NRI Succession Planning & Will

NRI succession planning does not rest on one consolidated statute — it spans several overlapping frameworks, and explaining that overlap accurately is itself the core of this advisory.

The governing choice-of-law rule is Section 5 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925: succession to a deceased person's IMMOVABLE property situated in India is regulated by Indian law regardless of where the deceased was domiciled at death (Section 5(1)) — so an NRI's India-situated real estate is always subject to Indian succession law. Succession to the deceased's MOVABLE property, wherever located, instead follows the law of the country of the deceased's domicile at the time of death (Section 5(2)) — meaning an NRI domiciled abroad may have their global movable estate (bank accounts, securities, personal property) governed by that foreign jurisdiction's law even while their Indian property follows Indian law.

Which Indian succession law applies further depends on personal law: intestate succession for Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains is governed by the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, not the Indian Succession Act, 1925; Muslims are governed by applicable Muslim personal law rather than either Act, subject to the limited testamentary exceptions in Section 58 of the 1925 Act. For those governed by the Indian Succession Act, a valid will requires the testator's signature and attestation by two witnesses under Section 63.

Because Indian probate does not automatically extend to assets abroad, and a foreign grant of probate/administration does not automatically extend to Indian assets, cross-border NRI estates typically require coordinated, separate succession proceedings in each situs jurisdiction — the planning objective is minimising that duplication and conflict, not finding a single filing that resolves it.

NRI succession planning is the structuring of how a non-resident's Indian assets will pass on — the will, the nomination, the succession under the personal law, and the FEMA and the tax dimensions of the inheritance. The Indian assets of the NRI — the property, the bank accounts, the investments, the shares — pass under the Indian succession law and the personal law of the deceased, and the transfer to the heirs raises the FEMA questions of the repatriation and the remittance, and the tax questions of the capital gains at the eventual sale. The succession that is planned is the succession that costs what it should; the succession that is not is the one the family discovers in the probate and the repatriation.

The NRI's Indian assets are governed by the Indian law wherever the NRI lives, and the planning is the work of making the passing of those assets as clean as the passing can be. The will made and probated, the nominations on the accounts and the investments, the succession certified under the personal law, the inheritance remitted under the FEMA framework — each is a step the family will otherwise take at the worst time, without the plan.

The cost of an unplanned succession is the blocked inheritance: the property that cannot be transferred, the funds that cannot be repatriated without the succession certificate, the assets stuck in the estate while the family manages the process the plan would have prepared. The planning is cheaper than the probate.

This service is for NRIs with Indian assets. We map the Indian assets and the succession law that governs them, structure the will and the nominations, plan the transfer to the heirs with the FEMA and the tax positions under the Income-tax Act 1961, and document the succession so the family's path to the assets is the planned one.