Presumption as to documents produced as record of evidence

Reference: The Indian Evidence Act
Section 80

Whenever any document i.e. produced before any Court, purporting to be a record or memorandum of the evidence, or of any part of the evidence, given by a witness in a judicial proceeding or before any officer authorised by law to take such evidence or to be a statement or confession by any prisoner or accused person, taken in accordance with law, and purporting to be signed by any Judge or Magistrate or by any such officer as aforesaid, the Court shall presume that the document is genuine; that any statement as to the circumstances under which it was taken, purporting to be made by the person signing it, and that such evidence, statement or confession was duly taken.

This Section gives legal sanction to the maxim ‘Omnia praesumuntur rite esse acta’ which means that all acts are presumed to be rightly done. (Queen Empress v. Vivan, 1886)
The presumption in Section 80 is wider than that in Section 79 – Section 79 presumes that the documents, etc. mentioned in it are genuine while Section 80 presumes that the documents, etc. mentioned in it are not only genuine but also that they have been properly taken in the circumstances mentioned in them. The presumption of genuineness is, however, not a guarantee of the truth: it is rebuttable. It is under this Section that statements which are recorded under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure are presumed to be genuine. (Ramchit Rajbhar v. State of West Bengal, 1992)