A relative's occupation is not automatically adverse possession. Where he entered with the family's consent, time does not run against you until he openly denies your title. From that point Article 65 of the Limitation Act, 1963 allows twelve years to sue for possession — and Section 27 then extinguishes the right itself, not merely the remedy.
Jurisdiction. The Limitation Act, 1963, the Specific Relief Act, 1963 and the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 are central statutes and apply uniformly across India. Where this note describes the jamabandi and mutation record, that material is specific to Rajasthan. Consultation by telephone and video is available for clients living outside India, which is how matters of this kind are ordinarily conducted; Section 30 of the Advocates Act, 1961 entitles an advocate to practise throughout India.
Everything turns on this, and most people abroad ask the wrong question first. They ask how to remove the relative. The question that decides the matter is when, if ever, the clock started.
A brother who was asked to look after the house, a cousin left in the fields, a tenant's family that stayed on after the tenancy ended, a widowed aunt allowed to live in a portion — each of these is in permissive possession. Permissive possession is possession held with the owner's leave, and it does not become adverse merely because it has gone on for a long time. Thirty years of it, standing alone, still gives the occupant nothing.
The Supreme Court's statement of the test in Karnataka Board of Wakf v. Government of India (2004) is the one to hold on to. Possession said to be adverse must be nec vi, nec clam, nec precario — peaceful, open and continuous — and it must be adequate in continuity, in publicity and in extent to show that it is adverse to the true owner. A person who came into possession under an arrangement must disclaim his original character and plead and prove independent hostile possession, to the knowledge of the owner, for the whole statutory period. And the proposition that matters most to a client living overseas: in the eye of the law an owner is deemed to be in possession so long as there is no intrusion, and non-use of the property by the owner, even for a very long time, does not affect his title.
So the fact that you have not visited since 2009 is not, by itself, a problem. What matters is whether something happened at the other end that was hostile and open.
An act of ouster — a denial of your title that is out in the open, not merely private ill-will.
In practice the moment is usually documentary rather than dramatic, and in Rajasthan it is usually visible in the revenue record. The occupant applies for and obtains mutation of the khata in his own name; he starts being assessed and paying revenue as khatedar rather than on your behalf; he mortgages the land or executes a sale deed; he takes the crop as owner rather than accounting for it; or, most simply, he refuses your share in terms when it is asked for. Each of those is an assertion of a right inconsistent with yours, and each carries a date.
That is why the first step in these matters is documentary and costs nothing dramatic: obtain the current jamabandi and the mutation register, and read the dates. The revenue record in Rajasthan will usually tell you exactly when the name changed and on what order, and that date is frequently the strongest single fact in the case — for you if it is recent, against you if it is not. It is also a fact that can be gathered from Jodhpur without your travelling anywhere.
A related discipline is worth knowing because it cuts in your favour at trial. A defendant who wishes to defeat you by adverse possession must plead it specifically and prove when it began; he cannot both admit that he entered permissively and claim to have held adversely from the start, because the two pleas contradict each other. Vague assertions of long possession, unaccompanied by a date and an act of ouster, do not discharge that burden.
Twelve years for the suit that most owners need, but which twelve years depends on what you are suing on.
Where you sue as the person with title — you inherited it, it stands in your name, you hold the sale deed — the article is Article 65, and the twelve years run from when the possession of the defendant became adverse to you. Not from his entry, not from your discovery of it, and not from the date you decided to act.
Where you were yourself in possession and were thrown out, and you would rather not put your title in issue at all, the article is Article 64: twelve years for possession based on previous possession and not on title, running from the date of dispossession. It is the narrower plea but it can be the quicker one.
What happens at the end of the period is the part people underestimate. Section 27 of the Limitation Act, 1963 provides that on the determination of the period limited for instituting a suit for possession, the right to the property is itself extinguished. Limitation elsewhere in the Act bars the remedy and leaves the right intact. Here it takes the right away. Ravinder Kaur Grewal v. Manjit Kaur (2019) is the other face of the same coin: a person who has perfected title by adverse possession may use it as a sword and not only as a shield, and may himself sue for possession under Article 65. The occupant does not simply become hard to evict; on the far side of twelve years he becomes an owner who can litigate against you.
Which is the honest answer to the question clients most often put to me — whether it is better to wait and settle it within the family after the elders are gone. Waiting is not a neutral option in this branch of law. It is a transfer.
Sometimes, and it is under-used.
Section 6 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963 provides that a person dispossessed of immovable property without his consent and otherwise than in due course of law may sue to recover possession notwithstanding any other title that may be set up in such suit. You prove that you were in possession and that you were put out; the defendant is not permitted to defend by pleading that he is the better owner. That is the whole point of the section — it exists to make self-help unprofitable.
Its price is strictness. No suit under Section 6 may be brought after the expiry of six months from the date of dispossession, or against the Government. And no appeal and no review lies from any order or decree passed in it. Section 6(4) then makes clear what the section does not do: it bars nobody from suing separately to establish title and recover possession on that basis.
For a client abroad the six months are usually the difficulty, because dispossession is often discovered months after it happened. Where the window is still open it is worth taking; where it has closed, Section 5 of the same Act points to the ordinary route — a person entitled to possession of specific immovable property may recover it in the manner provided by the Code of Civil Procedure, which is the title suit under Article 65, with cancellation of any fraudulent instrument joined to it where one exists.
It can, and an application for interim protection ought to go in with the plaint rather than after the damage.
Order XXXIX Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 allows a temporary injunction where property in dispute is in danger of being wasted, damaged or alienated by a party to the suit, and — since the amendment — where the defendant threatens to dispossess the plaintiff or otherwise cause injury to him in relation to the property in dispute. Rule 2 covers restraint of a continuing injury. Where an injunction is granted without notice to the other side, Rule 3A requires the court to endeavour to dispose of the application within thirty days.
The practical value of that order is preventive. Once the land has been sold to a stranger who pleads that he bought it for value without notice, the case stops being a family dispute and acquires a defendant with an independent case to argue and money to argue it with. An injunction restraining alienation and creation of third-party rights, registered and communicated, is a much smaller thing to obtain at the start than to repair later. Alongside it, a caveat and a notice to the office of the Sub-Registrar concerned are ordinary precautions in a matter where a sale is feared.
Four things, in this order, and none of them requires a flight.
First, obtain the record — the jamabandi or the record of rights, the mutation entries with their dates and orders, the property tax or revenue receipts, and the registered documents of title in the family's chain. This is the exercise that tells you whether you are inside twelve years or outside them, and until it is done any advice you receive is guesswork.
Second, fix the date of the act relied on as adverse, and preserve the evidence of it — the mutation order, the sale deed, the letter or message in which the share was refused. Dates reconstructed years later from memory do not survive cross-examination; a document produced from the tehsil does.
Third, execute a special power of attorney, not a general one. It should be confined to the named property and the named purpose, executed before the Indian Mission where you live or notarised and apostilled and then stamped in India within the period allowed. A general power of attorney given to a relative to look after everything is, in my experience, one of the commonest origins of the disputes described on this page rather than a cure for them. The point is developed in the note on securing inherited land in Rajasthan from abroad.
Fourth, send a notice, but only after the first two steps. A notice sent before the record is read tells the occupant precisely what to consolidate, and a relative who has been quietly permissive for years can respond by asserting hostility for the first time and dating it back. Where several heirs are involved, it is generally better to resolve the shares between them — by partition or family settlement — before anyone writes to the person in possession, since a divided family is the occupant's strongest asset.