Everybody calls it “the property case” — but there are three of them, and you have to know which one you are bringing

Three cases wearing one name

Sit in any district court corridor in Delhi and you will hear the same phrase from a dozen people: property ka case chal raha hai. Ask what is being claimed and the answers scatter. One man wants his quarter of a house. One wants his uncle physically out of a shop. One wants a gift deed his mother supposedly signed in her last year declared worthless.

Those are three different proceedings. They are decided on different questions, the court fee is computed differently, the limitation period is different, and the relief at the end is different. A family that spends four years getting a share declared and then discovers the house was sold in year one has not been unlucky. It has been asking for the wrong thing.

Many matters need two of them together, or all three, and they can be combined. The point is not that you must pick exactly one. It is that somebody has to decide, deliberately and early, what is being asked for — rather than filing a plaint that describes a grievance and hopes the court works out the rest.

The word “ancestral”, and why it is usually being used wrongly

No word causes more wasted litigation in Delhi families. It is used to mean “the house we all grew up in”, and that is not what it means in law.

If your father bought a flat with money he earned, that is his self-acquired property. His children have no right by birth in it. He may live in it, mortgage it, sell it, gift it to one child, gift it to a stranger, or leave it by will to whomever he wishes. That children grew up there, contributed to the household, or looked after him in old age changes nothing about his power to dispose of it, however unfair the result feels.

Coparcenary property — what people usually mean by ancestral — is a different thing, and there a right does exist by birth. Whether a particular Delhi house is one or the other is a question of how it came into the family and what happened to it since: bought, or inherited, or thrown into a common pool, and on what documents. It is answered from the title chain, and it is answered badly from family memory.

Before you spend money, spend an hour getting the documents. A title verification that tells you the property was self-acquired is the cheapest bad news you will ever buy.

Section 6 — a right by birth, and daughters have it

Where property is coparcenary, Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, as amended in 2005, governs. Its first sub-section provides that the daughter of a coparcener shall by birth become a coparcener in her own right in the same manner as the son, shall have the same rights in the coparcenary property as she would have had if she had been a son, and shall be subject to the same liabilities in respect of that property as a son.

Three things follow that families still resist twenty years on. The right is by birth, not by gift and not by the goodwill of brothers. It is the same right, not a smaller one. And it carries the same liabilities, which is the part nobody mentions when the subject comes up at a funeral.

Marriage does not end it. Living elsewhere does not end it. Having taken dowry or wedding expenses does not end it, whatever is said across the table. What can cut it down is Section 6(5): the section does not apply to a partition effected before 20 December 2004 — and the statute explains partition, for this purpose, as one made by a registered deed of partition or by a decree of a court.

Vineeta Sharma, and the argument it ended

For fifteen years after the amendment one question was fought everywhere: did a daughter get the right only if her father was alive on 9 September 2005, the date the amendment came into force? Different benches of the Supreme Court had said different things, and a great many families were told, wrongly, that a father who died in 2001 had closed the door.

Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) settled it. Because the right in coparcenary is by birth, it is not necessary that the father-coparcener should have been living on 9 September 2005. The Court overruled the contrary view in Prakash v. Phulavati and in Mangammal, and partly overruled Danamma to the extent of the conflict. Daughters born before 2005 take the right with effect from 9 September 2005, subject to the savings in the section for a disposition, alienation, partition or testamentary disposition already made before 20 December 2004.

If a sister in your family was told years ago that she had no claim because your father had already died, that advice may simply be out of date. It is worth checking rather than assuming, on either side of the table.

“It was divided orally, years ago”

Once Vineeta Sharma closed the date argument, a second one appeared in its place: that the family had already partitioned the property orally before 20 December 2004, so the daughter’s right never attached.

The Court dealt with that too. A plea of oral partition resting on oral evidence alone is to be rejected; the statutory mode of partition contemplated by the section is a registered deed of partition or a decree of a court. Courts may look at contemporaneous public documents in a truly exceptional case, but the ordinary version — three brothers and two neighbours remembering a division nobody wrote down — does not survive.

So the question to ask, politely and in writing, is short: please give me a copy of the registered partition deed, or the decree. A legal notice asking exactly that often produces more clarity in a fortnight than two years of family meetings, because it forces a claim to be either documented or abandoned.

When there is no will at all

Most Indian families have no will, so most of these disputes are about intestate succession.

For a Hindu male dying intestate, the property devolves first upon the heirs in Class I of the Schedule to the Hindu Succession Act. Where there is even one Class I heir, the later classes do not come into the picture at all. Who the Class I heirs are in your family, and what each takes, depends entirely on who survived him, so we deliberately print no fractions here — a percentage copied from a website and applied to the wrong family structure is how people arrive at a settlement meeting with a number nobody else accepts.

What you can usefully do yourself is assemble the facts the arithmetic runs on: the death certificate, proof of each relationship, the marriage and birth records, and a complete list of what he owned including the bank and insurance side. A legal heir certificate and, where movable assets or dues are involved, a succession certificate are the documents that turn that list into something institutions will act on.

A woman’s own property follows a different scheme

Families routinely apply the male scheme to a mother’s property and get the wrong answer.

Where a female Hindu dies intestate, Sections 15 and 16 of the Act govern, and the order is not the same. The scheme also contains a rule that treats property she inherited from her parents differently from property she inherited from her husband or father-in-law, so the source of the property can change who takes it. That is unusual in Indian succession law and it catches people out constantly.

There is also Section 14, which converts property possessed by a female Hindu, held by her as a limited owner, into property held as full owner. It is the provision that turned a great many old widow’s interests into absolute ownership, and it matters wherever the chain of title runs through a widow. It has conditions, including a sub-section for grants made on restricted terms, so it is not a slogan.

If the property in dispute ever stood in a woman’s name — your mother’s, your grandmother’s — say so in the first sentence of your first meeting. It changes the analysis more than anything else you might mention.

When there is a will

A will changes everything, which is precisely why it is the document most often attacked.

It has to have been executed the way the law requires: signed by the testator, with the intention of giving effect to the writing as his will, and attested by two or more witnesses each of whom saw him sign or received his personal acknowledgement. When the will is disputed, it has to be proved in the manner the law of evidence lays down for an attested document, which in practice means producing an attesting witness where one is available.

Beyond the formalities, courts look at whether there is anything suspicious about the circumstances — a shaky signature unlike every other signature, a will nobody heard of until after the funeral, one child excluded without explanation, the principal beneficiary having arranged the drafting and brought the witnesses. Suspicion is not a finding of forgery. What it does is put a burden on the person propounding the will to dispel it.

If you are on the other side of that — you hold a will and expect a fight — the strength of your position was mostly decided when it was made. Our will drafting and the guide to it set out what makes one hard to attack.

Probate in Delhi: what changed, and what was never true

Two corrections, and both matter.

First, probate was never mandatory in Delhi. The requirement in Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 applied to wills of certain communities made in the old presidency towns — Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. An enormous amount of Indian writing about “you must get probate” simply does not apply here, and Delhi families have spent money on the strength of it.

Second, that section has now been omitted altogether by the Repealing and Amending Act, 2025, which received the President’s assent on 20 December 2025. Probate remains available and is often worth obtaining voluntarily, because it is a judicial confirmation that the will is genuine and it makes life considerably easier with banks, registrars and buyers.

The mutation entry is not ownership. It never was

This single misunderstanding decides the emotional temperature of half the family disputes in this city. Somebody gets the property mutated into his name at the municipal office, sends a photograph of the record to the family group, and everybody concludes it is over.

It is not. The Supreme Court in Sawarni v. Inder Kaur (1996) put it in a sentence that is worth reading twice: mutation of a property in the revenue record does not create or extinguish title nor has it any presumptive value on title.

Mutation exists so that the authority knows whom to bill and whom to tax. Title comes from the documents and from succession. An entry obtained on an application nobody contested proves that an application was made and nobody contested it — nothing more.

The rule cuts both ways, and the second edge is the one people forget. If the property is mutated in your name, that is not your case either. Do not build one on it, and do not be surprised when the other side attacks it. What mutation is genuinely for is set out on its own page, and it is a useful thing to have — it is simply not proof of ownership.

GPA, agreement to sell and will — the Delhi papers that are not title

For decades an enormous quantity of Delhi property changed hands on a bundle: an agreement to sell, a general power of attorney, a will, and a receipt. No conveyance, no stamp duty at the full rate, no registration. Whole colonies were transacted this way, and a great many families are sitting on such a bundle believing it makes them owners.

In Suraj Lamp & Industries v. State of Haryana (2011) the Supreme Court held that a sale agreement, general power of attorney and will transaction does not convey any title nor create any interest in an immovable property, and that immovable property can be legally and lawfully transferred or conveyed only by a registered deed of conveyance.

So the position is not that your papers are worthless. It is that they are an agreement and a defence, not ownership, and anybody in this situation should be taking advice before a dispute starts rather than after somebody else has got themselves a registered deed. A title verification is the sensible first spend.

“I paid for it, the registry is in his name”

This is the hardest section on the page and the one most likely to be unwelcome, so it is written plainly rather than gently.

Under the Prohibition of Benami Property Transactions Act, 1988 as amended in 2016, a transaction where one person pays and the property is held by another is a benami transaction unless it falls within the stated exceptions. Those exceptions cover property held by a karta or a member of a Hindu undivided family for the family’s benefit, property held in a fiduciary capacity, property in the name of a spouse or child, and property in the joint names of a brother, sister or lineal ascendant or descendant where those names appear in the title documents — in every case with the consideration paid out of known sources of income.

Every family has a version of this story, usually with a reason attached — a loan was in his name, he was in the city and you were not, it was for convenience. Take proper advice on your exact facts and take it early, because there are situations with real answers. But do not begin from the assumption that having paid the money settles it, and be extremely careful of anybody who tells you it does.

What a partition suit actually is

A partition suit is not a fight about who owns the property. It starts from the position that several people own it together, and it asks for that joint ownership to be converted into separate shares.

That is why a partition suit does not, by itself, cancel a sale deed your brother obtained, and does not by itself get somebody out of the house. If those are also needed, they have to be asked for — which is the whole argument of the first section of this page.

What a partition suit does require is that the property and the parties be set out properly. Every co-owner has to be before the court, every item of property has to be described, and the share claimed has to be stated. Families frequently leave out an heir who is abroad or estranged, and then discover years later that the decree cannot be acted on.

We prepare the plaint and the schedules to your advocate’s instructions, the applications that go with it, and the affidavits. What is pleaded is his work.

Partition ends in two decrees, not one

This is the structural fact nobody is told, and its absence causes real despair around year three.

Under Order XX Rule 18 of the Code of Civil Procedure, a partition suit is decided in two stages. The court first passes a preliminary decree, which declares the rights of the parties — who has what share. Then there is a final decree stage, in which the property is actually divided by metes and bounds, or sold and the proceeds divided, and that stage has proceedings of its own.

So a client can “win” and find that nothing whatever has changed on the ground, because only the first half is over. In Kattukandi Edathil Krishnan v. Kattukandi Edathil Valsan (2022) the Supreme Court addressed exactly this, directing trial courts not to adjourn matters indefinitely once a preliminary decree is passed and to initiate final decree proceedings themselves rather than waiting for a separate application.

Know this at the beginning, so the plan covers both halves. And where the property is one flat and there are four heirs, think honestly at the start about where the final decree stage is going to lead, because the answer is very often a sale — and a sale the family arranges itself is always better than one arranged for it.

Possession, and the twelve-year clock

A suit for possession of immovable property based on title is governed by Article 65 of the Limitation Act, 1963: twelve years, running from when the possession of the defendant becomes adverse to the plaintiff.

The words that matter are the last three. The period does not run from the death, or from the day he moved in, or from the day the family stopped speaking. It runs from when his possession became adverse to you — hostile to your title, and known to be so. A brother living in the family house with everybody’s knowledge and nobody’s objection may not be holding adversely at all, because he is not denying that you own a share.

Which is why the moment he does deny it — the day he says the property is his alone, refuses you entry, applies for mutation in his sole name, or tells you in writing that you have no claim — is a date worth recording and keeping. It is frequently the most important date in the whole file, and it is usually recorded nowhere.

Adverse possession, honestly

It is raised in almost every one of these matters and it succeeds in very few, so here is the honest version.

To hold adversely, possession must be actual, open and visible, continuous for the whole period, and hostile to the true owner’s title with his knowledge. Somebody who is there as a family member, a licensee, a caretaker or a tenant is not holding adversely, because his possession is not a denial of your ownership. The person pleading it also has to admit the other side’s title in order to say he has held against it, which is a plea many are unwilling to make.

Two practical warnings. If you are the owner, the answer to this plea is a dated record of every occasion on which your title was acknowledged — a letter, a rent receipt, a reply, a settlement discussion in writing. And if somebody is advising you to stay quiet and let a period run, understand that you are being advised to gamble the property on a defence that usually fails.

Undoing a document — and the three-year clock

If the real grievance is a piece of paper — a sale deed, a gift deed, a relinquishment obtained by pressure, a will — then the remedy is a different one and it is the most time-sensitive of the three.

Article 59 of the Limitation Act gives three years to cancel or set aside an instrument, running from when the facts entitling the plaintiff to have it cancelled first become known to him. Read that carefully: not from when you decided to act, not from when negotiations broke down, but from when you first knew. A family that saw the deed in 2021, spent three years trying to resolve it within the family, and then came to a lawyer has a serious problem that no amount of good faith fixes.

The Specific Relief Act, 1963 provides the substantive remedy: a person against whom a written instrument is void or voidable, and who has reasonable apprehension that leaving it outstanding would cause him serious injury, may sue to have it adjudged void and cancelled.

So the first move on discovering a document is not to call a family meeting. It is to obtain a certified copy of the registered instrument, so that you know what was executed and, critically, on what date — and to see an advocate within weeks.

Cancellation or declaration — they are not the same remedy

A distinction that decides whether a filing is useful or wasted.

Cancellation is what a party to the instrument asks for. You executed it, or it purports to bear your signature, and you want it set aside entirely.

A declaration is what somebody who was never a party asks for. He cannot have the whole document wiped out — it is not his document. What he asks is that it be declared not to bind him or affect his rights, and such a declaration binds the parties to the suit and those claiming through them.

A co-owner who was not a party to his brother’s sale deed is usually in the second position, not the first, and Article 58 gives three years from when the cause of action accrues for a declaratory suit. We prepare declaration drafting and petitions to instructions; which of the two you need is a question for counsel and it is not a formality.

The application that comes first

In a property dispute the single most consequential document is often not the plaint. It is the interim application filed with it.

The reason is simple. If the property is sold while the suit is pending, and it passes to somebody who says he bought it without notice of your claim, your case becomes several times harder and several years longer. The remedy against that is an order holding the position where it is until the dispute is decided, and the Specific Relief Act provides for perpetual and temporary injunctions to protect a right.

These applications are decided on what you can put before the court immediately. That means the documents have to be assembled before filing, not after — the title chain, the certified copies, the dated correspondence. It is the one stage of a property matter where being three weeks early genuinely changes the outcome, and being three weeks late genuinely loses it.

The first week, before anybody files anything

Which court, and what it costs to get in

Property suits go to the civil court, and which civil court depends on where the property is and on the value of what is being claimed. Delhi’s district complexes and what happens inside them are set out on our Delhi courts page; matters of sufficient value go to the High Court on its original side.

Court fee in these matters is generally worked out on the value of the relief claimed, which is why the three claims cost very different amounts to file — and why the choice between them has a financial consequence as well as a legal one. We do not print rates or slabs here: they are fixed by law that is amended, and a stale figure in a family already short of money is worse than no figure. Ask your advocate for the number on your valuation before you decide what to claim.

Two things worth knowing in advance. Valuation is itself contestable, and a wrongly valued suit can be sent back to be valued again. And court fee is money paid to the court, not to anybody representing you — keep the two completely separate in your mind and in your accounts.

The case for settling, made by somebody who is paid to draft

Family property litigation has a feature almost no other litigation has: the people on the other side will still be at the weddings.

It also has a feature that should be considered coldly. The property is usually not producing income, everybody’s money is going into the same fight, and the asset most likely to be sold to pay for the litigation is the asset being litigated about. Five years in, families routinely reach a settlement close to what was on the table at the start, with the difference spent.

Where a suit is already filed, this can be recorded before the court, which makes it enforceable rather than a promise. Mediation through the court system works well in family property matters for the same reason it works in tenancy: once the anger is priced, the positions are usually a negotiation apart.

Settlement, partition, relinquishment or gift — four different papers

The stamp and registration consequences of these differ, and choosing the cheaper-looking instrument for a transaction it does not fit is how families produce a document their own members successfully attack later. Tell us what has been agreed, in ordinary words, and we will tell you which instrument that actually is.

Why an unregistered paper keeps letting people down

A recurring shape in these disputes: there is a paper, everybody accepts it was signed, and it still does not do what the family assumed.

The reason is that where a document itself creates, declares, assigns, limits or extinguishes a right in immovable property, the law requires it to be registered, and an unregistered document of that kind cannot be received in evidence of the transaction it purports to effect. There are limited purposes for which such a document can still be looked at — a point your advocate will know how to use — but as a way of proving that ownership moved, it fails.

This is the same principle underneath Suraj Lamp, and it is why the answer to “we had it written on stamp paper and notarised” is so often disappointing. Notarisation is not registration and it never was.

If you are abroad

A large share of Delhi family property disputes has at least one party outside India, and distance changes the practical problem more than the legal one.

You can act through a power of attorney, executed and attested in the manner the law requires for a document made outside India, and it has to be specific enough to cover what is actually needed — filing, signing pleadings and affidavits, appearing, and settling if that is intended. A generally worded power drawn up for a bank will not carry a property suit.

Three things learned the hard way. Do not give the power to somebody whose own interest sits on the other side of the dispute, however close they are. Insist that copies of everything filed reach you directly rather than through the family. And remember that an attorney holder may do the paperwork but cannot argue your case — that is for an advocate, as our guide on that explains.

When somebody else is living in it

Family disputes are often tangled with an occupant who is not family — a tenant put in by one brother, a caretaker, a buyer on a GPA bundle.

Keep the two questions apart. The dispute among co-owners is one proceeding; removing or regularising an occupant is another, and if that occupant is a tenant, it is governed by an entirely separate body of law that our landlord and tenant guide sets out — including the rent figure that decides which system applies.

What must not happen, in any version of this, is anybody taking possession by force. A co-owner who breaks a lock converts a property dispute he might win into a dispossession case he will probably lose, and everything on this page becomes secondary to the lock.

Things that are particular to Delhi

Four features of this city that change how these matters run, and that generic advice misses.

Leasehold and freehold. A great deal of Delhi property sits on land allotted by a development authority, and whether the plot has been converted to freehold, and in whose name, affects what can be transferred and what permissions a transfer needs. Establish this before designing a settlement around it.

Unauthorised and regularised colonies. Large parts of the city changed hands on the GPA bundle described above, and regularisation has its own paper trail. Suraj Lamp itself preserved reliance on such documents for applying for regularisation and left undisturbed what a development authority had already accepted and acted on — so the history of what the authority did matters as much as what the family signed.

Joint families with property outside Delhi. Agricultural land in another State may be governed by that State’s own law on succession to agricultural holdings, and cannot simply be folded into the Delhi arithmetic. Mention every property in the first meeting, including the one everybody thinks is irrelevant.

Records held by public bodies. Where a municipal, revenue or authority record is needed and the family cannot get it, an RTI application is often the quickest route to it. Where an heir cannot be traced or a claim needs to be flushed out, a public notice is the conventional step.

If the family is not Hindu

Nearly everything above is Hindu law, which is what the Hindu Succession Act governs — and it applies to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs.

For Muslim families, succession is governed by personal law and the structure is genuinely different, not a variation. There is no coparcenary and no right by birth; the estate vests in the heirs at the moment of death in defined shares, and the power to dispose of property by will is limited. The specific shares depend on the school followed and on exactly who survives, so this page prints none of them.

For Christians, Parsis and inter-faith families, and for anyone married under the Special Marriage Act, the Indian Succession Act, 1925 governs intestate succession with its own scheme. Our Muslim marriage registration guide and the court marriage guide touch on the marriage side of this; the succession consequences belong with an advocate who practises in that law.

The reason for keeping this short rather than summarising each system is Rule H on this site: a half-remembered fraction applied to the wrong school of law is the most damaging thing a page like this could print.

If paying for an advocate is the difficulty

Property litigation is long, and the person with the weakest claim to the asset is often the person with the least money to fight for it — an unmarried sister, a widow, an heir who was kept away from the property and therefore from its income. Free legal services under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 exist for exactly this, and several categories are entitled regardless of income, with others entitled below the limit the State Authority notifies. The Delhi State Legal Services Authority publishes the current limit and a helpline, and there is a legal services committee attached to the court complexes. We have not printed the income figure because it is revised. Ask at the complex, or ask us and we will point you at the right desk.

Keeping a file that survives a long case

These matters outlast everybody’s memory, including your advocate’s. Keep one folder in date order: the title chain with certified copies, the death certificates and relationship proofs, every mutation and tax record, photographs of the property, every notice sent or received with its proof of service, every court paper with the date it was received written on it, and a single sheet at the front listing what happened and when.

That front sheet is worth more than everything behind it. When the question is whether Article 59 has run, the answer is a date, and it should take four seconds to find.

Mistakes that cost families the property

What to collect before anybody drafts

The complete title chain with certified copies of every registered instrument, and the document by which the property first came into the family. The death certificate and proof of relationship for every heir. The will, if there is one, and the circumstances in which it appeared. Mutation entries and the applications behind them. Property tax receipts, electricity and water connections and the names they stand in. Society, authority or allotment records, and the conversion papers if the plot is leasehold. Photographs of the property. Every notice, letter or message exchanged about the property, with proof of how it was sent. And the list of dates described above.

Add affidavits sworn before an oath commissioner where required, translations of anything not in English or Hindi prepared in advance, and further certified copies of any order already passed. Where a public body holds a record you cannot get, an RTI application is often faster than asking again.

Our part of a property matter

Papers, and only papers. Nobody here is an advocate, nobody appears before any court, and nobody tells you whether your claim is a good one. What we do is the plaint and its schedules typed to your advocate’s instructions, the applications including the interim one, the written statement or reply, the declaration or petition as settled by him, the legal notice and the reply to one, the affidavits and their attestation, translations, certified copies, the execution petition, the appeal papers, and — if the family reaches an agreement — the partition deed, family settlement or relinquishment deed that records it.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. The directory is free to open and free to write through, it runs A to Z, and no listing on it was bought.

What we decline in a family property matter

What we charge, said up front

Every document shows its price on its own service page, readable before you order anything or speak to anybody. Court fees, stamp duty, registration charges and whatever a public office levies are shown separately from ours, because that money belongs to the government and never passes through us.

The whole figure is told to you before work begins and none of it is payable in advance. And in family property work we will say the thing that costs us the larger job more often than in any other area: where the family is genuinely close to an agreement, a properly drawn settlement ends this year what a suit would carry into the next decade — and we would rather draft that document than a plaint.