Businesses run on routine. A letter posted according to office practice, a bill despatched on the day it was drawn, an entry made in the ordinary way at the ordinary time — these happen not by decision but by the settled course of the enterprise. When a case turns on whether a particular such act was done, the existence of the course of business itself becomes evidence that it probably was. Section 14 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) codifies that intuition.
14. Existence of course of business when relevant. When there is a question whether a particular act was done, the existence of any course of business, according to which it naturally would have been done, is a relevant fact.
Illustrations.
(a) The question is, whether a particular letter was dispatched. The facts that it was the ordinary course of business for all letters put in a certain place to be carried to the post, and that particular letter was put in that place are relevant.
(b) The question is, whether a particular letter reached A. The facts that it was posted in due course, and was not returned through the Return Letter Office, are relevant.
Section 14 reproduces Section 16 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (IEA) without any change in wording. The BPRD BSA-to-IEA correspondence table records "No change." Its function within Chapter II is to admit a specific class of contextual proof — evidence of routine — as bearing on whether a particular act was done.
What the section actually admits
The section is drafted as a rule of relevance. Where a party has to prove that a particular act was done — a letter dispatched, a payment made, a form filed, a record generated — the party may lead evidence of the "course of business, according to which it naturally would have been done." That course-of-business evidence does not directly prove the specific act. It proves the general practice, from which an inference to the particular act can be drawn.
The two illustrations, worked
Neither illustration asserts the particular fact directly. Illustration (a) uses office routine to bridge from "the letter was in the outgoing tray" to "the letter was despatched." Illustration (b) uses the postal system's normal operation, and the absence of a returned-mail record, to bridge from "posted" to "received". In each, the general course of business fills a gap the direct evidence cannot.
The two elements a court looks for
| Element | What must be proved |
|---|---|
| Course of business exists | A settled, habitual practice — not an ad hoc arrangement, and not merely something that has happened a handful of times |
| The act would naturally have been done under that practice | The specific act in question falls within the routine — not an exception, not a special case handled outside the ordinary process |
Where the section operates in modern practice
The section's usefulness has, if anything, grown with the digitisation of commercial and administrative processes. Modern examples include the automatic dispatch of an email once composed and placed in an outbox; the automatic generation of an invoice by an accounting system once a delivery is recorded; the routine forwarding of a case-file within an office based on a workflow; the daily backup of records to a cloud store. In each, the course of business is a well-defined, often technically enforced routine, and Section 14 supplies the mechanism to move from "the routine exists" to "the particular act would have happened under it."
In older paper-based settings — where the section is still regularly used — it remains the mechanism for proving despatch, receipt, filing, entry, and posting of documents through the routines of an office, a court registry, a bank branch, or a postal system. In each of these settings, no employee can testify that they personally performed the specific act; the case rests on establishing that the routine existed and that the act in question would naturally have been done under it.
How Section 14 interacts with the record-based provisions
Section 14 works alongside the records-based provisions later in Chapter II. Section 28 admits entries in books of account regularly kept in the course of business; Section 29 admits entries in public and official records made by public servants in the discharge of duty. Where a party can establish both a course of business and an entry made under it, the two provisions strengthen each other — the entry falls within a routine the court has already accepted as regular, and the routine gives the entry additional evidentiary weight.
The inferential nature of the proof
What Section 14 admits is inferential rather than direct evidence. The court is asked to accept, from the fact that a routine exists and that the specific act falls within it, that the specific act was probably done. This is a permissible-inference construction, not a mandatory one. The tendering party still has to lead evidence of the routine, its regularity, and its actual applicability to the case at hand. The court then decides how strong the inference is against the other evidence in the case.
Key Takeaways
- Course of business is relevant: where the question is whether a particular act was done, the existence of a course of business under which it naturally would have been done is relevant.
- Two elements: a settled routine, and the specific act falling within that routine.
- Inferential, not conclusive: the section admits the routine as evidence bearing on the question; the opposing party may still displace the inference.
- Modern relevance: increasingly important with digitised workflows and automated record-keeping.
- Unchanged from Section 16 IEA: the recodification preserved the provision verbatim.
Conclusion
Section 14 recognises a class of proof that would otherwise sit awkwardly in the general relevancy framework. Individual acts done within a routine are often impossible to prove directly — no one remembers the particular letter, the particular payment, the particular entry — but the routine itself can be proved reliably. By making the routine relevant on the question whether the particular act was done, Section 14 lets courts and litigants move confidently from "this is how things are always done" to "this is probably how it was done here", while leaving room for the opposing party to displace that inference where the facts of the case call for it.