterpart in an ordinary complaint.
The commonest error is missing the notice stage or sending it late. That sinks the case for reasons entirely unconnected to whether the money was owed.
It is also worth knowing because of the volume. A large share of the complaint cases in any Magistrate court are of this kind, which means the procedure around them is well settled and quick to explain, and it also means a general account of complaint procedure, including this one, will not match what you see happening in that courtroom.
Among the offences that most often come by private complaint rather than through the police, which is why people with this grievance are so frequently sent away from a station and arrive here confused.
Two practical points. The material is usually documentary, which suits this route: messages, posts and publications with dates, rather than a narrative that depends on who remembers what. And the thing most complainants actually want is removal and correction rather than a conviction.
If that is your position, consider a defamation notice first. It is faster, it is cheaper, and a retraction in the same forum where the statement appeared is worth more to a reputation than a judgment years later that nobody in that forum will read.
One more practical point specific to this category. Material online changes and disappears, and a complaint about something published is only as good as the record of what was published. Preserve it properly and early, with dates and sources visible, because the thing you are complaining about may not exist by the time anybody looks for it.
Preserve the material today, whatever you decide. Full-screen captures showing the sender, the group or page, the date and the time, saved as files rather than left in a phone gallery. Posts are deleted, accounts are closed, and groups are wound up, and a complaint about a publication nobody can now see is a hard complaint to run.
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Where the person complained against is a public servant and the allegation concerns the discharge of official functions, section 223(2) adds requirements that do not apply to anybody else.
The public servant must be given an opportunity to make assertions as to the situation that led to the incident. And a report containing the facts and circumstances of the incident must be received from the officer superior to them. Only then may cognizance be taken.
Both gates exist to filter complaints aimed at officials for doing their job. Whether your matter is about official functions at all is therefore the first question, and it is not always obvious.
None of this means such complaints cannot be brought. They can, and the gates are procedural rather than substantive. What it means is that the timeline is longer and partly outside your hands, and that a complainant who expects the ordinary sequence will think something has gone wrong when nothing has.
The second gate deserves its own section because of where it leaves a complainant: waiting on a document from a department with no particular reason to hurry.
You cannot produce it, you cannot compel it directly, and the complaint cannot get past cognizance without it. That is a structural feature of the provision rather than an obstruction in your case.
What to do about it in practice. Expect the stage, build it into your expectations of time, keep your own record of what was sought and when, and ask counsel early what can be done where the report simply does not arrive. A complainant who understands this on day one is far better placed than one who concludes in month five that somebody is obstructing them.
Keep the correspondence about it, whatever form it takes. Where a report is sought and does not come, the record of what was asked and when is the foundation of whatever is done about it, and reconstructing that record later from memory is not the same thing.
Separately from section 223(2), there are offences and categories of accused for which a prosecution cannot proceed without a sanction or authorisation from a specified authority.
This is a distinct requirement with a distinct source, and it is not satisfied by anything in Chapter XVI. Where it applies and has not been obtained, the proceeding is vulnerable however good the facts are.
Whether sanction is needed in your matter is a question for counsel at the outset. It is not a detail to be discovered when the other side raises it.
Ask the question in the same conversation in which you ask about jurisdiction and limitation. Those three — the right court, the time available, and whether anybody has to authorise the prosecution — are the structural questions, and all three are cheaper to answer before filing than after.
Some complaints are made not by a private person but by a Court, and the second proviso to section 223(1) treats them differently: where the complaint is in writing and made by a Court, the Magistrate need not examine the complainant and witnesses.
The same exemption covers a complaint in writing by a public servant acting or purporting to act in the discharge of official duties.
Those exemptions tell you something about the ordinary case. The examination on oath exists because a private complainant needs testing. Where the complaint comes from a court or an official acting officially, the law takes it as already having passed through a responsible filter.
There is a practical use in knowing this exists. Where the wrong you are complaining about happened in or to a court proceeding, the right route may be to bring it to the attention of that court rather than to file your own complaint about it, and those are quite different things with quite different consequences.
A company or a firm can be a complainant, and the question that has to be settled first is who will stand in the witness box.
Three separate things need to line up. The entity must authorise somebody, properly and in a form that can be produced. That person must have knowledge of the facts rather than merely holding the authority. And they must be able to attend dates over a long period, which in practice means not the most senior person available.
Get all three right before filing. An authorisation produced late, or a deponent who turns out to know the matter only from a file, is a weakness that surfaces at the sworn statement.
Put the authorisation in place in a form that can be produced in court, not merely in an internal email. And choose the person for the long run: a complaint case outlives employment, and a deponent who leaves the company in year two creates a problem that has to be solved mid-proceeding.
Some subjects have their own statutory machinery that displaces or sits in front of the general complaint route, and filing a general complaint instead of using it wastes the attempt.
Matters involving particular categories of complainant or particular statutes frequently have a designated authority, a designated court, or a required first step. The question to ask before filing anything is whether the subject matter has its own route, and if it does, what that route requires first.
Where the matter is really a police matter after all, the FIR route is the page to go back to, and a simple written grievance to the station is criminal complaint drafting rather than this.
The general shape of this trap is always the same. A statute creates a scheme, the scheme has a designated authority and a required first step, and a general complaint filed in ignorance of it is returned. Asking whether a special route exists costs one question; discovering it afterwards costs the filing and the time.
The complaint itself, in the form the court takes, setting out the parties, the jurisdiction, the facts in dated order, the offence said to arise from them, and the prayer. A list of witnesses with what each is being called to say. A list of documents with an index. The verification. And the affidavit where one has to go with it.
Alongside the papers, a note of the procedural sequence as it now stands: sworn statement, notice to the proposed accused, hearing, then cognizance. Clients who understand that order are not alarmed when the person they complained about turns up at the second date, and clients who do not are alarmed every time.
The test a draft has to pass before it leaves us. Read the facts section alone. Can a reader state what is alleged to have happened, on what date, by whom, and which ingredient of the offence each fact goes to? If the answer needs the annexures, the facts section is not finished.
Before any drafting, somebody reads the whole account cold and asks three questions. Is there an offence here at all, or is this a civil wrong told angrily? Is a complaint case the right instrument, or should this have gone through the police route? And is anything in it going to look, to a Magistrate, like a dispute about money dressed as a crime?
That reading is uncomfortable and it is the most valuable thing we do on this subject. A complaint case that should never have been filed costs more than the fee: it produces a dismissal, it hands the other side a document to use, and on a bad set of facts it invites a response in kind.
If the conclusion is that no offence arises, we tell you that and name what the matter actually is. That conversation loses us the instruction fairly often and we would rather have it at the start.
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A plain written account of what happened, in order, with dates. The documents you already have, as they are. The names and addresses of the people you say did it, as accurately as you can give them. The names of anybody who saw or can speak to any part of it. And anything you have already sent to the police or to anybody else about the same facts, with its date.
That last item matters more than clients expect. A complaint case filed while the same grievance is sitting with the police, or after a closure, is a different document and has to be written knowing that history rather than around it.
Where papers are in another language, that is legal translation and is separately priced. Where the papers in hand have to be tested against the assertions the complaint will make, that is document verification, and on an old or tangled matter putting the history into usable order is legal file management.
A complaint case is a court proceeding with appearances, and it is not a documentation exercise after the first day. We prepare the complaint, the lists, the index and the affidavit, and we keep the file. Everything that happens in the courtroom is counsel work.
That includes the sworn statement, which is you on oath before a Magistrate and is not something anybody prepares a script for. It includes the hearing the proposed accused now gets. It includes every date thereafter.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Engage that advocate early rather than at the filing. The decisions that matter most on a complaint case — whether it is a criminal matter at all, which offences to plead, which court, who the complainant should be — are better taken with the person who will have to stand up and argue them than handed to them afterwards as a finished document.
Named plainly, because on this subject the requests that cause harm are predictable.
A complaint alleging facts you have not told us are true. You will be examined on oath on this document. We will not write a sentence you cannot stand behind under that examination.
A criminal complaint whose purpose is leverage in a money dispute. If what you want is payment, say so and we will tell you the route. A complaint filed to create pressure is recognised as one, and it rebounds.
Offences added to make the matter look heavier. Loading a complaint with sections the facts do not support weakens the ones they do, and it is the first thing the other side will point at.
A complaint on facts already closed by the police, written as though that never happened. That history has to be disclosed and dealt with, not omitted.
Anything at all where the account changes between conversations. We will ask once, and if the facts move we will decline the work.
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Ours is ₹7,999, and the working window we hold to is 7 – 30 days from the day your account and your documents are with us. That is the reading, the complaint, the lists, the index, the affidavit and the assembled file.
Outside that figure sit the court fee and any process fee the court levies, neither of which comes to us, which are paid at the court, and the engagement of the advocate who will appear. A complaint case runs over dates, so the second of those is the larger figure and it is not a single payment.
We would rather you knew that before starting than discovered it in month three. A complaint case is cheap to file and not cheap to conduct, and a complainant who budgets only for the filing is a complainant who abandons it halfway, which is the worst of every outcome.
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Worth being blunt about, because the gap between what people expect and what this produces is where the disappointment lives.
It does not get you your money back. A criminal court punishes; it is not the forum for recovering a debt, and a dispute about payment belongs in a civil suit or in the cheque bounce route where that applies.
It does not produce an arrest. Process issues to secure attendance, and what issues is decided by the court on what it finds sufficient.
It does not run itself. Complaint cases are dismissed for the complainant not turning up far more often than they are decided on the merits.
It is not faster than the police route. It is the route available when that one is not, which is a different thing.
It does not stop the other side. They may seek to have it quashed, which is its own proceeding, and they may complain in return.
No court fee figure appears here, and no form. Court fees are fixed by State legislation and the schedule in force where you file, the format a Magistrate court accepts is set by the rules and practice of that court, and both differ enough that a number printed here would mislead most of the people reading it.
Nor does this page give you a period. The limitation that applies depends on the offence and is a question about your facts, not a figure that can be published alongside a procedure.
What it does give is the structure, the change of 2024 that most material on this subject has not absorbed, and the order of the steps as a High Court has now explained it. Those are national. The counter is local, and the counter is where the fee and the form are settled.
The question to put at the filing counter, in one line. What is the court fee on a complaint under section 223, and in what format does this court take it. Two answers, obtained in a minute, that no web page can give you reliably.
Tell us four things. What happened, in a few sentences. When. Who you say did it. And whether you have already been to the police about it, with what result.
We come back with a straight view on whether this looks like a criminal matter at all, whether a complaint case is the right door or the police route still is, and what the first fortnight involves. Where the honest answer is that this is a civil dispute, you will get that answer rather than a quotation.
Include the police history even if it is unflattering, and especially if it is. An application that was taken and never acted on, a closure, or an officer telling you it was a civil matter are all facts that shape what we would advise, and leaving them out produces advice based on half the picture.
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Send us what happened and whether you have been to the police already. You will get a straight view on whether a complaint case is the right instrument before anything is drafted.
This page is built on Chapter XVI of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, headed Complaints to Magistrates, read with section 210 in Chapter XV and section 227 in Chapter XVII. Section 210 provides for cognizance of offences by Magistrates. Section 223 is headed Examination of complainant and provides that a Magistrate having jurisdiction, on taking cognizance of an offence on complaint, shall examine upon oath the complainant and the witnesses present, the substance of the examination being reduced to writing and signed by the complainant and the witnesses and by the Magistrate. Section 224 deals with procedure by a Magistrate not competent to take cognizance, section 225 with postponement of the issue of process, section 226 with dismissal of a complaint, and section 227 with the issue of process.
On the change that most published material has not absorbed, the first proviso to section 223(1) provides that no cognizance of an offence shall be taken by the Magistrate without giving the accused an opportunity of being heard. There was no equivalent in section 200 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, which section 223 replaces, and under which the proposed accused had no right to be heard before cognizance. The second proviso dispenses with examination of the complainant and witnesses where the complaint is made in writing by a public servant acting or purporting to act in the discharge of official duties, or by a Court, or where the Magistrate makes over the case for inquiry or trial to another Magistrate under section 212; and the third proviso provides that where the case is so made over after the complainant and witnesses have been examined, the Magistrate to whom it is made over need not re-examine them.
On complaints against public servants, section 223(2) is also new and provides that a Magistrate shall not take cognizance of a complaint against a public servant for an offence alleged to have been committed in the course of the discharge of official functions or duties except after giving the public servant an opportunity to make assertions as to the situation that led to the incident, and after receiving a report containing facts and circumstances of the incident from the officer superior to that public servant.
On the order in which those steps are taken, the High Court of Karnataka in Sri Basanagouda R. Patil (Yatnal) v. Sri Shivananda S. Patil, decided 27 September 2024 by Nagaprasanna J., explained the sequence under section 223: on presentation of the complaint the Magistrate records the sworn statement of the complainant and of any witnesses present, and the question of taking cognizance does not arise at that stage; notice then issues to the proposed accused, who is given the opportunity of being heard that the proviso requires; and only thereafter does the Magistrate take cognizance and regulate the proceedings. The Court treated the issue of notice to the accused immediately on presentation of the complaint, before the sworn statement, as a procedural aberration, allowed the petition and remitted the matter so that the exercise could be done afresh.
On the court filter before process issues, section 225 permits a Magistrate, on receiving a complaint of an offence of which he is authorised to take cognizance or which has been made over to him under section 212, to postpone the issue of process and either inquire into the case himself or direct an investigation by a police officer or such other person as he thinks fit, for the purpose of deciding whether there is sufficient ground for proceeding; it requires the issue of process to be postponed where the accused resides beyond the area in which the Magistrate exercises jurisdiction; it bars a direction for investigation where the offence appears to be triable exclusively by the Court of Session, in which case the complainant is called upon to produce all witnesses and they are examined on oath; and where the complaint was not made by a Court, it permits a direction for investigation only after the complainant and the witnesses present have been examined on oath under section 223. A person other than a police officer who is directed to investigate has the powers of an officer in charge of a police station for that purpose, except the power to arrest without warrant. Section 226 provides for dismissal of the complaint where, after considering the statements on oath and the result of any inquiry or investigation under section 225, the Magistrate is of opinion that there is no sufficient ground for proceeding, the Magistrate briefly recording the reasons.
On what this page deliberately leaves out, no court fee, no process fee, no form and no period of limitation is stated. Court fees and the accepted format answer to State legislation and to whatever the court concerned lays down by its own rules and practice, and limitation depends on the offence alleged rather than on the procedure. These are settled at the court where the complaint is to be filed.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
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