That is the standard estate. Indian inheritance — for most families, including most diaspora families — runs on default settings. No will. No plan. No conversation. The default is workable in a country where everybody lives within driving distance of the relevant tehsildar. For an OCI cardholder thirteen time zones away, it is the slow tax: months of paperwork, frozen bank accounts, sibling disputes, property that quietly mutates into nobody's.

This piece is about how to do better than the default. It is the fourth in our OCI's Guide to India series, and it is the one where preparing in advance costs almost nothing and not preparing costs years.

Which law governs your father's estate

Indian inheritance is not one law. It is, depending on the religion of the deceased at the moment of death, one of three:

• The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 — for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists.
• Muslim personal law — for Muslims, governed by Sharia and codified only in parts (the Shariat Application Act, 1937 sets the scope).
• The Indian Succession Act, 1925 — for Christians, Parsis, and Jews, and as the general statutory framework for wills across all communities.

Two things follow from this. First, the religion of the deceased at the moment of death is determinative — conversions during the testator's life can change which law applies, and family lawyers see this exact dispute often. Second, none of these laws treat all heirs equally. Each has its own logic of who gets what, in what order, and in what share.

For the typical OCI family — Hindu, with a parent who has died intestate (without a will) — the relevant law is the Hindu Succession Act. The relevant section is Section 8. The relevant class of heirs is "Class I," which includes the widow, the sons, the daughters, and the mother of the deceased, each taking equal shares. Class II heirs only come into play if there are no Class I heirs. That is, in concrete terms, what intestate succession looks like for most diaspora estates.

It is also where most family disputes start.

The Vineeta Sharma question

In August 2020, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court delivered judgment in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma. The court held that daughters are coparceners by birth in their father's Hindu Undivided Family property, with the same rights as sons — and crucially, that this is true regardless of whether the father was alive on 9 September 2005, the date the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act took effect.

This was the third Supreme Court iteration of the same question. The 2015 ruling in Prakash v. Phulavati had said daughters' coparcenary rights required a living father in 2005. The 2018 ruling in Danamma v. Amar contradicted that. Vineeta Sharma settled it: daughters have equal rights, full stop, irrespective of when the father died.

In practice, what this means for the Toronto-born OCI daughter whose grandfather owned ancestral property in Ludhiana is that her claim to a share is the same as her brother's. In further practice, it means that the ancestral-property arrangements many North Indian families have been operating on for thirty years — under which the daughters were given a wedding and the sons got the land — are no longer the legal default. They are still the social default in many families. The gap between the two is where the litigation lives.

For an OCI daughter, the Vineeta Sharma point is important to know and, often, difficult to enforce. Bringing a partition suit against your own brother in an Indian district court while you live in Vancouver is not a casual undertaking. But it is a real legal right, and family lawyers report that diaspora daughters increasingly assert it — particularly when one sibling has been managing the property and another has not seen accounts.

Why most Indian fathers do not write wills

A will solves most of this. It also costs almost nothing — a clear, witnessed document specifying who gets what, written in plain language, executed in the presence of two adult witnesses, ideally with one of them a doctor or a lawyer who can later attest to the testator's mental capacity. The Indian Succession Act allows even a handwritten ("holograph") will, though the cleaner route is a typed one signed in the presence of witnesses.

And yet most Indian fathers do not write wills. There are several reasons.

The first is cultural. Indian family inheritance, historically, has run on a default that everybody knew: the eldest son got the most, the daughters got jewellery and a wedding, the youngest son got the parental house, the widow was looked after by the eldest son. The will is a Western contrivance for a society in which the default was not assumed.

The second is superstition. A non-trivial number of Indian fathers will not write a will because they believe doing so accelerates their own death. Lawyers who do estate work for the diaspora hear this constantly.

The third is the cost of the family conversation. To write a will, the testator has to decide what the daughters get, what the sons get, what the second wife gets, what the favourite nephew gets, what the disabled brother is owed, what the long-term mistress is owed. That conversation is hard. Avoidance is easier.

The OCI son or daughter's job — and it is hard for many cultural and personal reasons — is to make the case to the parent that not writing a will is itself a decision, and that the decision they are making is to leave their children to fight in a district court. Often that case can only be made by a sibling who still lives in India, who has standing the OCI does not. Sometimes it can only be made by a respected family lawyer or a trusted cousin. The OCI's contribution is often to fund the lawyer.

The 2025 amendment that changed probate

Until very recently, a will made by a Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, or Parsi within the original civil jurisdiction of the Bombay, Calcutta, or Madras High Courts — or covering immovable property within those cities — had to be probated before it had legal effect. Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act required it. This was a colonial leftover; it did not apply to Muslims or Christians.

In 2025, Parliament passed the Repealing and Amending Bill, 2025, which omits Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act in its entirety. The amendment removes the mandatory probate requirement for these religious groups across all three cities.

At the time of writing this piece, the bill has passed both houses of Parliament and is awaiting Presidential assent and notification. OCI families with wills covering Mumbai, Chennai, or Kolkata property should check whether the notification has come through before relying on the new position. Trilegal's analysis is a useful reference.

What this change does not do is make probate useless. Even where it is not legally required, getting probate — a court's judicial confirmation that the will is valid — is often the smart move. Banks and sub-registrars will often release funds, transfer property, or process mutations far more readily with a probated will than with an un-probated one. An un-probated will is also more vulnerable to a challenge from an aggrieved sibling years later. Probate, in practice, is a form of insurance the family pays for once instead of fighting for many times.

The two-jurisdiction problem

This is where things get specifically hard for the OCI.

The general principle, in the conflict of laws, is that inheritance of immovable property is governed by the law of the place where the property is located ("lex situs"). Inheritance of movable property is governed by the law of the deceased's domicile at death. So if your father owned a flat in Powai and bank accounts in Toronto and you live in London, his Indian flat is governed by Indian inheritance law, his Canadian accounts by Canadian inheritance law, and his domicile question is its own conversation. Three regimes, one estate.

A single will trying to cover all of this will often work, but it can produce awkward outcomes — particularly if the host-country will is drafted by a Canadian solicitor who has never thought about Indian property and uses standard Canadian "all my assets" boilerplate. The clean answer, for most diaspora estates with assets on both sides, is two wills: one for Indian assets, drafted by an Indian lawyer in accordance with the Indian Succession Act and the relevant personal law; one for non-Indian assets, drafted by a host-country lawyer. Each will should expressly refer to the other and confirm that it does not revoke the other. Otherwise the later will can inadvertently cancel the earlier one, and the estate dies the death of two executors fighting over jurisdiction.

The two-will approach is standard in diaspora estate planning. It is not what most diaspora families do.

What happens at the bank

The practical experience of inheriting in India — even from a parent who left a clean will — is a procession of counters. The bank counter. The locker counter. The sub-registrar's office. The tehsildar's office, for mutation of agricultural land. The society office, for the housing-society membership transfer. The Aadhaar centre, for the deceased's records. The Income Tax Department, if there are tax dues.

The pattern is the same at every counter. The clerk wants the original death certificate, the original of the will (or letters of administration), the legal heir certificate, the indemnity bond, the photos of the heirs with witnesses, and at least one document the heir did not know existed. The clerk wants it on the right form. The clerk wants the right rupee stamp on the indemnity bond. The clerk does not care that you are flying back to Sydney in three days.

For the OCI, the practical answer is two things. First, a Power of Attorney to a trusted family member or a paid professional in India, authorising them to do the running. Second, getting the documentary core in order before you leave India: certified copies of the death certificate (usually 10 to 15 of them), the legal heir certificate from the local tehsildar or court, and the original will or probated will. Without these, even simple things — closing a fixed deposit, releasing a locker — can take six months by remote correspondence.

The repatriation pipeline

The repatriation of inherited assets out of India is governed by the same framework that applies to property sale proceeds, covered in Part 1 of this series. The headline rules:

• Inherited proceeds can be repatriated through the OCI heir's NRO account, up to US$1 million per financial year.
• The transfer requires Form 15CA (the heir's self-declaration of taxes paid) and Form 15CB (a chartered accountant's certificate).
• Inheritance itself is not taxable in India — there is no inheritance tax, no estate duty, no gift tax on inherited assets. India abolished estate duty in 1985.
• The income generated by inherited assets — rent from inherited property, interest from inherited deposits, capital gains on sale — is taxable, on the standard NRI rules covered in Part 3 of this series.

In other words: India does not tax the inheritance itself. It taxes what the inheritance earns once you own it. The cleanest repatriation strategy for most OCI estates is to consolidate inherited assets into the heir's NRO account, sell what should be sold, and repatriate within the annual cap. For larger estates, the repatriation runs over multiple financial years.

The bottom line

Indian estate planning is the place where the gap between preparing in advance and dealing after the fact is widest. A will costs nothing to write and saves years. A power of attorney costs little and saves trips. A frank conversation with siblings about who is owed what costs the most emotionally and saves the most legally.

Most diaspora families do not have these conversations until the funeral. By then the deceased's voice is no longer in the room, and what is left is paperwork, and grief, and a brother-in-law who has theories about what your father would have wanted.

The Indian estate is not unmanageable. It is fully manageable. It just requires acting before there is anything to manage. That is the part the diaspora keeps learning the wrong way.

---

Annexure — Sources

Primary law and regulations

1. Hindu Succession Act, 1956, as amended by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 — the principal statute governing intestate succession for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. Bare act.
2. Indian Succession Act, 1925 — the statutory framework for wills across all communities, and the personal law for Christians, Parsis, and Jews. Bare act.
3. Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 — applies Sharia rules to inheritance disputes involving Muslims. Bare act.
4. Repealing and Amending Bill, 2025 — omits Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, removing the mandatory probate requirement for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis in the original civil jurisdictions of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Passed by both houses of Parliament; awaiting Presidential assent at the time of writing. Practitioner summary at Trilegal and Bar and Bench.
5. Foreign Exchange Management (Non-debt Instruments) Rules, 2019 — operative subordinate legislation under FEMA governing OCI repatriation of inheritance proceeds.
6. Reserve Bank of India — Master Direction: Acquisition and Transfer of Immovable Property under FEMA, governing inheritance routes for NRIs and OCIs. RBI portal.

Case law

1. Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma & Ors., (2020) 9 SCC 1, Supreme Court of India, 11 August 2020. Three-judge bench. Holds that daughters are coparceners by birth in Hindu Undivided Family property, irrespective of whether the father was alive on 9 September 2005. Full judgment on Indian Kanoon.
2. Prakash v. Phulavati, (2016) 2 SCC 36 — the earlier two-judge ruling that Vineeta Sharma overruled. Historically important for contextualising the development of the coparcenary-rights jurisprudence.
3. Danamma @ Suman Surpur v. Amar, (2018) 3 SCC 343 — the intermediate two-judge ruling that conflicted with Prakash v. Phulavati and set up the larger-bench resolution in Vineeta Sharma.

Practitioner guidance

1. "Removal of the mandatory probate requirement under the Indian Succession Act" — Trilegal, March 2025.
2. "Probate no longer must to prove validity of wills" — The Print, March 2025.
3. "Omission of Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925" — Bar and Bench, 2025.
4. "Inheritance Tax Rules and Property Transfer in India" — N.D. Savla & Associates practitioner guide.
5. Ministry of External Affairs — Acquisition and Transfer of Immovable Property in India, official booklet. PDF.

Related Diaspora Dreams reporting

1. The OCI's Guide to India, Part 1 — Property rights.
2. The OCI's Guide to India, Part 2 — Premier Indian institutes.
3. The OCI's Guide to India, Part 3 — Tax.

---

Editorial note: This article is journalism, not estate-planning advice. Indian inheritance turns on facts specific to the family — the deceased's religion, marital status, domicile, the location and nature of each asset, the existence and form of any will, and the personal law of any potential challenger. Readers planning a diaspora estate should engage a chartered accountant and an Indian succession lawyer in the relevant state, alongside their host-country estate-planning solicitor, before acting on any of the framework set out above.