Tribal Women's Inheritance Rights After the Ram Charan Verdict

For decades, Scheduled Tribe women have lived in a legal blind spot: Section 2(2) of the Hindu Succession Act keeps most tribal communities outside its ambit, leaving inheritance to uncodified customs that often favor sons alone.

- TDG NETWORK

The Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Ram Charan & Ors v. Sukhram & Ors cracks open that exclusion.The case arose from a land dispute ina tribal family where a woman's branch was cut out of ancestral property on the ground that customary law did not recognize daughters’ succession rights. With no codified tribal personal law and no clear, proven custom on record, the Court treated the issue as one of first principles: could women be excluded from inheritance simply because they were women?

‘A bench of Justices Sanjay Karoland Joymalya Bagchi answered that question bluntly. Excluding female heirs from ancestral property, it held, is “unreasonable and discriminatory,” even in tribal societies, when no specific law mandates such exclusion. In such a vacuum, courts must apply justice, equity and good conscience, read with the Constitution's guarantee of equality.