The Inheritance Trap

There is a set process of what happens when someone inherits property. On paper, the process of gathering death certificates, establishing a will, applying for property mutation, updating housing security records and addressing taxes should take about one year. Without a will, this timeline stretches. When a man dies intestate, meaning without a valid will, or leaves a will that does not cover all his assets, succession law decides who inherits. For a Hindu man, his wisdom mother sons and daughters inherit together as first-class heirs, in equal shares. With no will and several heirs, this process can take two to three years. Those years matter. Each step is a point at which a name can be added or quietly left out, and the longer the process runs, the more tired and pressured a family becomes.

When an owner dies, the heirs apply for mutations (called dakhil kharij in many states), the entry that updates the revenue records. It sounds like a formality. The supreme court has said many times that it is not a transfer of ownership. In Suraj Bhan v. Financial Commissioner (2007), it held that an entry in the revenue records does not confer title on the person named. In Balwant Singh v. Daulat Singh (1997), it held that mutation neither creates nor extinguishes title, and that its purpose is to let a person pay land revenue. In Jitendra Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2021), it said so again.

This should protect a daughter left off the form. A case from Jammu shows what it does in practice. After a man died, the revenue authorities mutated his land in the names of his two sons. His two daughters, Kuldip Kaur and Balbir Kaur challenged the entry, and argued they were also entitled. In Rajdir Singh v. State of Jammu and Kashmir (2008), the Supreme Court held that the tenancy authorities and the High Court should not have decided questions of ownership and inheritance at all. Revenue records, it said confer no title, and the daughters were left to go to a civil court to establish their rights.

This is the first daw of the trap. The law protects her title, but only if she sues for it. A wrong entry does not take her share away. It does make her the one who must go to court to prove it, against her own family.

On paper, the revenue record is a fiscal document. In daily life, it is the document that banks, buyers, officials and schemes consult. The name on the page is who is treated as the owner, who is recognised as the farmer, and who can be approached about a sale or a loan. A 2013 Oxfam India policy brief argued that without land titles, women are not recognised as farmers. The numbers suggest how often women are missing from that record. Women were 13.9 per cent of operational landholders in the 2015-16 Agricultural Census. Researchers at the NCAER caution that operational holdings measure who uses the land, not who owns it. But they note a broader finding, women rarely hold land titles on their own, usually appear on joint titles, and in those cases tend to hold smaller shares. A separate source of data, the National Family Health Survey, found that 41.6 per cent of women owned a house or land alone or jointly in the first phase of NFHS-5 (2019-20), a figure that includes houses and joint ownership and so is not directly comparable.

The starkest evidence on paperwork comes from a 2013 study by UN women and a research partner in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, Only about 60 per cent of the plots surveyed had formal documentation, and women held the title in under 10 per cent of the households that did. More than 61 per cent of women had never visited the local revenue office for land-related work, and another 18 per cent had gone with only a male relative. A woman who has never been to the office where the record is kept is hardly placed to correct it.

Possession in property law means actual physical control of a property and the ongoing exercise and enjoyment of it. It is distinct from formal ownership. A person can own a property without possessing it, and similarly, possess a property without owning it. For a married daughter, the former is more common. The share is hers on paper, and someone else is in the house, on the land or collecting the rent. Ownership, then, is about who is on the land, who collects the rent and who deals with the tenant. A married daughter usually lives elsewhere A brother lives close, farms the plot, or runs the shop. And over years, his possession becomes indistinguishable from ownership, to the family and to everyone else.

Then, comes a dreaded stage: a paper that needs her signature. It rarely looks like pressure, it in fact looks like a courtesy. A brother, an uncle, or a family friend who “knows these things” calls to say that a document is ready, it’s only a formality, and that she only needs to sign at the pencil mark. It is usually drawn up weeks after a death, when no one has valued the property or consulted their own lawyer, and when saying no could be construed as an insult to the dead. This is the release deed, or relinquishment, a paper in which a co-heir gives up her share, almost always “for the sake of the family.”

The law did what it was asked to do. It gave daughters an equal share, by birth, and the Supreme Court has said so more than once. Yet, the truth begins after the law is done speaking. It begins in a revenue office, where a form is filled without her. It begins in a revenue office, where a form is filled in without her. It continues on land she does not farm, in a house she does not live in, with a tenant who pays someone else. It reaches its sharpest point at a table, days after a funeral, where a paper is placed in front of her and signing feels like the only decent thing to do. Nowhere in that sequence does anyone break the law. That is what makes it so hard to see, and so hard to name.


The trap has two jaws. The first is procedural: a wrong entry does not take her share away, but she is the one who must go to court to prove it. The second is emotional: the lawful route runs through her own family, and the price of taking it is her place among them. Most women weigh both and decide, reasonably, to stay silent. What closes the gap is rarely a judgment. It is a name on a record, a copy in her own hands, a rent paid into her own account, a delay of two weeks before she signs. These are small, administrative, almost dull acts, and they are the difference between a right and a possession. The question for families is whether they will let her take those steps without treating them as an accusation. The question for everyone else is why ownership, for so many women, still depends on being willing to ask.