Parliament Should Relook at the Hindu Succession Act

The Supreme Court’s recent appeal to Hindu women to make wills has brought renewed attention to the discriminatory provisions in the Hindu Succession Act, 1956. While the Court’s advice offers a practical workaround, it inadvertently highlights a deeper legislative failure: our succession laws remain anchored to assumptions about women and family structures that contemporary India has long outgrown.

The Discriminatory Framework

The Hindu Succession Act creates fundamentally different inheritance schemes for men and women. When a Hindu man dies intestate, his properties are distributed equally among his wife, children, and mother, with his father inheriting if no such successor exists. His parents are recognized as Class I and Class II heirs.

However, when a Hindu woman dies intestate, her properties—including those acquired through her education, employment, or entrepreneurship—pass to her children and husband, or in their absence, to her husband’s heirs rather than her own parents. This difference particularly affects women who die without children, as their self-acquired property bypasses their natal families entirely.

The Supreme Court bench of Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice R. Mahadevan, while disposing of advocate Snidha Mehra’s PIL challenging Section 15(1)(b), acknowledged this anomaly. The Court observed that Parliament in 1956 “may have assumed that women would not have self-acquired property,” but emphasized that “the progress of women in these decades cannot be underestimated.”

Yet the Court stopped short of striking down the provision, noting that it would be “wary of shattering the Hindu social structure.” This judicial restraint, while understandable, places the burden squarely on Parliament to modernize laws that no longer reflect social reality.

Two Outdated Assumptions

The provisions of the Hindu Succession Act rest on two outdated assumptions:

1. That the joint family remains the primary unit of Hindu social organization, and
2. That women lack the capacity to independently acquire and manage property.

Both assumptions are demonstrably false today.

The Myth of the Joint Family

Contemporary demographic data reveals how outdated the joint family assumption has become. The average Hindu family size shrank from 5.16 persons per household in 2001 to 4.9 in 2011, with urban areas showing median family sizes below 4. This trend clearly demonstrates the declining relevance of traditional joint family systems.

Few urban households today operate as joint family enterprises where a woman’s wealth forms part of the in-laws’ collective assets. The one-child and two-child norms have also led to many households with only daughters, and parents increasingly depend on these daughters for old-age care. A 2016 survey found that 16% of parents plan to live with their daughters in their old age—a reality entirely inconsistent with succession laws that treat daughters’ property as belonging to their marital families.

Moreover, the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 recognizes contemporary realities by imposing obligations on all children, including daughters, to maintain their parents. Section 4(4) explicitly states:

“Any person being a relative of a senior citizen and having sufficient means shall maintain such senior citizen, provided he is in possession of the property of such citizen or he would inherit the property of such senior citizen.”

This legal obligation to maintain parents sits uneasily alongside succession laws that deny parents inheritance rights over their daughter’s self-acquired property. The law expects daughters to provide for their aging parents but denies those same parents any claim to their daughter’s estate—a contradiction that defies logic and justice.

The Myth of Women’s Economic Incapacity

The assumption that women lack economic capacity is even more starkly contradicted by current realities. Female workforce participation has nearly tripled from 12% in 1971 to 33% in 2023. Today:

• 28% of women own land, and
• 37% own houses, independently or jointly.

Financial inclusion has improved dramatically, with 53% of women maintaining bank accounts.

Women’s entrepreneurship has grown significantly, with over 8 million proprietary establishments owned by women (15.4% of the total). Educational achievements are equally remarkable: female literacy has risen from 9% in 1951 to 70% today, and women constitute 46% of higher education enrollments and earn 53% of postgraduate degrees.

These are not marginal improvements—they represent a fundamental transformation in women’s economic agency. The women of 2025 bear little resemblance to the women Parliament imagined in 1956. Yet the law continues to treat their property as naturally belonging to their husband’s family.

A Growing Problem

The discriminatory impact of Section 15(1)(b) is likely to worsen due to demographic changes:

• The number of married women without surviving children doubled from 2.4 crore in 1981 to 4.95 crore in 2011.
• India’s total fertility rate declined from 5.91 in 1960 to 2.51 in 2017.
• The widowed female population grew from 2.4 crore in 1961 to 4.3 crore in 2011, significantly outnumbering widowed men.

As women’s property ownership increases, declining fertility and rising widowhood will expose more women to the discriminatory structure of the law, diverting their self-earned assets to their husband’s heirs instead of their own parents.

Why the Court’s Solution Falls Short

The Supreme Court’s appeal for women to make wills is pragmatic but insufficient. It places the burden on women to navigate around a discriminatory law instead of correcting the discrimination itself. Not all women have the legal literacy or access to resources needed to draft valid wills. Rural women, marginalized groups, and those without legal support remain vulnerable.

At a deeper level, even universal will-making would not cure the symbolic and structural injustice of a law that treats a woman’s property as naturally belonging to her marital family. Laws shape social attitudes. A discriminatory law on the statute books reinforces patriarchal assumptions about women’s identities being subsumed into their husband’s families.

The Court’s call for mandatory pre-litigation mediation in inheritance disputes is similarly insufficient—another procedural patch on a substantive defect.

Constitutional and Legal Concerns

These provisions potentially violate Articles 14 (equality before the law) and 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sex) of the Constitution. They also conflict with India’s commitments under the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

More equitable models exist within India. The Goa Succession, Special Notaries and Inventory Proceeding Act of 2012, and the Indian Succession Act of 1925, recognize more balanced approaches to inheritance. Succession laws in developed nations similarly reflect contemporary family relationships and give significant weight to parents in intestate succession—especially for childless individuals.

The Need for Legislative Action

The Supreme Court has exercised appropriate judicial restraint by not striking down provisions of personal law. But this restraint creates a corresponding responsibility for Parliament.

Social structures evolve, and laws must evolve with them.

Parliament must recognize that true gender equality extends beyond granting women rights in ancestral property; it requires respecting their autonomy over property they have earned themselves. The current provisions treat women’s self-acquired property as if it naturally belongs to their marital families, reflecting an outdated view of women’s identity and agency.

The law must acknowledge that today’s women maintain lifelong relationships with their parents, provide them financial support, and act as independent economic actors. It must abandon the fiction that women’s wealth forms part of a joint family enterprise—an enterprise that is increasingly rare in modern India.

Conclusion

The growing disconnect between the Hindu Succession Act’s assumptions and contemporary Indian society makes legislative reform not just desirable but urgent. As more women acquire property through their own efforts and demographic shifts expand the affected population, Parliament can no longer delay reform.

The question is not whether the law should change, but how long it will take for the law to align with the reality of modern Hindu society. Women’s economic empowerment—earned through decades of progress—must be matched with a legal framework that respects their autonomy and family relationships.

The Supreme Court has signaled the problem.
Parliament must provide the solution—a gender-neutral succession law that reflects the lived realities of Hindu women today, not the assumptions of 1956.

References:

• Supreme Court judgment in Snidha Mehra v. Union of India
• Devendra Damle, “Time to end gender-based discrimination in the Hindu Succession Act, even in the matters of devolution,” NIPFP, September 22, 2020