Focus: GS-II Governance, Social Justice,
Why in news?
The Supreme Court held that daughters, like sons, have an equal birthright to inherit joint Hindu family property. The judgement came on the issue whether the amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, granting equal rights to daughters to inherit ancestral property would have retrospective effect.
Details
- The Supreme court decided that the amended Hindu Succession Act, which gives daughters equal rights to ancestral property, will have a retrospective effect.
- The judgment agreed that the 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.
- The court larified that an unregistered oral partition, without any contemporaneous public document, cannot be accepted as the statutory recognised mode of partition.
- However, in exceptional cases where plea of oral partition is supported by public documents and partition is finally evinced in the same manner as if it had been affected by a decree of a court, it may be accepted.
-Source: The Hindu
