Your mother died in March. There is a flat in Delhi, a fixed deposit at a branch in Lajpat Nagar, some shares, and a will she made in 2014 leaving everything equally between you and your brother, who lives in Bangalore and has been very decent about all of it.
The bank has asked for a succession certificate. The society has asked for probate. The registrar's office told your brother something different again. Each of them is confident. At least two of them are wrong.
Start with what you are trying to do
The confusion here comes from treating "getting the estate transferred" as one process. It is not. Which document you need depends on which asset, and on whether there is a will. The answers are different for the flat, the deposit and the shares.
| Probate | Letters of administration | Succession certificate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When | There is a will naming an executor | No will, or no executor, or the executor will not act | No will, and the asset is a debt or a security |
| Applied for by | The executor | The heir or beneficiary | The heir |
| Covers | Everything in the will, movable and immovable | Everything in the estate, movable and immovable | Only debts and movable securities — deposits, shares, bonds |
| Statute | Indian Succession Act, 1925 | Section 234 and following | Sections 370 to 390 |
The line that saves the most time: a succession certificate does not cover immovable property. Section 370 confines it to debts and securities. If somebody has told you to get a succession certificate for a flat, they have given you the wrong advice, and you will find that out after paying the filing fee.
What actually changed in December 2025
Section 213 of the Indian Succession Act used to provide that no right as executor or legatee could be established in any court without first obtaining probate or letters of administration. Section 213 has been omitted. It was removed in its entirety by the Repealing and Amending Act, 2025, which received Presidential assent on 20 December 2025.
The effect is that probate is no longer a mandatory precondition to asserting rights under a will. A beneficiary can now rely on the will directly in a civil proceeding, unless another statute requires a grant, or the court directs one, or the validity of the will is genuinely in dispute.
Two qualifications, both important, and neither of them in the headlines.
First, the mandatory requirement never applied everywhere. Section 213 bit hardest on wills of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains falling within the classes in Section 57. Broadly, wills made within the former presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, or relating to immovable property situated there. For a will made in Delhi relating to property in Delhi, probate was never mandatory in the first place. A very large number of Delhi families have been obtaining probate for decades because a bank or a housing society insisted, not because the statute did.
Second, the change is recent enough that institutions have not caught up. A bank manager, a sub-registrar or a co-operative housing society is not going to read the Repealing and Amending Act. They are going to apply the checklist in front of them. The legal position and the counter position are now different things, and dealing with the second is a practical exercise rather than a legal one.
There is also a live question about whether the omission reaches probate petitions that were already pending on 20 December 2025. The Act expressly saves proceedings pending or concluded, and the better view is that the omission is procedural in effect, but this has not been settled by the Supreme Court and it remains an argument rather than a certainty.
So should you still take out a grant?
Often, yes. But now as a matter of choice rather than compulsion.
A grant of probate or letters of administration is a judgment in rem. It binds the world, not merely the parties before the court. An ordinary civil decree binds only those who were parties to it. That difference is worth a great deal where:
- the estate has heirs in more than one country, or heirs who are not participating;
- there is any prospect of a challenge to the will, now or in ten years;
- the estate includes immovable property that will eventually be sold to a buyer whose lawyer will ask questions;
- a bank, depository or institution refuses to act without one, which they remain entitled to do as a matter of their own internal requirements;
- the will is old, holographic, unregistered, or the attesting witnesses are dead or abroad.
For an ordinary, uncontested, registered will where every heir agrees and the assets are a deposit and a flat, the answer is now often no. For a cross-border estate the answer is usually still yes, and the reason is not the statute. It is that a grant ends the argument permanently and a settlement between siblings does not.
Where the will was made or proved abroad
This comes up constantly and is almost always mishandled.
A grant of probate obtained in London, Toronto, New Jersey or Dubai does not operate in India by itself. You cannot take a foreign grant to a bank in Delhi and expect it to be honoured, and you cannot register a transfer on the strength of one.
The route is Section 228 of the Indian Succession Act. Where a will has been proved and deposited in a court of competent jurisdiction outside India, and a properly authenticated copy of the will is produced, letters of administration may be granted here with a copy of that copy annexed.
In plain terms: where the will has already been proved abroad, you do not re-prove it in India. You produce a properly authenticated copy of the foreign grant and the will, and apply in India for letters of administration with that copy annexed. It is a separate proceeding before the Indian court having jurisdiction over the assets, and it is considerably shorter than proving the will from scratch, because the contentious part has already been done elsewhere.
Two things decide whether it goes smoothly.
Authentication. The phrase "properly authenticated" is doing real work in that section. What is required depends on the country: apostille under the Hague Apostille Convention for countries party to it, consular legalisation at the Indian Mission for those that are not, certified copies under the seal of the foreign court, sworn translations where the document is not in English. Getting this wrong is the most common cause of these petitions being returned, and it is entirely avoidable by settling the list before anything is executed abroad.
Jurisdiction and valuation. Which court, and what the estate is valued at for court fee, are settled at the outset rather than argued about later.
Where the deceased died intestate abroad leaving assets in India there is no foreign grant to work from, and the application is for letters of administration in India on the intestacy.
Getting the money out
Obtaining the grant is half the exercise. Repatriating the proceeds is the other half, and it has its own rules.
An NRI may remit up to USD 1 million per financial year from an NRO account. That ceiling covers the aggregate: rent, dividends, pension, and the proceeds of sale of immovable property, including property that was inherited.
The mechanics require Form 15CA, an undertaking by the remitter, and Form 15CB, a chartered accountant's certificate that the applicable tax has been paid or deducted, together with the bank's own forms and a FEMA declaration. Interest on NRO balances is taxable in India.
There are restrictions on what an NRI may acquire. Agricultural land, plantation property and farmhouses cannot be purchased. Property that has been inherited is treated differently, and inherited agricultural land can be held even though it could not have been bought.
The order of operations matters. Sell before the title question is properly closed and the sale falls through at the buyer's due diligence stage. Remit before the tax position is settled and the certificate cannot be issued. These are sequencing problems. They are cheap to avoid and expensive to unwind.
What tends to go wrong for families abroad
Nobody applies for anything for four years. The estate is not urgent, everyone is grieving, the flat is occupied by a tenant or a relative and rent is being paid, or it is not. Meanwhile the person in possession accumulates the one thing that is genuinely hard to argue with, which is possession.
The heirs agree informally and never document it. A family arrangement is a recognised and often excellent way to settle an estate. An undocumented understanding between four siblings in three countries is not a family arrangement. It is a dispute that has not started yet.
One heir is given a power of attorney to handle everything. Sometimes this works. When it does not, a general power of attorney holder who has already dealt with the property is considerably harder to unwind than the original estate would have been to administer.
The bank's list is treated as the law. Institutional checklists are negotiable, escalatable and frequently wrong. They are not a legal position.
Send me the will and the death certificate
With those, and a list of the assets, I will tell you which grant is actually needed for each asset, whether a foreign grant can be used, and what the realistic sequence and timeline looks like. If a caveat has been filed or a sale is being pressed, say so.
Questions people actually ask
Do I need probate for my father's flat in Delhi?
Probably not, and since December 2025 certainly not as a statutory requirement. Whether you should obtain a grant anyway depends on whether the will might be challenged and on what the society and the registrar will accept in practice.
The bank wants a succession certificate for the flat.
A succession certificate does not cover immovable property. Section 370 restricts it to debts and securities. Something else is needed.
We have probate from England. Is that enough?
Not by itself. Letters of administration can be granted in India with a copy of the will annexed under Section 228, on production of a properly authenticated copy. That is a separate application here.
How long does a grant take in Delhi?
An uncontested petition is generally measured in months rather than years. A caveat filed by a dissenting heir converts it into a testamentary suit and the timeline changes completely. Whether anyone is likely to file a caveat is the question worth asking at the start.
Do all the heirs have to come to India?
No. Heirs abroad participate on a power of attorney and, where the court requires an affidavit or a statement, through consular attestation or video, depending on the court and the stage.
My brother has been in the house since 2011 and now says it is his.
That is no longer only a succession question. Time matters here, and it has already been running for a while. It should be looked at now rather than after the next family conversation.
Is there inheritance tax in India?
No estate duty is currently levied on inheritance in India. Tax arises on what you subsequently earn from or realise on the asset, rent and capital gains on sale, and that is what the certificates on repatriation are concerned with.