Comparative Study of Provisions of Income Tax Act 2025 & Income Tax Act 1961

India's direct tax framework has undergone its most consequential structural transformation since independence. The Income-Tax Act 2025 is not an amendment to the Income-Tax Act 1961—it is a complete legislative replacement. It rebuilds the statute from the ground up: sections have been renumbered across an entirely new numerical range stretching past 530 (against 298 in the 1961 Act), sub-clauses within provisions have been reordered, provisos have been surgically trimmed, voluminous narrative text has been converted into structured tables, over a hundred Section 10 exemptions have been redistributed across multiple categorised Schedules, and a new unified concept of 'tax year' has replaced the decades-old Previous Year/Assessment Year framework across every procedural provision in the statute.

This is not a change that can be absorbed incrementally. It requires a complete, structured, side-by-side mapping of both statutes—at every level of the legislative text.

Comparative Study of Provisions of Income-Tax Act 2025 & Income-Tax Act 1961 is precisely that. Now in its 2^nd Edition, updated to incorporate all amendments made by the Finance Act, 2026 to both statutes, this reference places the complete operative text of the 1961 Act and the 2025 Act in direct two-column alignment—section by section, sub-section by sub-section, clause by clause, sub-clause by sub-clause, proviso by proviso, and Explanation by Explanation—with typographically coded change mark-up that makes every deletion, modification, simplification, and new insertion instantly visible. It is the single most comprehensive primary-text comparative reference available for the 1961 → 2025 transition.

A companion volume, the Comparative Study of Income-Tax Rules 2026 & Income-Tax Rules 1962, extends this framework to the subordinate legislation—together, the two volumes cover the complete regulatory framework governing Indian direct taxation across both regimes.

This book is intended for the following audience:

• Tax Professionals, Chartered Accountants & Senior Departmental Officers — This book operates as a systematic migration map, showing not only which section of the 2025 Act corresponds to a familiar 1961 Act provision, but also exactly what changed within it, what was trimmed, what was reordered, and what was restructured. Institutional knowledge built over decades does not go to waste; it gets precisely translated
• Newer Professionals, CA/Law Students & Compliance Teams — This book provides the ability to understand the 2025 Act not in isolation, but in the legislative context from which it emerged, with the historical text of the 1961 Act serving as the baseline against which every design choice in the new statute becomes legible
• Litigators and Appellate Practitioners — This book will address the disputes arising from assessments governed by the 1961 Act, which will continue to be adjudicated alongside matters under the 2025 Act, often involving the same set of facts spanning both regimes. This requires precise knowledge of how provisions align, where language diverges, and where new sub-clauses lacking 1961 Act counterparts introduce new statutory areas
• Researchers & Policy Analysts — This book provides a granular ledger of six decades of statutory evolution compressed into a single comparative framework