Act 2025Sections 1–3

Chapter I of the Income-tax Act, 2025 — Preliminary

Three sections that do nothing except fix what the Act is called, where it runs and when it starts — and, in section 2, define almost every term the other 534 sections use.

What this chapter does

Chapter I is short and almost entirely definitional, which makes it the most-cited chapter in the Act without ever deciding a case on its own. The one drafting change worth knowing is section 3: the 2025 Act abandons the pair 'previous year' and 'assessment year' and works with a single 'tax year'. Every time limit, every carry-forward, every rate table in the rest of the Act is now expressed against that single year, so a period stated in the old Act does not always translate word for word.

What to watch

Section 2 is where an argument usually starts, not where it ends: a defined term controls only where the Act uses that term.
A time limit copied across from the 1961 Act may look unchanged and still fall on a different date, because the year it counts from has changed.

The sections in this chapter

3 sections, in the order the Act runs them. 3 have a page of their own.

What this page does not tell you. This page gives the shape of the chapter and the Act's own heading for every section in it. It does not reproduce the text of any section, and a heading is not the provision. Where a section is marked read in full, that page carries the working; everywhere else, read the section itself before relying on anything here.