A certified copy of a sale deed goes into evidence at trial. Nobody objects. Years later, at the appellate stage, the losing party suddenly argues the certified copy was never a valid mode of proof in the first place. The Supreme Court, in Dayamathi Bai v. K.M. Shaffi, AIR 2004 SC (Civil Appeal No. 2434 of 2000), shut that argument down: an objection to how a document was proved is procedural, and if nobody raises it when the document is marked as an exhibit, it cannot resurface on appeal. The case is a useful entry point into Section 76 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) — the provision that makes certified copies a valid mode of proof for public documents in the first place.
76. Proof of documents by production of certified copies. Such certified copies may be produced in proof of the contents of the public documents or parts of the public documents of which they purport to be copies.
Section 76 is deliberately short, and it is carried over from Section 77 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 without a single word changed — one of the small handful of provisions in this stretch of Chapter V that the BSA's drafters left entirely untouched. Its job is narrow but important: it converts the certified copy that Section 75 entitles a person to obtain into an actual mode of proof, usable in place of the original public document itself.
The word "such" at the start of the section is doing real work — it deliberately ties Section 76 back to the certified copies described in Section 75, not to certified copies in general. A copy loosely stamped "certified" by someone with no legal authority to certify it does not qualify; only a copy that meets Section 75's requirements — issued by the officer with custody, bearing the dated certificate of authenticity and, where applicable, the official seal — earns the right to stand in for the original under Section 76.
Why does this matter practically? Public documents — land records, court registers, government files — are often irreplaceable or administratively impossible to physically produce in every courtroom that needs to rely on them. Requiring the original of a decades-old revenue record to travel to every court hearing a dispute over that land would make ordinary litigation grind to a halt. Section 76 solves that by letting a certified copy carry the same evidentiary weight for proving contents, so the original can stay safely in the custodian's records where it belongs.
This is precisely the situation Dayamathi Bai addressed. The plaintiff had produced a certified copy of a sale deed rather than the original. Had the defendant objected at the time the document was tendered — arguing, for instance, that the copy did not meet Section 75's certification requirements — the trial court would have had to rule on that objection immediately, while the deficiency could still be cured. Because no objection was raised, the Supreme Court held it was too late to raise it for the first time before the appellate court. The lesson generalises well beyond that one case: a certified copy's admissibility under Section 76 is not self-executing forever — it is a mode of proof that must be tested, if at all, at the moment it is offered.
Section 76 also marks a boundary worth noting for private documents. Nothing in this section — or in Section 74's definition of private documents — extends the certified-copy shortcut to private instruments such as ordinary agreements, wills, or personal letters. Those remain governed by the general rules on proof of documents and, where the original is unavailable, the separate secondary-evidence provisions elsewhere in the Act, not by Section 76's certified-copy route, which is reserved strictly for public documents.
Consider a land-title dispute spanning three separate proceedings — a revenue mutation case, a civil suit for declaration of title, and a later criminal complaint alleging forgery of the same sale deed. Under Section 76, the same certified copy of the registered document, obtained once from the Sub-Registrar's office under Section 75, can be produced in each of those three proceedings to prove the deed's contents, without the original ever leaving the registration office's custody. This is the practical payoff of treating certified copies as an independent mode of proof rather than a mere convenience: the underlying public record stays intact and available to everyone who might later need it, while litigants in unrelated proceedings are not left competing for access to a single physical original.
It is also worth being precise about what "proof of contents" means here. Section 76 lets the certified copy substitute for the original text of the document — what it says. It says nothing about whether the transaction the document records was itself valid, voluntary, or free of fraud. A certified copy of a sale deed proves, under Section 76, that the deed contains the words it purports to contain; whether that sale deed was procured by fraud, or whether the seller had valid title to convey in the first place, remains a separate question to be proved on its own evidence, entirely untouched by this section.
Key Takeaways
- Unchanged from 1872: Section 76 carries forward Section 77 IEA verbatim — one of the few provisions in this stretch of Chapter V with no drafting change at all.
- Tied to Section 75, not standalone: "such certified copies" means only copies meeting Section 75's own certification requirements qualify.
- Proves contents, not automatic genuineness: that separate presumption comes from Section 78, which must be read alongside this section.
- Objections must be timely: per Dayamathi Bai v. K.M. Shaffi, a challenge to the mode of proof must be raised when the document is exhibited, not saved for appeal.
- Public documents only: private documents cannot be proved this way, regardless of how the copy is labelled.
Section 76 shows how a single sentence, unchanged across 151 years and two Acts, can still carry substantial litigation consequences — not because the rule itself is complicated, but because parties routinely forget that the right to object to a mode of proof has a shelf life. Once a certified copy goes into the record unopposed, Section 76 has already done its work, and the time to question it has usually passed.