Types Of Proof Under Indian Evidence Act, 1872

Brijesh Kumar Chaudhary, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru

Nithin Vijayan, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru

Introduction

The law of evidence is a blend of practical and academic issues. It is practical in the sense that it is applied by the courts to decide whether evidence presented is admissible or not. Once the evidence is admitted, the practical situations such how it is to be used, what the requirements for a fact to be considered evidence are and how to deal with the witness etc., are dealt by law of evidence. Therefore, without the academic knowledge of it, one cannot apply it. So here is one academic issue related with the law of evidence i.e., whether ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ are same or they have different affiliations. Through this paper, the researchers are going to deal with this problem within the law of evidence.

In this paper, the researchers are going to argue that “the Indian Evidence Act does not contain types of proof but types of evidence like oral, documentary, electronic because proof is the process of establishment of existence or non-existence of a fact while evidence is the means through which the existence or non-existence of such fact is proved”.

There has been a whole lot of ambiguous use and reading of terms “proof” and “evidence” in field of law. Both the terms are used interchangeably by individuals although they have different meanings altogether. If we think of them in a common sensical way without giving them affiliation to any epistemological field, they seem to be the same and be read as such. But, applying a common sensical understanding in reading of a statute may not be sufficient. For a better understanding of the scheme of the statute and better outcomes, we need to examine at how the legal scholarship interprets both the terms.