# How to Revoke a Power of Attorney from Abroad

**To cancel a power of attorney over India property while you live outside India: execute a Deed of Revocation before a notary in your country, apostille or attest it, courier it to India, pay stamp duty, register it at the same sub-registrar office that registered the original POA, serve written notice on the attorney by registered post, publish a public notice in one English and one vernacular newspaper, and send a copy to every institution that has seen the POA.** Skipping the registration or the notice is what turns a cancelled POA into a POA that still works.

Most owners who search for this have already decided. The relative stopped answering. The agent went quiet after a rent cycle. Something in the last statement did not add up. The question is not whether to revoke. It is how to revoke so that the document actually stops working, in the office where it matters, before somebody uses it.

That is the part people get wrong. A revocation that lives in your inbox stops nothing. Indian law is specific about when a cancellation takes effect and against whom, and the answer in both cases is: when the other side learns of it, not when you sign it.

## First, check that you can revoke at all

Two sections of the *Indian Contract Act, 1872* decide this.

**Section 201** is the ordinary rule. An agency ends when the principal revokes the authority, when the attorney renounces it, when the business of the agency is completed, or when either party dies, is adjudicated insolvent, or becomes of unsound mind. A plain management POA falls here. You can revoke it.

**Section 202** is the trap. Where the attorney "has himself an interest in the property which forms the subject matter of the agency, the agency cannot, in the absence of an express contract, be terminated to the prejudice of such interest." This is the agency coupled with interest. If a developer holds a POA over your plot as part of a development agreement, or a buyer holds one as part of a part-performed sale, that POA is protected while the interest lasts. You cannot cancel it by writing a letter.

Two limits on Section 202 matter to owners:

- The interest must be in the subject matter of the agency, not in the fee. In *Vishnucharya v. Ramachandra* (ILR 3 Bom 253) the court held that remuneration or commission is not the kind of interest that protects the attorney from revocation. A property manager paid a percentage of rent does not acquire an irrevocable POA by being paid.

- Calling a POA "irrevocable" in its own text does not make it so. The label follows the substance. In *Seth Loon Karan Sethiya v. Ivan E. John* (AIR 1969 SC 73) the Supreme Court held that an agency created for valuable consideration to secure the agent's own interest cannot be revoked. The test is whether that interest exists, not whether the word appears in the deed.

Read your deed before you draft anything. If there is a development agreement, a loan, an unregistered sale agreement or a family settlement sitting behind the POA, get a lawyer to look at it. Revoking a Section 202 POA needs a suit, not a deed.

For everything else, keep going.

## The Deed of Revocation

The document is short. What matters is that it identifies the thing it is killing with enough precision that a sub-registrar can match it.

It should carry:

- Your full name as it appears on the original POA, your passport number, and your address abroad.

- The attorney's full name and address.

- The original POA identified by its date, its registration number, the book and volume, and the sub-registrar office where it was registered. Copy these from the registered copy, not from memory.

- A description of the property the POA covered, matching the title deed.

- A clear operative sentence revoking, cancelling and withdrawing all powers granted, with the date from which the revocation takes effect.

- A statement that the attorney is required to return the original POA and hand over all documents, keys and accounts.

- Your signature, witnessed, with the notarial or consular certificate attached.

Have an Indian property lawyer draft it. A US or UK revocation template will not name the Indian register correctly, and the sub-registrar reads the register reference before anything else.

## Registration is not optional if the POA was registered

This is the step owners skip and regret.

A deed cancelling a registered power of attorney that dealt with immovable property is compulsorily registrable under *Section 17(1)(b) of the Registration Act, 1908*. The Allahabad High Court held exactly this in *Chandrama Singh v. Mirza Anis Ahmed* (AIR 2011 All 114). The court found that because the original POA dealt with immovable property worth more than one hundred rupees and created rights of alienation, the cancellation had to be registered, and that where "the document/notice of cancellation was compulsorily registrable and it was not registered, then even upon its execution or service upon the attorney it would not in any manner affect the rights created."

Read that again. Executing the cancellation and serving it on the attorney was not enough. The rights survived because the cancellation was unregistered.

So: register the Deed of Revocation at the same sub-registrar office where the POA was registered. Same office, not a convenient one. That is where a buyer's lawyer, a bank's lawyer and the sub-registrar's own clerk will look when the original POA is produced.

If the original POA was never registered, register the revocation anyway where the property lies. It costs a few thousand rupees and it converts your cancellation from a private letter into a public record. The whole point of this exercise is the public record.

Stamp duty on a revocation deed is set by each State's Stamp Act and is a fixed amount rather than a percentage of property value in most States. The figure changes with State amendments, so ask your lawyer for the current number in your State before you courier the deed. We do not publish a rupee figure here because a stale one would cost you a trip to the sub-registrar.

## Notice: the section that decides whether your revocation works

*Section 208 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872*: "The termination of the authority of an agent does not, so far as regards the agent, take effect before it becomes known to him, or, so far as regards third persons, before it becomes known to them."

The illustrations to that section are blunt. A principal revokes an agent's authority by letter. Before the letter arrives, the agent sells the goods. The sale binds the principal, and the agent still earns his commission. In a second illustration, a buyer who knew of the original authority but not of the revocation is protected when he pays the agent.

Apply that to your flat. If your attorney signs a leave-and-licence agreement, or a sale agreement, on a Tuesday, and your revocation reaches him on a Wednesday, the Tuesday act binds you. If a buyer or a bank deals with the attorney without knowing of the revocation, they are protected too.

Which is why the revocation runs on two tracks, and both have to be documented:

**Track one, the attorney.** Send the registered Deed of Revocation by registered post with acknowledgement due to every address you have. Send it again by courier with tracking, and by email. Keep the acknowledgement card, the courier proof of delivery and the email. Those three pieces of paper are what fix the date on which the authority ended as against him.

**Track two, the world.** Publish a public notice, and write directly to everyone who has ever been shown that POA.

## The public notice

Publish a short notice in two newspapers that circulate where the property is: one English daily and one in the State language. The notice names you, names the attorney, identifies the POA by date and registration number, describes the property, and states that all powers stand revoked from a stated date and that no person should deal with the named attorney in respect of the property.

Keep the full original page of each newspaper, not a clipping. Scan it the day it appears. If a dispute follows, the dated page is your evidence of general notice under Section 208.

Where the POA was described as irrevocable and you are cancelling it on legal advice, the public notice is doing more work than usual. Publish it in both papers and keep both pages.

## Who else needs a copy

Every institution that has been handed the POA once will keep honouring it until you tell them otherwise. Write to each one, attach the registered revocation, and ask for written acknowledgement:

- **The sub-registrar** who registered the POA, and the sub-registrar for the area where the property lies if different.

- **The land-records or municipal office** holding the khata, mutation or property-tax record.

- **The housing society or apartment association**, which is often where a sale or a tenancy starts.

- **Your bank**, for any account the attorney could operate, and any bank that holds the property papers.

- **The tenant**, in writing, with the new payment instruction. A tenant paying rent to a revoked attorney in good faith has a defence, and you have a mess.

- **The Registrar of the housing board, development authority or builder**, where the property is not yet conveyed.

- **Your chartered accountant**, if the attorney was filing or signing anything on your behalf.

Send each by registered post or by a channel that produces a receipt. The receipts are the file.

## What revoking does not undo

Revocation is prospective. It stops the next act. It does not unwind the last one.

*Section 203* of the Contract Act lets the principal revoke authority "before the authority has been exercised so as to bind the principal." Acts already validly done under the POA stand. If the attorney registered a lease last month within his authority, the lease is good.

There is one large piece of comfort. A power of attorney never transferred ownership in the first place. The Supreme Court settled that in *Suraj Lamp & Industries (P) Ltd. v. State of Haryana* (2011), holding that a power of attorney is not an instrument of transfer of any right, title or interest in immovable property. Title moves only by a registered deed of conveyance. So an attorney who holds your GPA does not own your flat, and never did. What he can do is sign a conveyance as your agent, which is exactly what revocation and its public record are designed to stop.

If a sale has already been registered on a POA you did not authorise, revocation is no longer the remedy. That is a suit for cancellation under Section 31 of the Specific Relief Act plus a criminal complaint, and it is covered in our guide on [POA misuse, detection and recovery](/guides/power-of-attorney-misuse-nri).

## The POA may already be dead and nobody told you

Under Section 201, an agency terminates by operation of law when the principal or the attorney dies, is adjudicated insolvent, or becomes of unsound mind, and when the business of the agency is completed.

Two practical consequences for NRI owners.

If your attorney has died, the POA ended on that date. The family holding his papers has no authority. Get the death certificate and put it on record with the sub-registrar and the society, because the document itself does not look any different.

If your POA was granted "for the sale of Flat 402" and Flat 402 was sold, the agency is finished by completion. An attorney continuing to act on that deed is acting without authority.

Neither of these removes the need to file a revocation where the deed is still floating around. A dead agency and a public record of a dead agency are different things, and only the second one protects you.

## The sequence, from abroad, in order

- **Get the registered copy of the original POA** from the sub-registrar through your lawyer, so the revocation quotes the right register details. One to two weeks.

- **Have the Deed of Revocation drafted** in India, emailed to you as a PDF. Two to three days.

- **Print and sign it before a notary** in your country of residence. Same day.

- **Apostille it** through the competent authority in your country, or have it attested at the Indian mission. Follow the same route the original POA took, since that is the route the sub-registrar has already accepted for this property. One to three weeks depending on the country and the mission. The routes and the passport-type rules are set out in our [apostille and attestation guide](/guides/apostille-attestation-india-property-documents) and, for the US corridor, in [power of attorney from the USA to India](/guides/power-of-attorney-from-usa-to-india).

- **Courier the original to your lawyer in India.** Three to seven days.

- **Stamp and register** at the same sub-registrar office. Your lawyer can present it under your existing arrangements, or you appoint someone by a fresh, narrow POA for this single act. One to two weeks.

- **Serve the attorney** by registered post, courier and email on the day of registration.

- **Publish the public notice** in two newspapers within a few days of registration.

- **Write to the institutions** on the list above, attaching the registered deed.

- **Pull an Encumbrance Certificate** for the property sixty days later and read it. This is how you find out whether anything was registered against the property while all of the above was in motion.

Budget six to ten weeks end to end, most of it authentication and courier time.

## The document to grant next, if you grant one at all

Owners who revoke a POA usually still need someone in India who can act. The instinct is to hand the same broad General POA to a different relative, which reproduces the problem with a new name on it.

Grant a Special POA instead: named property, named acts, an expiry date, and an express exclusion of any power to sell, mortgage, gift, exchange or create a charge. A sub-registrar will not register a sale under an SPA that grants only management powers, which is the whole protection. Our [POA for property management template guide](/guides/poa-for-property-management-template) sets out the clauses, and [can a General POA transfer property title](/guides/can-general-poa-transfer-property-title-india) explains why the broad version buys you nothing you actually need.

## FAQ

**How do I revoke a power of attorney from abroad?**
Execute a Deed of Revocation before a notary where you live, apostille it or have it attested at the Indian mission, courier the original to India, pay stamp duty, and register it at the same sub-registrar office that registered the POA. Then serve the attorney by registered post, publish a public notice in one English and one vernacular newspaper, and send the registered deed to the society, the bank, the tenant and the land-records office.

**Does a revocation of power of attorney have to be registered in India?**
If the POA was registered and dealt with immovable property, yes. In *Chandrama Singh v. Mirza Anis Ahmed* (AIR 2011 All 114) the Allahabad High Court held that such a cancellation is compulsorily registrable under Section 17(1)(b) of the Registration Act, 1908, and that an unregistered cancellation does not affect the rights created, even after it is served on the attorney. If the POA was unregistered, register the revocation anyway to create the public record.

**When does the revocation actually take effect?**
Under Section 208 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, termination does not take effect as against the attorney before it becomes known to him, or as against third persons before it becomes known to them. The date you sign is not the date it works. Keep the registered-post acknowledgement and the newspaper pages, because those fix the dates.

**Can I revoke an irrevocable power of attorney?**
Not by writing a deed, if the attorney genuinely holds an interest in the property under Section 202 of the Contract Act, such as a developer under a development agreement. The word "irrevocable" in the document is not what decides it; the existence of the interest is. Where the attorney's only stake is a fee or commission, the POA is revocable, following *Vishnucharya v. Ramachandra*. Get a lawyer to read the deed and whatever agreement sits behind it.

**Do I need to publish a newspaper notice?**
Publish it. Section 208 makes revocation effective against third persons only when it becomes known to them, and a dated newspaper page in the city where the property lies is the cheapest general notice available. Use one English daily and one in the State language, and keep the full original pages.

**What happens to acts my attorney already completed?**
They stand. Section 203 allows revocation before the authority has been exercised so as to bind you; acts already validly done under the POA remain binding. Revocation stops the next act, not the last one.

**My attorney has died. Do I still need to revoke?**
The agency ended on the date of death under Section 201, so there is nothing left to revoke. Put the death certificate on record with the sub-registrar, the society and the bank, because the POA document in the family's hands looks unchanged and will be presented as if it still works.

**What does this cost?**
The Indian side is small: the lawyer's drafting fee, a fixed stamp duty set by your State's Stamp Act, the registration fee, and two newspaper notices. The cost that varies is authentication abroad, which depends on your country's apostille fee or the mission's attestation fee and on courier charges. Ask your lawyer for the current State stamp figure before you send the deed, because it changes with State amendments.

## Revoke it, then do not recreate the problem

66 MG Road runs your India property under a narrow Special POA drafted with counsel: management authority only, sale and mortgage power excluded by design, one named manager per property, and an expiry date. Dated photo proof on every visit, itemized billing, rent to your NRO account, and a quarterly Encumbrance Certificate check so anything registered against your property surfaces in weeks rather than years. We operate in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Gurgaon.

If you are not ready to appoint anyone, start with the [₹20,000 Property Health Check](/property-health-check). One visit, dated photos, a boundary survey, the Encumbrance Certificate read line by line, and a written risk report. No keys, no POA, no money custody.

*Saurabh Garg, founder, 66 MG Road*

## Sources

- Indian Contract Act, 1872, Section 208 (when termination of agent's authority takes effect), Indian Kanoon: [https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1307050/](https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1307050/)

- Chandrama Singh & Ors v. Mirza Anis Ahmed, AIR 2011 Allahabad 114 (revocation of a registered POA is compulsorily registrable under Section 17(1)(b), Registration Act 1908), BCAJ: [https://bcajonline.org/journal/power-of-attorney-revocation-by-registered-deed-registration-act-section-171b/](https://bcajonline.org/journal/power-of-attorney-revocation-by-registered-deed-registration-act-section-171b/)

- Registration Act, 1908, Section 17 (documents of which registration is compulsory), India Code: [https://www.indiacode.nic.in/show-data?actid=AC_CEN_18_43_00004_190816_1523340837338&orderno=18](https://www.indiacode.nic.in/show-data?actid=AC_CEN_18_43_00004_190816_1523340837338&orderno=18)

- Seth Loon Karan Sethiya v. Ivan E. John, AIR 1969 SC 73, and Vishnucharya v. Ramachandra, ILR 3 Bom 253 (agency coupled with interest under Section 202), iPleaders: [https://blog.ipleaders.in/revocation-power-attorney/](https://blog.ipleaders.in/revocation-power-attorney/)

- Suraj Lamp & Industries (P) Ltd. v. State of Haryana (2011), full text, Indian Kanoon: [https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1565619/](https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1565619/)

- Revocation of power of attorney for NRIs: consulate attestation, registration at the original sub-registrar, notice to the attorney, newspaper notice, LegalHelpNRI: [https://legalhelpnri.com/revocation-of-power-of-attorney/](https://legalhelpnri.com/revocation-of-power-of-attorney/)

- Procedure for cancellation of power of attorney in India, India Law Offices: [https://www.indialawoffices.com/knowledge-centre/procedure-for-cancellation-of-power-of%20Attorney%20in%20India](https://www.indialawoffices.com/knowledge-centre/procedure-for-cancellation-of-power-of%20Attorney%20in%20India)

## Compare and cost

- [The NRI Property Management Companies in India: A Comparison You Can Check](/guides/best-nri-property-management-companies-india)
- [What NRI Property Management Costs in India: The Four Models and What Hides in Each](/guides/nri-property-management-cost-india)
- [NoBroker NRI Services Review: What the Pages Promise and What They Leave Out](/guides/nobroker-nri-services-review)

---

Source: [https://66mgroad.com/guides/revoke-power-of-attorney-from-abroad](https://66mgroad.com/guides/revoke-power-of-attorney-from-abroad) · 66 MG Road. Full LLM brief: https://66mgroad.com/llms.txt