Inheritance Rights of Children Adopted under the Juvenile Justice Act: A Legal Grey Area in Indian Law

The legal institution of adoption is a twofold process; it brings a child who needs it a family, and it means a child who needs it gets a legal heir. India Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, as updated in 2021, is the most broad-based secular adoption law, cutting across religious lines and offering full legal recognition to all adopted children, no better than their biological siblings. This seems to be a full and full-fledged legal guarantee on paper. Practically, though, it is not. This paper explores a controversial yet little studied conflict in Indian law: although the Juvenile Justice Act grants full filial status to adopted children, the personal succession laws of India, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Indian Succession Act, 1925, and the un codified principles governing Muslim inheritance, are based on completely different legal frameworks and do not necessarily or consistently acknowledge JJ Act adoptions to the purposes The consequence is a legal grey zone where a child can be legally adopted by one statute and then legally invisible under the succession law applicable to the property of his or her adoptive family. The paper contends that such a gap is not just a technical discrepancy, but a substantive deprivation of rights. In case of uncertainty in inheritance, the whole idea of adoption is compromised. The law only partially protects a child who has been granted family membership but not the right to property. The article critically evaluates the gap between adoption law and succession law in India, considers the pertinent judicial rulings such as Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India and Lakshmi Kant Pandey v. Union of India and evaluates the doctrinal fault lines and proposes practical legislative and judicial amendments to make the promise of the Juvenile Justice Act not only whole, but hereditary.