Counting The Days: Section 479 Of The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, And The Distance Between Statutory Release And Actual Liberty
Dr. Purnima Gautam, Ms. Pragya SharmaOct 4, 202610.5281/zenodo.23140372pp. 264–28118 pages
“Section 479 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS)” tells the State when it must stop holding an undertrial prisoner: once the accused has served one-half of the maximum sentence for the alleged offence, or one-third if he is a first-time offender. It also, unusually, puts the first step on the jail superintendent and not on the prisoner. This paper asks whether section 479 has turned the undertrial’s constitutional claim to liberty into an entitlement that actually delivers release. It argues that the provision makes two real advances over “section 436A of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973”, the first-time offender threshold and the superintendent’s duty, but retains or introduces three weaknesses: a reliance on the statutory maximum as a clock, an unclear bar on release where multiple cases are pending, and dependence on the same institutional chain that failed under the old law. Using the text of the provision, the Supreme Court’s supervision in In Re: Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons, a Karnataka High Court reading of section 479(2), and “the National Legal Services Authority’s quarterly data on Under Trial Review Committees for April to June 2025”, the paper shows that identification and release under the provision remain thin compared with the size of the undertrial population. It closes with doctrinal and administrative proposals aimed at turning a promise of release into a routine one.