Question

Under what section of the Evidence Act can information discovered via narco-analysis (if voluntary) be admitted?

Hint:

Remember: Narco → Statement inadmissible; Discovery admissible under **Section 27** only if test was voluntary.

Answer 1

A concrete example makes this rule easier to hold onto. Suppose an accused, during a voluntary narco-analysis test, says the murder weapon is buried behind a shed. Investigators go there and recover a knife.

The sentence about the weapon's location was spoken while the accused's conscious control was suppressed by the drug, so it cannot be treated as a genuine, willed statement. That part stays out of evidence entirely, and it would stay out even if the test itself was fully voluntary.

What changes things is the knife. Once it is physically recovered and verified, matched to the crime, tested for prints or blood, its existence and location no longer depend on trusting the drugged statement. It is an independently confirmed fact, and Section 27 of the Evidence Act allows exactly this kind of derivative discovery to be proved even though the underlying disclosure would otherwise be barred as a confession.

Selvi v. State of Karnataka (2010) draws the line at precisely this point: the words spoken under narco-analysis are never admissible as testimony, but a fact that investigators independently discover and verify as a result of those words can be led in evidence, so long as the test was voluntary and conducted under proper safeguards.

So the admissible route is Section 27, and it admits the discovered fact, never the statement that pointed to it.

Answer 2

This question can be answered by working through it as a short chain of if-then reasoning rather than starting from the case law.

Premise one.
A confession made by an accused to police, or while in police custody, is generally inadmissible under Sections 25 and 26 of the Evidence Act, unless a specific exception applies.

Premise two.
Section 27 is that exception, and it applies specifically where a piece of information leads to the discovery of a fact, allowing only the part of the statement distinctly connected to that discovered fact to be proved.

Premise three.
A statement made during narco-analysis is not made with conscious volition, since the drug is designed to suppress the speaker's normal control over what they reveal. Selvi v. State of Karnataka (2010) treats such statements as unreliable and testimonially compelled in substance, so they cannot be admitted as direct evidence of guilt.

Conclusion by elimination.
The statement itself is excluded by premise three. It cannot be admitted as an ordinary confession because it fails the voluntariness that Sections 24 to 26 assume. But if that statement leads police to something they then independently discover and verify, premise two supplies the route: the discovered fact, not the statement, becomes provable.

Put together, the only Evidence Act provision that lets any part of a voluntary narco-analysis disclosure reach the courtroom is the discovery exception.

\[ \boxed{\text{Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act.}} \]