Section 33 is the Sanhita's de minimis rule: nothing is an offence merely because it causes, is intended to cause, or is known to be likely to cause harm, if that harm is so slight that no person of ordinary sense and even temper would complain of it. It is the last of the chapter's general exceptions before the private-defence group that begins at Section 34.
Verified against the National Crime Records Bureau's official BNS–IPC concordance (Sankalan Portal) and cross-checked directly against the bare text of both Acts. Section 33 is marked Exact correspondence:
| BNS 33 | Covers | IPC, 1860 equivalent | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 33 | Act causing slight harm | S.95 (identical, word-for-word) | Exact |
Comparing the bare text directly, BNS Section 33 reproduces old IPC Section 95 word-for-word, with no change whatsoever — not even a punctuation difference.
Nothing is an offence by reason that it causes, or that it is intended to cause, or that it is known to be likely to cause, any harm, if that harm is so slight that no person of ordinary sense and temper would complain of such harm.
Source: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act No. 45 of 2023), as published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary.
This section reflects the old legal maxim de minimis non curat lex — the law does not concern itself with trifles. Unlike Sections 14 through 32, which excuse acts based on the actor's state of mind, capacity, consent, or compulsion, Section 33 excuses an act based purely on how slight the resulting harm is. The standard is objective: would a person of ordinary sense and even temper — not someone unusually thin-skinned, quarrelsome, or oversensitive — complain of the harm caused? If not, no offence arises, regardless of whether the harm was accidental, intended, or merely foreseen as likely. This exception typically comes up for the smallest frictions of everyday life — a light jostle in a crowd, a trivial and fleeting inconvenience, a minor and momentary annoyance — that would otherwise, read literally, fall within the wording of some offence but plainly do not deserve the law's attention. Because the standard turns on the ordinary person's threshold rather than the particular victim's own reaction, a person who takes unusually strong offence at genuinely trivial conduct cannot convert that conduct into a criminal offence merely by complaining loudly about it.
During a heated spat between neighbours, the respondent threw a file of papers at the appellant's husband; it missed him but grazed the appellant's elbow, causing a scratch. The Supreme Court held this was genuinely trivial and fell within the "slight harm" exception, and in doing so laid down the governing test: whether harm is "so slight" that an ordinarily sensible, even-tempered person would not complain of it is not measured by the physical injury alone, but by the nature of the injury, the relationship and position of the parties, and the intention or knowledge behind the act, assessed together. This is the leading illustration of the exception operating as intended — a minor, unplanned physical contact arising from an ordinary quarrel.
Currency check: decided 1966, interpreting the identically-worded predecessor provision (IPC Section 95); its multi-factor test remains the settled starting point and was expressly followed by the Court itself in Rupan Deol Bajaj (below).
A senior IAS officer was slapped on the posterior by a Director General of Police at a dinner party, in front of other guests. The High Court had quashed the resulting criminal case partly by treating the act as "trivial" under the slight-harm exception. Applying the very test it had laid down in Veeda Menezes, the Supreme Court held that this exception could not rescue the accused here: the physical contact may have been momentary, but an act intended to outrage a woman's modesty, done deliberately before an audience, is not the kind of harm an ordinarily sensible person is expected to shrug off. Read together, the two cases mark the boundary of Section 33: Veeda Menezes shows a genuinely trivial, unplanned contact that the exception protects, while Rupan Deol Bajaj shows that a deliberate, dignity-violating act is not rendered trivial merely because the physical contact itself was brief or minor.
Currency check: decided 1995, applying and reaffirming Veeda Menezes rather than departing from it; no overruling found in this review.
No. The section applies regardless of whether the harm was caused, intended, or merely known to be likely — the only question is whether the harm itself was slight enough that an ordinary person would not complain of it.
No. The test is objective — whether a person of ordinary sense and temper would complain — not whether the particular person affected did, in fact, feel aggrieved.
No. It applies only where the harm is so slight that no ordinary person would complain of it; anything beyond that threshold falls outside this exception entirely.