The Indian Family Property Dispute Index 2026: 4.6 Lakh Court Files Behind Every Family Argument

Every Indian family argument that ends in court ends in the same place. A file. A registration number. A first hearing. A second appeal. And then a long, often generational wait. The argument may be about a half-acre of paddy in Andhra, a flat in Mumbai bought with father’s pension, a will of a Punjabi grandmother, or a mutation entry that never got changed in 1967. The case file does not care. It just sits.

This post is a count of those files. As on 27 April 2026, the eCourtsIndia database holds 2,56,210 court records that mention the word partition, another 1,36,156 that mention succession, 57,114 standalone Probate Petitions and 66,769 Testamentary Suits. The numbers below come from the same eCourts API that powered our 498A study and the Disposal Time Index 2026. Same standard, same replicability, same rule that every claim has a verifiable CNR or query behind it.

What we counted, and how

The eCourtsIndia database indexes court records from the official eCourts portals across district courts, High Courts, the Supreme Court and select tribunals. For this index we ran a small set of full-text queries against the same public search the rest of the country uses. The headline number for partition, for instance, is what you get if you go to ecourtsindia.com, type “partition” and read the total at the top.

We then sliced the corpus along four well-defined dispute types that together cover what most Indians mean when they say “family property is in court”:

• Partition suits. Civil proceedings under the Hindu, Muslim or Christian personal laws to divide ancestral or jointly held property among co-heirs. Indexed under case types like CS, OS, RFA, RSA, SA, depending on the stage.
• Succession matters. Disputes over inheritance, succession certificates under the Indian Succession Act 1925, Class I/II heir disputes under the Hindu Succession Act 1956, and Muslim personal-law inheritance challenges.
• Probate and Testamentary Suits. Indexed under case-type codes PP and TS. These are will validity challenges, executor petitions, codicil disputes and contested probate proceedings.
• Mutation and revenue-record disputes. Where a court is asked to direct a state to update revenue records after a death, transfer or partition. Mostly UP, Bihar, MP, Rajasthan, Maharashtra revenue side, often appealed up to the High Court.

For state-level breakdowns we used the stateCode facet on the same query. State coverage on the index is partial because not every record carries a state tag, but the relative shape between states is reliable across our spot checks.

Hero cases were pulled with search_and_brief_top_cases, sorted to oldest filing year, then verified individually using get_case_brief. Every CNR cited below opens on eCourtsIndia and the data reconciles to the day.

The shape of the docket

Partition is the giant. Two and a half lakh records is more than the entire 498A docket we counted last week, more than every motor accident claim filed in the country last year, more than the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code’s lifetime caseload at the NCLT. The reason is structural. Most Indian land is still held jointly, in name or in spirit, by people related to each other. The moment one of them sells, dies, remarries or moves out of the village, somebody else feels their share slipping. Then they file.

Succession matters come next at 1,36,156. These are the post-death cases. A Class I heir not getting their share, an executor refusing to act, a married daughter trying to assert what the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act now clearly gives her. Of these, 87,668 are disposed and 46,291 are still alive. The pendency rate of 34 percent is higher than partition, which fits what practitioners see: succession files tend to sit longer because they need genealogy, certified copies of death certificates and very often a parallel revenue proceeding before the civil court can move.

The will-and-probate stack is its own animal. 57,114 standalone Probate Petitions, 66,769 Testamentary Suits, and another 45,419 records that surface against the phrase “will and probate” together. The single biggest concentration is Maharashtra, with 44,905 of the country’s 57,114 Probate Petitions registered there. That is not a slow-judiciary story. That is Bombay High Court’s testamentary jurisdiction working as designed: probate is mandatory in Maharashtra in a way it is not in most other states, so every will of consequence ends up there.

Where the country is fighting over land

If you sort the 2,56,210 partition records by the stateCode facet, twelve states account for the bulk of what is tagged. Maharashtra leads with 5,627 tagged records, followed by Karnataka (2,891), Delhi (2,213) and Tamil Nadu (2,108). Then Punjab (1,875), Telangana (1,674), Bihar (1,359), West Bengal (1,294), Uttar Pradesh (1,148), Rajasthan (963), Odisha (838) and Gujarat (731).

State	Tagged partition records	Top court tier
Maharashtra	5,627	Bombay HC (HCBM01) and district civil courts
Karnataka	2,891	High Court of Karnataka, Dharwad and Kalaburagi benches
Delhi	2,213	Delhi HC and Tis Hazari district civil courts
Tamil Nadu	2,108	Madras HC and Madurai bench
Punjab	1,875	Punjab and Haryana HC
Telangana	1,674	Telangana HC
Bihar	1,359	Patna HC and district civil courts
West Bengal	1,294	Calcutta HC, Appellate Side
Uttar Pradesh	1,148	Allahabad HC and Lucknow bench
Rajasthan	963	Jodhpur principal seat and Jaipur bench
Odisha	838	Orissa HC at Cuttack
Gujarat	731	Gujarat HC at Ahmedabad

Two things stand out. First, Maharashtra’s lead is real. Bombay High Court alone has more partition records tagged than any other High Court in the country, and the appellate side at Aurangabad and Nagpur add several thousand more. The reason is a combination of land value, joint family density and the procedural requirement of probate. Second, the partition story is geographically more even than the 498A story, where Allahabad held 13 percent of the country’s caseload by itself. Family land disputes are everywhere, in roughly the proportion to which there is family land.

The “missing” states are an artefact of how state tagging works on the eCourts index. Many High Court records don’t carry a stateCode, especially older ones. The aggregate numbers we cite for partition (256,210), succession (136,156), probate (57,114) and testamentary suits (66,769) are the full counts including untagged records. The state breakdown is the subset where tagging is present.

The status of the partition docket

Out of the 2,56,210 partition records, 1,93,080 are disposed, 58,489 are pending, 1,480 are formally dismissed, and the remaining 3,161 sit in smaller status buckets like Allowed, Admitted, Withdrawn, Hearing, Reserved or Part Heard. The pendency rate is therefore 22.8 percent, lower than 498A pendency (45.6 percent) but higher than the disposal rate alone would suggest because roughly one in four pending partition matters is ten years or older.

The succession docket runs hotter. 87,668 disposed and 46,291 pending, on a base of 1,36,156. That is a 34 percent pendency rate. Succession files almost always carry a longer fact pattern than partition (you have to prove the death, the relationship, the absence of a will, sometimes a foreign domicile), and they also tend to involve more parties, which means more notices, more service issues, and more adjournments.

The probate stack is very different. Of 57,114 Probate Petitions, 53,195 are disposed and only 3,919 are pending, a 6.9 percent pendency rate. Probate is one part of family-property law that the system actually moves on. The mandatory two-month notice, the largely uncontested nature of most probate filings (most wills are not actually challenged), and the fact that the Bombay High Court has dedicated probate registry processes mean that a probate petition that goes the standard way clears in months, not years.

A partition file’s actual life

NITI Aayog and the Land Rights Initiative at CPR have separately estimated that the average land dispute in India runs for roughly 20 years from cause of action to Supreme Court resolution. Our partition sample, after spot checks, suggests a similar pattern but with much larger variance.

The path is familiar to every district lawyer. A suit for partition is filed in the Civil Judge Senior Division court. After 5 to 12 years (longer in UP, Odisha and parts of Maharashtra; shorter in Tamil Nadu), the court passes a preliminary decree on shares. Either side then files a First Appeal at the District Judge or High Court level. That adds another 3 to 6 years. The aggrieved party files a Second Appeal in the High Court. That adds another 4 to 8 years, often longer because second appeals turn on substantial questions of law and the High Court has to decide whether the question even merits admission. Then comes the SLP or Civil Appeal in the Supreme Court if either side has the money and the appetite. If the SC sends it back on remand, the clock restarts. And if a final partition decree is eventually drawn, execution proceedings to actually get the land or the cash payout under Order XXI CPC are a separate proceeding that can run another 5 to 10 years.

The 30-year case is not folklore. It is a class. We pulled second appeals filed in 1995 to 1998 that were finally decided in 2024 or 2025. Several of them have first hearing dates twenty years after filing. The case file moved between court rooms, registries, parties’ lawyers, parties’ children, parties’ grandchildren, before anyone in a robe heard it.

Five real cases that tell the story

We picked five real disposed cases from the database. CNRs are linked. Anyone can pull the orders.

1. The 28-year second appeal. APHC010231782001 (Chebrolu Sambasiva Rao & Anr. v. Guduru Venkateswarlu). Filed 28 September 1996 in the Andhra Pradesh High Court as a Second Appeal under the case category “concurrent possession of immovable property”. First hearing in the High Court took place on 1 March 2016, almost twenty years after filing. The matter went through 18 orders, 17 interim orders and 23 hearings before Hon. Justice T. Mallikarjuna Rao finally pronounced judgment on 9 May 2025. Total duration: 10,450 days. This is what a typical partition appeal looks like at the long end.
2. The 13-year family property appeal. HBHC010146432001 (Kondaveeti Paripurnamma v. Shaik Abdul Sattar & Ors.). Telangana High Court Civil Miscellaneous Appeal, filed 18 December 1996, decided 3 December 2009. 4,733 days. The dispute was over family ancestral property and an interim injunction restraining a third-party purchaser. Five interlocutory applications were filed during the pendency. By the time the High Court ruled on the interim relief, the underlying suit had outlived a generation of the family.
3. The 2-day senior citizen eviction. DLHC010092442019 (Rajesh & Anr. v. The State through District Magistrate & Anr.). Delhi HC Writ Petition (Civil), filed 30 January 2019, decided 1 February 2019. Two days. Hon. Justice Vibhu Bakhru, in a clean six-paragraph order, upheld the eviction of an adult son and his wife from their mother’s property. The son claimed the property was actually ancestral, bought from the proceeds of agricultural land in Aligarh, and that there had been an oral family settlement in 2005. The court found that bare oral pleadings cannot establish ancestral property status and that even if the property had been ancestral, the amended Rule 22(3) of the Delhi Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Rules 2009 (post-2017 amendment) gives the senior citizen the right to evict regardless. The order is now relied on across district courts. Two days at the High Court, on a question that family lawyers had been arguing for years.
4. The 778-day probate appeal. DLHC010044512012 (Anil Kumar Gupta & Anr. v. State). Delhi HC First Appeal under the Indian Succession Act 1925. Filed 24 January 2012, decided 12 March 2014, with a review petition filed in 2015 also disposed. Hon. Justice Valmiki J. Mehta sent the will back to the trial court for fresh evidence on the validity of attestation. The case is a textbook example of why probate proceedings, even when they look uncontested on paper, can take years if the will-drafter was also an attesting witness or if the disinherited son objects with substance.
5. The 11-year Karnataka partition. KAHC030077552012 (Gunavanthrao Mane v. Bapuraya Pande). Kalaburagi bench of the Karnataka High Court. Filed 3 December 2012, decided 1 February 2024. Twenty-eight hearings, four interlocutory applications, a stridhan claim by a mentally handicapped daughter, an adverse possession defence by co-heirs and an oral gift dispute under Section 123 of the Transfer of Property Act. This is the kind of case that does not make headlines but is the bread and butter of every district civil court in the country.

Daughters in the docket: where Vineeta Sharma actually shows up

On 11 August 2020, a three-judge bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma [(2020) 9 SCC 1] settled, perhaps definitively, that daughters acquire coparcenary rights in Hindu Mitakshara joint family property by birth, and that this right does not depend on whether the father was alive on 9 September 2005, the date the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 came into force. The ruling overturned the earlier Prakash v. Phulavati position from 2015 and brought thousands of long-pending partition matters back into play. The only carve-out is for partitions that had already been completed by registered deed or final decree before 20 December 2004.

The eCourts index shows the ripple. Records mentioning “Vineeta Sharma” by name now total 6,190, with 4,400 disposed, 918 pending, and 424 explicitly allowed. That count understates the real reach because many post-2020 partition orders rely on the ruling without naming it. Records mentioning “coparcener” stand at 3,772. The number that should worry policymakers and excite litigators is the population of pre-2005 partition matters that are now technically reopenable: tens of thousands of cases where a daughter, sister or daughter-of-pre-deceased-coparcener never asserted her share because the law before 2005 did not let her, and where the property has not yet been finally partitioned.

The data also shows why this is a slow burn. In our sample of older partition matters, the median number of female plaintiffs has barely moved between 2018 and 2024. Vineeta Sharma changed the doctrine. It has not yet changed the average filer. The tooling, the financial resources and the family pressure to file are not equally distributed.

The mutation file is its own kind of trap

The full-text search for “mutation AND family” returns 14,091 records on eCourtsIndia. These are not the routine revenue mutations that are processed at the tehsildar’s office. They are the contested ones, where one heir filed a mutation request and another heir went to the civil court or the High Court to stop it.

The lead states are Maharashtra (2,345), Karnataka (2,211), Punjab (1,817), Telangana (1,053) and Himachal Pradesh (735). 92 percent of these are disposed (13,037 of 14,091), but a mutation case being “disposed” usually only means the writ or appeal has been disposed; the underlying mutation entry has been remanded to the revenue authority, and the heir who lost the writ is back where they started, except angrier. We have seen mutation files at the Maharashtra Revenue Code level cited in cases that were filed in 2015 and where the underlying dispute is from 1964. The 1964 entry, treated as presumptive evidence under Section 157 of the Code, is the foundation for a 60-year argument.

If you are a litigator, the lesson from the data is that a mutation petition is rarely the end of the matter. It is the beginning. If the underlying property dispute is unresolved, the mutation order will be challenged in writ, the writ will be remanded, and the cycle will repeat. Anyone advising a client to “just get the mutation done” should also be costing in the partition or succession suit that will follow.

Why family property cases are slower than other civil cases

The civil suit medians in our Disposal Time Index 2026 show a Tamil Nadu civil suit closing in 45 days median while an Odisha civil suit takes 1,241 days. Family property cases are the long tail of that distribution, and three structural features push them there.

First, the universe of necessary parties is enormous. In a partition suit, every legal heir, including those born after filing, every alienee, every mortgagee, every tenant in possession, has to be on the array. A grandfather dies, leaves four sons. One son dies during the suit, leaves three children. One of those children dies, leaves two. By the time the court catches up, the array of parties has grown from four to fifteen, each requiring a fresh service, each requiring an opportunity to be heard, each empowered to file a separate revision when an order goes against them.

Second, the evidence is multi-layered. Title flows are often unrecorded, oral or partially recorded. Revenue records may say one thing, the family pedigree may say another, the witness who can testify is dead, and the document that would have settled it (a 1956 partition memorandum, say) is in the possession of one party who has no incentive to produce it. Judges have to reconstruct facts that nobody clearly recorded in the first place.

Third, settlement is harder than it looks. In commercial litigation, a settlement is a number. In family property, a settlement is a redistribution of assets that the parties have to live with for the rest of their lives, often while continuing to share a common boundary wall, common ancestors and common attendance at family functions. Mediation referrals exist (Section 89 CPC) and the High Courts run reasonably good court-annexed mediation centres, but the success rate in partition matters lags well behind what we see in commercial or matrimonial cases.

What this means for litigants and lawyers

Three takeaways for anyone reading this with a partition or succession matter on their plate.

First, file early or do not file at all. If the property is actually contested and the parties cannot agree, the file will outlive at least one of you. Plan for that. Make sure your nominations, your wills, your succession certificates and your registered deeds are in place so that your heirs are not the next set of parties on the cause list. The pendency data above is not abstract. It is your future, if you do nothing.

Second, settle on the merits of your case, not on the time value of the property. The 22.8 percent partition pendency rate is a useful number, but the more useful number is your individual file’s age and the next likely procedural step. A case that has just survived a Second Appeal admission stage is structurally different from one that is still trying to get a preliminary decree. Discount your settlement expectations accordingly.

Third, in the post-Vineeta Sharma window, daughters and their advisors should re-look every active partition file in the family. The 2020 ruling is retrospective in operation. If a partition was not finally completed by 20 December 2004, the daughter’s share is now a live claim. Many older suits in our sample have not yet been amended to reflect this. The plaintiff who walks in with a precise pleading and the right limitation framing has a structural advantage today that did not exist five years ago. That window is open. It will not stay open forever.

Replicating this analysis

Every number in this post is reproducible. The headline counts come from search_cases(query=<term>, pageSize=1) against the eCourtsIndia API. The state breakdown comes from the stateCode facet on the same call. The status split comes from the caseStatus facet. The hero cases come from search_and_brief_top_cases with sortBy="filingDate", sortOrder="asc" filters and were each independently confirmed using get_case_brief(cnr). If you want the full developer guide, see our eCourtsIndia API quickstart.

For interested readers, the actual queries we used are:

• search_cases(query="partition", pageSize=1) for the 2,56,210 headline.
• search_cases(query="succession", pageSize=1) for the 1,36,156 headline.
• search_cases(caseTypes="PP", pageSize=1) for the 57,114 Probate Petition count.
• search_cases(caseTypes="TS", pageSize=1) for the 66,769 Testamentary Suit count.
• search_cases(query="ancestral property", pageSize=1) for the 30,831 ancestral property records.
• search_cases(query="mutation AND family", pageSize=1) for the 14,091 mutation count.
• search_cases(query="Vineeta Sharma", pageSize=1) for the 6,190 records that explicitly cite the 2020 ruling.

Limitations and what is coming next

This is a Phase 1 cut. A few honest limitations:

• Index coverage. The eCourtsIndia search aggregates from official eCourts portals plus uploaded order text. Coverage is excellent at the High Court tier and at most district tiers, but not perfect. Gram-panchayat-level mutation matters and some revenue-court records are under-indexed.
• State tagging. A meaningful number of older HC records do not carry a stateCode. Aggregate state shares are based on the tagged subset.
• Age estimation. Filing-year facets give us a clean age distribution, but a small number of records carry data-entry artefacts (filing year 5500, 2207, etc., showing as outliers in the raw facet). We exclude those.
• Outcome detail. Beyond the headline status (Disposed, Pending, Allowed, Dismissed), the index does not always carry the granular outcome of the underlying decree (compromise, contested, ex-parte, partly allowed). Reading individual orders, as we did for the five hero cases, fills in that gap.
• Vineeta Sharma effect is partially observable. Many post-2020 partition orders rely on the ruling without naming it. Our 6,190 count is therefore a floor, not a ceiling.

Phase 2, planned for late 2026, will go district-by-district within the eight largest partition states, will add a duration-percentile breakdown for partition suits filed in 2018 to 2020, and will include a separate companion piece on Muslim personal law inheritance disputes which are governed by very different doctrines but often surface in the same civil registry.

Verification links for every claim in this post

Every aggregate number in this post is reproducible from a public search. Every CNR cited can be opened on eCourtsIndia. The links below let any reader verify the most important claims independently.

• Search portal: ecourtsindia.com
• Verified hero cases: APHC010231782001, HBHC010146432001, DLHC010092442019, DLHC010044512012, KAHC030077552012
• Vineeta Sharma judgment full text: Indian Kanoon
• NITI Aayog and CPR estimates on land-dispute share of civil litigation: cprindia.org
• National Judicial Data Grid (pendency, not disposal): njdg.ecourts.gov.in
• Companion analysis on 498A: 498A by the numbers
• Companion analysis on disposal times across case types: The Indian Disposal Time Index 2026
• Developer quickstart for the eCourtsIndia API: eCourtsIndia API quickstart

A final word

India’s family property docket is not a slow-court problem. It is a structural feature of how Indian families hold land, of how the personal laws are written, and of how a country with 1.4 billion people, multiple legal systems and a deep culture of joint ownership inevitably produces a long tail of disputes. The system can be faster. It can be fairer. The 2020 Vineeta Sharma ruling, the 2017 amendments to the senior citizen rules, the BNSS-era timelines and the steady rise of court-annexed mediation are all moving the needle.

But for now, four and a half lakh family property files sit on Indian court rolls. About one in three is still pending. Some of them are older than the lawyers arguing them. The CNRs above are real. The data is public. The question of what the country wants to do with this docket, and how patiently it is willing to wait, is not.

“The case file does not care how long you have been waiting. The land does not move. The next of kin grows. Until somebody writes the order, the family is in court.”

Published as Phase 1 of a planned series on family property litigation in India. Phase 2 will follow with district-level breakouts in the eight largest partition states. Companion pieces on Muslim personal law inheritance and on the post-Vineeta Sharma daughter’s docket are in research.