After a death in the family — Maharashtra

Required for everyone

Depends on your setup

Journey-level pitfalls

• Costly mistake —Only one thing here has a deadline: registering the death, within 21 days. Everything else on this page can wait until you have the capacity for it. If you do one thing this week, make it that — and if you can, ask someone a step removed from the grief to handle it. A cousin, a neighbour, a colleague. It is the single most useful thing an outsider can offer in that fortnight, and most people never think to ask.
• Costly mistake —If the death happened in a hospital, the hospital reports it — not you. The official position is explicit that deaths in institutions are not to be reported by the household. What is worth doing, if anyone has the presence of mind, is checking the spelling of the name and the date before the record goes in. Every claim you make in the next year gets matched against it.
• Costly mistake —Get many more certified copies of the death certificate than seems reasonable. The first is free; the rest are charged. The bank, the insurer, the pension office, each mutual fund, the gas and electricity connections, the housing society and any heirship application will each want their own, and most will not give it back. Families routinely make three or four trips for copies they could have collected in one.
• Costly mistake —Three different documents get called 'the inheritance certificate', and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this whole area. The administrative legal-heir certificate comes from the revenue office and is what PF, gratuity, pension and utilities usually accept. The heirship certificate comes from the Zilla Court under the 1827 Regulation and formally recognises who the heir is. The succession certificate is a court instrument for debts and securities only. Before pursuing any of them, ask the office in front of you — in writing — which one they mean and whether they need one at all.
• Costly mistake —You may not need a certificate at all. An heir may assume management of, or sue for the recovery of, the property — moveable or immovable — without any previous application to the court to be formally recognised (Section 1 of Bombay Regulation VIII of 1827). The Regulation's own preamble says certificates exist to give confidence to people holding or owing money to the estate. So the certificate solves an institution's hesitation. Find out whether that hesitation exists before you spend months on it.
• Costly mistake —A succession certificate does not transfer the house. It covers debts and securities — the Judge lists them in the certificate, and it reaches only what was listed. Agents sell it as 'the inheritance document'; it is not. If it is immovable property you are dealing with, this is the wrong instrument and the months spent on it are lost.
• A heirship certificate does not give anyone the property either. It confers no right to the property — it only indicates who is, for the time being, in legal management of it, the holder is accountable to everyone with an interest exactly as if no certificate existed, and it is annulled on proof that someone else has a preferable right (Section 7).
• Name every surviving heir, including the ones the family finds difficult. The court route runs a one-month public proclamation inviting objections precisely so disagreements surface; an omission does not avoid the dispute, it defers it to a worse moment — an annulment, or a contested investigation that a judge can suspend until a full civil suit decides the point.
• Missing the 21 days is not fatal, and nobody should carry guilt about it. Within 30 days it is a late fee. Up to a year, written permission and an affidavit before a notary. Beyond a year, a first-class magistrate's order. It gets harder, but there is no point at which the door closes.