Introduction
Sections 111 and 110 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 are two ends of the same rope. Section 111 tells a court what to presume after seven years of silence. Section 110 tells a court what to presume when someone was known to be alive far more recently — and the presumption runs in exactly the opposite direction.
This article covers Section 110's text, how it works alongside Section 111 as a single, coherent scheme for presuming life or death, and why the burden it places on whoever claims a recently-living person is dead is a genuinely heavy one.
110. Burden of proving death of person known to have been alive within thirty years.
When the question is whether a man is alive or dead, and it is shown that he was alive within thirty years, the burden of proving that he is dead is on the person who affirms it.
Section 110 reproduces Section 107 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 without any change — confirmed against two independent bare-act sources.
| Section 110 (Known Alive Within 30 Years) | Section 111 (Unheard Of for 7 Years) | |
|---|---|---|
| Default presumption | Alive, until death is proved | Dead (as a bare fact), until continued life is proved |
| Who carries the burden | Whoever claims the person is dead | Whoever claims the person is still alive |
| Trigger | Shown alive within the last 30 years | Unheard-of for 7+ years by those who'd naturally know |
Why the Ordinary Default Is Life, Not Death
Section 110's presumption is really the law's baseline position, restated: absent some specific reason to think otherwise, a person recently known to be alive is presumed to remain so. This is not a trivial default — it means that anyone who wants a court to treat such a person as dead, for whatever purpose (inheritance, insurance, remarriage, ending a tenancy in that person's name), must affirmatively prove it. Mere silence, absence, or the passage of some years short of the seven Section 111 requires does not, by itself, shift that burden. The two provisions together form a single sliding scale: the more recently a person was known to be alive, the harder it is to have them treated as dead; only once seven full years of unexplained silence accumulate does the law's own default flip.
The Same Doctrinal Family as Section 111
The Supreme Court has treated Sections 107 and 108 IEA (now 110 and 111 BSA) as a connected pair rather than two unrelated rules — most notably in its repeated emphasis, including in LIC of India v. Anuradha, (2004) 10 SCC 131, that any presumption of death under this scheme is confined strictly to the fact of death itself, never to a specific date, time, or cause. That limiting principle applies with even more force under Section 110: since the starting presumption here already favours life, a claimant seeking to establish death within the thirty-year window cannot lean on any presumption at all — they must prove the death directly, with real evidence, from the very outset.
A Practical Illustration
A woman was seen and spoken to by family members eight months ago. If her estranged husband now claims, in a maintenance dispute, that she has since died so as to end his payment obligations, Section 110 places the burden squarely on him to prove that death — with actual evidence, such as a death certificate or credible witness testimony — not merely an assertion that he has since lost contact with her. Eight months of no contact falls nowhere near the seven-year threshold that would even begin to shift the burden the other way.
Key Takeaways
- Section 110 BSA carries forward Section 107 IEA verbatim, confirmed unchanged across independent sources.
- It restates the law's ordinary default: a person recently known to be alive is presumed to remain alive, and whoever claims otherwise must prove it.
- Sections 110 and 111 work as a connected pair: recent life resists a finding of death (Section 110), while prolonged, unexplained silence eventually shifts the presumption toward death (Section 111) — but only once seven full years have passed.
- LIC of India v. Anuradha, (2004) 10 SCC 131, confirms that even where a presumption applies at all, it never extends beyond the bare fact of death itself.
- Section 110 supplies no shortcut of its own — proving death of someone recently known to be alive requires ordinary, direct proof from the start.
Conclusion
Section 110 is a quiet but important safeguard: it keeps the law from treating anyone as dead simply because they have been briefly out of touch, reserving that presumption for the genuinely prolonged silence Section 111 demands. Chapter VII's descent through the burden-of-proof provisions continues next at Section 109.