Law & Policy
Irrespective of the Area: What Section 173 Opens and Section 175 Does Not Close
23 September 2026 · 13 min read
Recording information and acting on it are separate functions, and a code of procedure has to say who does each. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 says both, in adjoining sections, and describes them by different geographies. The duty to record is owed by every station in the country. The power to investigate belongs to the station whose Court could try the case. Nothing between them tells the first station how to reach the second.
The words that removed the boundary
Section 173(1) opens Chapter XIII:
Every information relating to the commission of a cognizable offence, irrespective of the area where the offence is committed, may be given orally or by electronic communication to an officer in charge of a police station...
The clause sits early in the sentence, before the modes of giving and before the officer is named. It does not qualify the manner of the information or the identity of the informant. It qualifies the offence — where it happened — and declares that this has no bearing on whether the information may be given and, by the rest of the sub-section, recorded. Where the information is oral it "shall be reduced to writing by him or under his direction, and be read over to the informant", it shall be signed by the person giving it, and its substance shall be entered in the prescribed book. Sub-section (2) then provides: "A copy of the information as recorded under sub-section (1) shall be given forthwith, free of cost, to the informant or the victim." A document exists, and the person who brought the information leaves with it.
The Sanhita gives this class of record no name. The expression by which it is usually described appears nowhere in the enactment, and there is no separate species of register or form for one. There is a single duty, owed by every officer in charge of every police station, in respect of every cognizable offence wherever committed.
What the next section retains
Section 174 deals with non-cognizable cases, and its opening words are worth setting beside Section 173(1):
When information is given to an officer in charge of a police station of the commission within the limits of such station of a non-cognizable offence...
The territorial words are there, in the section immediately following, in the same Chapter and in the same drafting style. Whatever Parliament was doing in Section 173(1), it was not acting on a general view that the place of the offence had ceased to matter to the station that receives information about it. The limitation stands for non-cognizable offences and is absent for cognizable ones, and the difference is visible on the face of two consecutive sections.
Where the power stops
Section 175(1) states the power for which the Chapter is named:
Any officer in charge of a police station may, without the order of a Magistrate, investigate any cognizable case which a Court having jurisdiction over the local area within the limits of such station would have power to inquire into or try under the provisions of Chapter XIV...
The power is defined by reference to a Court. The test is not where the offence was committed, but whether the Court of the station's own local area could try it — and that question is answered by Chapter XIV, which reaches further than the place of the act alone. Section 197 states the ordinary rule: "Every offence shall ordinarily be inquired into and tried by a Court within whose local jurisdiction it was committed." Sections 198 to 204 then extend it. An offence constituted by an act and a consequence may be tried where either occurred. Theft, extortion and robbery may be tried where the stolen property was possessed by the person who committed the offence, or by a person who received or retained it knowing it to be stolen. Kidnapping or abduction may be tried where the person was conveyed, concealed or detained. Cheating practised by electronic communication may be tried by a Court within whose local jurisdiction the messages "were sent or were received".
The class of stations empowered to investigate is therefore wider than the class of stations in whose area something happened. In one common case — an online fraud reported by the person deceived, at the station nearest to them — the receiving station is likely to be empowered in any event, because the communications were received there. The gap is not universal.
It is not closed either. An assault in one district reported in another; a theft reported where the complainant has since travelled rather than where the property went; an offence reported by a family member at the station near their own home rather than the one near the incident. In each the registering station falls outside every head of Chapter XIV, and Section 175(1) gives it nothing.
The duty that does not arise
The consequence is not only that the registering officer may not investigate. The duties that follow registration are conditioned on the same empowerment. Section 176(1) provides:
If, from information received or otherwise, an officer in charge of a police station has reason to suspect the commission of an offence which he is empowered under section 175 to investigate, he shall forthwith send a report of the same to a Magistrate empowered to take cognizance of such offence upon a police report and shall proceed in person, or shall depute one of his subordinate officers... to proceed, to the spot, to investigate the facts and circumstances of the case...
Every obligation in the sub-section hangs on the words "which he is empowered under section 175 to investigate".
A reading is available on which those words do no territorial work — on which they identify a kind of offence, the cognizable kind that Section 175 deals with, rather than a competence belonging to the particular officer. The words resist it. The subject of the clause is "he", the officer already named in the opening line; Section 175 confers its power by reference to the local area of that officer's own station; and a construction that reads the words as a synonym for "cognizable" makes them redundant, because Section 175(1) is not the place the Sanhita defines cognizability. On the ordinary reading the condition is personal to the officer.
Where the officer is not so empowered, then, he is not required to send the report to a Magistrate, not required to proceed to the spot, and not required to depute anyone. Section 176(3) does not operate either: the duty to "cause the forensic expert to visit the crime scene to collect forensic evidence in the offence", for offences punishable with seven years or more, sits in the same section and is addressed to the same officer in the same capacity — and the crime scene, by hypothesis, is elsewhere.
So the record is made and no Court is told. Registration under Section 173 is not, by itself, a communication to a Magistrate. The two reports the Sanhita requires come from Section 176(1) at the start of an investigation and Section 193(3) at its end, and both are duties of an officer who is investigating.
Section 173(3), the preliminary enquiry provision for offences punishable with three years or more but less than seven, is drafted "Without prejudice to the provisions contained in section 175" and is available to "the officer in charge of the police station" on receipt of information. Whether an officer who cannot investigate the case may nevertheless conduct a fourteen-day enquiry into whether a prima facie case exists is a question the words leave open, and the opening reservation points away from reading it as a power that survives the absence of the other.
What the saving clause saves
One sub-section reads as though it answered all of this. Section 175(2):
No proceeding of a police officer in any such case shall at any stage be called in question on the ground that the case was one which such officer was not empowered under this section to investigate.
It does not. The sub-section bars a particular objection taken afterwards; it protects steps already taken from being undone. It is not a source of authority and it does not tell an officer that he may begin. An officer deciding in the morning what to do with a report he took the previous night gets no instruction from a provision addressed to a Court about what argument it may not entertain months later. The officer's question is prospective, and the sub-section operates only in retrospect.
What the Sanhita does provide for
The absence of a route is the more striking because the Sanhita is not generally indifferent to things that must cross a jurisdictional line. It provides for the crossing repeatedly, and in every instance for people rather than for paper.
Section 45 permits an officer, "for the purpose of arresting without warrant any person whom he is authorised to arrest", to "pursue such person into any place in India". Section 35(1) confers the power of arrest without warrant on "any police officer", and carries no territorial qualification in any of its ten clauses; the officer who may not investigate may still arrest — including, under clause (b), where he is satisfied that arrest is necessary "for proper investigation of the offence" that he will not be conducting. Section 57 requires an officer making an arrest without warrant to "take or send the person arrested before a Magistrate having jurisdiction in the case, or before the officer in charge of a police station" — drafted on the express footing that the Magistrate with jurisdiction may not be the nearest one. Section 58 makes the same assumption about distance: the twenty-four hours exclude "the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the Magistrate's Court, whether having jurisdiction or not".
The Sanhita also provides for several movements of paper. Section 173(4) tells an informant met with a refusal that he "may send the substance of such information, in writing and by post, to the Superintendent of Police concerned". Section 177 allows reports to a Magistrate to be routed through a superior officer whom the State Government appoints. Section 193(4) lets that officer direct further investigation while the Magistrate's orders are awaited. Section 59 requires officers in charge of police stations to report to the District Magistrate the cases of all persons arrested without warrant within the limits of their stations.
For the one movement that Section 173(1) makes inevitable — the record from the station that took it to the station that can act on it — there is nothing. No direction to forward, no period within which it must be done, no form in which it travels, no officer charged with seeing that it arrives, and no consequence if it does not.
The definition in Section 2(1)(u) shows that this is not a notional difficulty. A police station "means any post or place declared generally or specially by the State Government, to be a police station, and includes any local area specified by the State Government in this behalf". Local areas exist because a State Government has declared them, and a State Government's declaration stops at the State's boundary. A report taken in Lucknow about an offence committed in another State must cross a line that neither State's notification addresses, under a Sanhita that does not mention the crossing.
The clock that starts at the other station
One provision does treat the registering station as significant after the event, and it assumes the two stations are the same. Section 193(2) provides that the investigation into the sexual offences it lists "shall be completed within two months from the date on which the information was recorded by the officer in charge of the police station".
The period runs from recording, not from receipt by the station that will investigate. Where those are different stations, the investigating officer's statutory period is shortened by however long the transmission took — a period the Sanhita does not regulate, because it does not provide for the transmission at all. The officer who owes the duty does not control when his time began, and the statute does not tell him how much of it was spent before the papers reached him.
The reporting duties in Section 193(3) have the same shape. The police officer must "within a period of ninety days, inform the progress of the investigation" to the informant or the victim, and must communicate "the action taken by him, to the person, if any, by whom the information relating to the commission of the offence was first given". Both are owed to a person who dealt with a different station, whose particulars reach the investigating officer only with the transferred papers, and whose entitlement to be told does not depend on their having reached him.
The signature
A narrower point sits inside Section 173(1) itself. Information may be given "by electronic communication", in which case "it shall be taken on record by him on being signed within three days by the person giving it". The opening of the sub-section frees the informant from the geography of the offence. This part conditions the record's existence on a signature within three days.
The Sanhita does not say how or where the signature is to be affixed. Section 530 permits trials, inquiries and proceedings to be held in electronic mode, but what it enumerates is the issuance, service and execution of summonses and warrants, the examination of complainants and witnesses, the recording of evidence in inquiries and trials, and appellate proceedings. Whether the recording of first information falls within it is not obvious, and the section is not drafted as though registration were in contemplation. Until that is resolved, an informant who sends information electronically from a distance must still furnish a signature, within three days, to a station that may not be the one that investigates.
What was settled and what was left
Section 173(1) settles one question, and settles it in the strongest available form — in the operative words of the section that creates the duty, not in a proviso and not in an Explanation. No station may decline to record information about a cognizable offence on the ground that the offence happened elsewhere. That is worth having in the statute rather than outside it.
What the Sanhita does not do is carry the record forward. It confines the power to investigate to the trying Court's local area, ties the duty to report to a Magistrate to that same power, and supplies no route by which a record made outside those limits reaches the station inside them. Whatever governs the interval is therefore not the Sanhita. It is executive instruction of one kind or another — and an instruction, whatever its terms, does not have to be uniform between States, is not construed by the Courts as a statute is, and creates nothing the informant can assert as of right.
The informant leaves with the copy that Section 173(2) gives him forthwith and free of cost. It proves that the information was recorded. Whether anybody is investigating it, and where, is not something the Sanhita undertakes to tell him.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.