The Repealing and Amending Act, 2025

What it does

The Repealing and Amending Act, 2025 (Act No. 37 of 2025) is a clearing-up statute. Such an Act does not make fresh policy of its own. It removes provisions that have been overtaken or are no longer needed, and corrects others, by repealing them and amending the enactments in which they sit, in the schedules to the Act. The Gazette of India Extraordinary of 21 December 2025 recites assent on 20 December 2025.

This page is concerned with one of its effects, which is on the Indian Succession Act, 1925. Its Second Schedule omits section 213 of that Act, omits ", 213" from section 3(1), and amends section 370 so that a certificate is barred only where a right must be established "by letters of administration". Until 20 December 2025, section 213 provided that no right as executor or legatee could be established in a court without probate, or letters of administration with the will annexed. The bar was confined to the wills of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jainas of the kinds in section 57, and to certain Parsi wills. Section 57 reaches wills made on or after 1 September 1870 within territories then under the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal or within the ordinary original civil jurisdiction of the High Courts at Madras and Bombay, and wills made elsewhere so far as they concern immovable property inside those limits.

Who it binds

The Act is of general application and takes effect on the enactments it amends. For the succession provisions, it affects an heir or legatee under a will who needs to establish a right in a court, and the courts that hear such claims. A will made by a Hindu leaving a flat in Mumbai to a daughter in London could be a will the old section 213 caught.

What has changed, and when

The text has no commencement clause of its own. Section 4 saves things already done and rights already acquired. The rule that the right fails in court without probate has gone, but section 57 and section 212 of the Succession Act are untouched. Probate remains available. It stays conclusive under section 227 and is one of the documents that section 214 recognises. What went is the rule that the right fails in court without it.

A will proved in a court outside the State, within or beyond India, can ground letters of administration with an authenticated copy annexed, under section 228 of the Succession Act.

What turns on it in practice

For a family in which the heir lives abroad, the change removes a step that used to be unavoidable where the will fell within section 57. A legatee no longer has to take the will through probate before suing on it. Probate is still worth having where the title will be tested, because it is conclusive under section 227 and is one of the documents section 214 recognises, and a bank or a registrar may still ask for it.

The change leaves the foreign exchange side as it was. An heir living abroad can inherit property in India, but money leaves the country only up to USD 1 million a year without the Reserve Bank's approval. The two questions are separate: who has the right to the property, which the succession law decides, and how much of the value can be sent abroad, which the foreign exchange law decides. The site's note on inheriting property from abroad treats them together, and the Act matters in this practice because it affects the first of them.