(1) Every person having by law or consent of parties authority to receive evidence, and every person in charge of a public office, except an officer of police, before whom any instrument, chargeable, in his opinion, with duty, is produced or comes in the performance of his functions, shall, if it appears to him that such instrument is not duly stamped, impound the same.
(2) For that purpose every such person shall examine every instrument so produced or coming before him in order to ascertain whether it is stamped with a stamp of the value and description required by the law in force in India when such instrument was executed or first executed.
Legal Commentary & Landmark Judgments: Section 33
Section 33 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 imposes a mandatory statutory duty upon every court and public officer to examine and impound any instrument produced before them that appears to be not duly stamped.
Section 33 imposes a non-delegable duty upon all public officers and courts to examine and impound any document that is insufficiently stamped.
The impounding duty is non-discretionary. The authority cannot ignore the deficiency, return the document to the party, or permit withdrawal of the document to escape fiscal consequences. The document must be impounded the moment it is tendered in evidence or produced for judicial inspection.
Section 33 is the statutory trigger for revenue enforcement in civil courts. Whenever an unregistered agreement to sell, family settlement, or commercial contract is filed with the plaint or tendered in the witness box, the judge must immediately examine whether proper stamp duty has been paid, and if deficient, pass a formal impounding order.