Section 492 — Certain offences to be non-cognizable. Successor to s.279A of the 1961 Act.
Section 492 is in Chapter XXII — Offences and Prosecutions, which runs from section 473 to section 498.
It deems offences punishable under sections 476, 478, 479, 480, 482 and 484 to be non-cognizable within the meaning of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, notwithstanding anything in that Sanhita. It is a classification provision only: it names six sections and fixes their character for criminal procedure purposes, and says nothing about the ingredients or punishment of any of them.
Classifying these offences as non-cognizable removes them from the category in which the police may arrest without warrant or investigate without a magistrate's order, keeping their prosecution under the control of the court rather than of the police.
The practical consequence is procedural: for the six listed offences the police cannot register a case and arrest as they could for a cognizable offence, and the ordinary non-cognizable route under the Sanhita applies. Check the section number against the list — offences under this Chapter that are not among the six named are not made non-cognizable by this provision.
A person is prosecuted for an offence punishable under section 479. Because section 492 deems offences under sections 476, 478, 479, 480, 482 and 484 to be non-cognizable notwithstanding anything in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the police cannot deal with it as they would a cognizable offence — no arrest without warrant and no investigation without the magistrate's order — and the prosecution proceeds by the Sanhita's non-cognizable route, under the court's control. The list is closed: an offence under a section of the Chapter that is not one of those six is untouched, so the section number has to be checked against the list rather than assumed. Nothing here alters the ingredients of any of the six offences, their punishment or the question of bail — it fixes only their classification.
Only in criminal proceedings under the offences and prosecutions Chapter: it decides how a prosecution for one of the six listed offences may be set in motion under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. A taxpayer never meets it in a notice, return or assessment — what he meets is the prosecution under the substantive offence section itself.
an offence punishable under section 476, 478, 479, 480, 482 or 484 shall be deemed to be non-cognizable within the meaning of that Sanhita
See the full 1961 to 2025 concordance.