India Has No Law for What Happens to Your Digital Assets

India’s succession statutes were written for a world of physical and registered assets. Neither the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 nor the Indian Succession Act, 1925 mentions digital accounts, and no separate framework has been enacted since. The result is that a category of asset which for many households is now substantial sits outside the succession machinery entirely.

The gap has two quite different shapes depending on the asset.

For accounts held with an intermediary - a bank, a broker, an exchange, an email provider - there is at least someone to make a claim against. Access is then governed by that provider’s own terms of service and internal process rather than by succession law, which is why outcomes vary so widely between institutions and why heirs are so often told different things by different providers about the same estate.

For Self-Custodied Crypto the Gap Is Absolute

For self-custodied crypto, the gap is absolute. An asset held in a private wallet is controlled by the private key and nothing else. If the keys are not recoverable, no will, no court order, no succession certificate and no heirship declaration can reach the asset - the legal entitlement is perfectly clear and completely unenforceable. This is the one category where the estate planning has to be operational rather than documentary: the mechanism for the key reaching the heirs is the plan, and a bequest without it transfers nothing.

Neither Pending Reform Is a Succession Framework

Two developments are worth tracking without overstating either. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 creates, in Section 12, a limited right to nominate someone to exercise a data principal’s rights after death - which reaches personal data held by an intermediary, not assets generally. And MeitY’s forthcoming Digital India Act, intended to replace the IT Act, 2000, is widely expected to address digital inheritance. Neither amounts to a succession framework today, and planning has to assume the current position rather than an anticipated one.

The practical consequence is narrow but consistent: for digital assets, naming them in a will establishes who is entitled to them and does nothing about whether anyone can actually obtain them. Those are separate problems, and only the first one is solved by the document.

Plan operationally, not documentarily. Naming digital assets in a will establishes who is entitled to them and does nothing about whether anyone can obtain them - and for a self-custodied wallet, the mechanism by which the key reaches the heirs is the entire plan.