Daughters have an equal right to inherit property, says SC

Daughters have an equal right to inherit property, says SC

The Supreme Court held that daughters have an equal birthright with sons to inherit joint Hindu family property. 

• The court decided that the amended Hindu Succession Act, which gives daughters equal rights to ancestral property, will have a retrospective effect
• Substituted Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 confers the status of ‘coparcener’ to a daughter born before or after the amendment in the same manner as a son. Coparcener is a person who has a birthright to parental property.
• Since the right to coparcenary of a daughter is by birth, it is not necessary that the father should be alive as on September 9, 2005. The court has thus overruled an earlier 2015 decision.
• The court, in its 121-­page judgment, said the statutory fiction of partition created by proviso to Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 as originally enacted did not bring about the actual partition or disruption of the coparcenary.
• It also clarified that an unregistered oral partition, without any contemporaneous public document, cannot be accepted as the statutory recognized mode of partition.

Source: The Hindu