Imperative to codify intentional civil wrongs

India has undertaken a historic overhaul of its criminal justice architecture. The replacement of colonial-era penal statutes with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), 2023 reflects a decisive step toward an indigenous, modern, and modernised statutory framework. Yet, a stark institutional asymmetry persists. While criminal wrongs have been comprehensively codified, intentional civil wrongs remain uncodified, leaving victims dependent on scattered statutes and centuries-old English common-law precedents.

This critical gap must be urgently recognised and addressed by the Law Commission, the Union Government, the judiciary and legal jurists. To ensure a truly citizen-centred legal system in the digital era, India requires a dedicated code of intentional civil wrongs that defines liabilities, remedies, and damages, while providing speedy, technology-driven justice.

In jurisprudence, civil law means the positive law of the land governing private rights, duties, liabilities, and remedies, distinct from criminal, military, canon, natural, or purely Roman law. This distinction matters deeply for codifying intentional civil wrongs, because civil liability must fit within a broader civil framework.

While the BNS defines public criminal wrongs, private remedies for deliberate harms—such as compensation, injunctions, and civil restoration—lack a unified statutory spine. Under Indian constitutional jurisprudence, “law” includes ordinances, orders, byelaws, rules, regulations, notifications, customs, and usages having legal force. Yet, when a citizen’s dignity, liberty, reputation, or property is intentionally violated, the civil remedy remains fragmented across scattered statutes or dependent on judge-made principles.

The necessity of statutory codification has deep historical roots. Jurists such as Sir Henry Maine and Sir Frederick Pollock emphasised the need for codifying civil wrongs in India way back in the late 19th century, culminating in Pollock’s draft Code of Civil Wrongs in 1886. However, the need to codify intentional torts to protect the legal rights of Indian citizens arose decades prior to 1895.

Relying on foreign common-law precedents in 21st-century India creates legal uncertainty, inflates litigation costs, and undermines accessibility. Codification requires bridging this conceptual gap to build an indigenous rule of law.

A tort—derived from the Latin tortus, meaning wrong—is a civil wrong causing harm for which the law grants compensation or equitable relief. Examples of deliberate civil wrongs include assault, battery, false imprisonment, fraud, defamation, conversion, intentional emotional distress, and trespass.

While some of these deliberate acts also attract criminal liability, civil law focuses on victim compensation, injunctions, and restoration. Reliance on common law and scattered statutes creates confusion and unpredictability.

A Code of Intentional Civil Wrongs should strategically classify these wrongs into clear categories including personal torts like assault, battery, false imprisonment, fraud, and defamation. These protect personal liberty, physical integrity, trust, and reputation. And property and relational torts like conversion, trespass, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. These protect property rights, quiet enjoyment, and mental peace.

Since 1886, legal scholars have urged the codification of civil wrongs, yet India still lacks a tort code, causing misuse, uncertainty, and delay. A dedicated code must restore victims through fair compensation, deter deliberate wrongdoing, uphold fundamental civil rights, and allow nominal damages when legal rights are violated even without tangible monetary loss.

Furthermore, a modern code must integrate digital procedural justice to be truly effective in the digital era. It should incorporate digital case management like mandatory e-filing, virtual hearings, and online mediation to eliminate backlogs and affordability like simplified procedures and low court fees to ensure access to justice is not limited by wealth. Specialised forum support like special courts and online dispute resolution mechanisms for rapid civil adjudication is also needed.

Every citizen in a modern democracy values liberty, dignity, reputation, property, and peace. When these interests are deliberately violated, the law must provide predictable, accessible, and statutory remedies. India has created comprehensive modern criminal codes, but leaving civil tort remedies scattered and dependent on foreign precedents leaves a glaring hole in the legal system. A code of intentional civil wrongs is urgently needed to clarify legal principles, unify civil remedies, protect individual rights, and strengthen India’s citizen-centred, indigenous rule of law in the digital age.

(The writer is the District and Sessions Judge, Eluru)