You moved back from Australia with a super balance. India's Section 89A relief does not cover it.

Section 89A of the Income-tax Act, renumbered Section 158 in the Income-tax Act 2025, lets an Indian resident defer tax on income accruing in a foreign retirement account until the year the foreign country actually taxes it. It exists to remove a specific timing mismatch, the one where India taxes your retirement savings years before you can legally touch them. But it works only for accounts held in a notified country, and the government has notified exactly three: the USA, the United Kingdom and Canada, under Notification 25/2022 dated 4 April 2022. Australia is not on that list, and neither are Singapore or the Gulf.

The practical effect is blunt. A returning NRI with a US 401(k) files Form 10-EE (renamed Form 40 under the Income-tax Act 2025) and defers the Indian tax to match US timing. The same person with an Australian superannuation fund cannot file that election at all, because super sits in a country the relief does not reach. So the tool that fixes this problem for American and British and Canadian accounts is closed to you, and you are left with the ordinary rule for a resident instead.

This is not a loophole you have missed or a form you forgot. Section 89A has covered only these three countries since it was introduced by the Finance Act 2021, no later notification has added Australia, and the Income-tax Act 2025 carries the same design forward under Section 158, still limited to notified countries. Planning around it means accepting the relief is unavailable and using timing instead.

Once you are Resident and Ordinarily Resident (ROR), the conservative reading is that it can, and not only when you withdraw. There is no special provision doing this to you; it is the ordinary rule. A resident is taxed on worldwide income, and when the government brought in Section 89A the Finance Act 2021 memorandum described income in these foreign retirement funds as otherwise chargeable in India on an accrual basis. Section 89A is the escape hatch from that accrual charge, and because Australia is not notified, the escape hatch is shut. Australia already taxes your super's earnings at 15% inside the fund while it grows, but that is the fund's own tax, not yours, so it does not cleanly credit against your Indian tax the way tax you paid personally would.

Here is the genuinely unsettled part, and any honest adviser will tell you it is unsettled. A super in the accumulation phase is a preserved, non-vested interest: you cannot draw it until a condition of release, usually reaching preservation age 60. Income arguably accrues only when you have a right to receive it, so there is a real argument that growth you cannot yet withdraw has not accrued to you, and accrual tax should not bite until you can access it. Others apply the accrual reading literally and include the growth every year. There is no clean Indian ruling that settles this for superannuation specifically, so the safe assumption is accrual, and the planning in the next section is built to keep you from ever having to test it.

The reason this matters more for Australia than for the US is exactly the Section 89A gap. An American account gets to defer the accrual question by election. Yours does not, so the question is live from the day you become ROR.

The one lever that reliably protects your super is timing, not a form. For the first two to three financial years after you return, you are usually Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident (RNOR), and foreign income, including your super's growth and any withdrawal, stays outside Indian tax as long as you receive it into a foreign account rather than an Indian one. You qualify for RNOR broadly if you were a non-resident in nine of the ten prior financial years, or were in India for 729 days or fewer across the previous seven years, under Section 6 of the Income-tax Act.

Reaching preservation age 60 and drawing your super inside that window is the clean move. The money comes out while India is not yet taxing your worldwide income, and Australia generally does not tax a withdrawal after 60 either, so the drawdown can land in the one gap where neither country is charging you. If you return well before 60, the window may close before you can access the fund; in that case the planning shifts to managing the accrual position and the treaty credit, which is a CA conversation rather than a single clean answer.

The mistake to avoid is receiving super money into an Indian bank account during the RNOR years, which can drag it into Indian tax that timing would otherwise have kept out. Keep the receipt offshore until the position is set.

The India-Australia Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, signed in 1991 and amended by a protocol in force from 2013, decides who taxes a super pension once India can tax it. Under Article 18, a private pension paid to a resident of India is taxable only in India, your country of residence. That word only matters: Australia gives up its taxing right, and a super withdrawal taken after preservation age 60 is tax-free in Australia anyway, so in the ordinary case there is no Australian tax to credit and the pension is simply taxed once, in India.

The wrinkle is that Article 18 was written for periodic pensions, and Australian super is often taken as a single lump sum, especially by someone repatriating the balance in one move. Most CAs treat a post-retirement lump sum as pension-equivalent and apply Article 18, but the lump-sum point is arguable, and where a lump sum does not fit the pension article it falls to the residual income article, still taxable in India for a resident. One genuine exception runs the other way: a government-service pension is covered by Article 19 and can be taxable only in Australia, so an ex-Australian-government employee should check that separately.

The foreign tax credit is the tool for the exceptions, not the norm. Where Australia did tax a slice, such as access to your super before 60, you claim the credit under Section 90 on Form 67, with a Tax Residency Certificate to support the treaty position. The paperwork has to be in before you file: miss Form 67 and the credit can be denied for the year, turning relief you were entitled to into tax you did not need to pay.

On the Australian side, your super stays in the Australian system wherever you live. Earnings inside an accumulation-phase fund are taxed at 15%, and withdrawals after preservation age 60 are generally tax-free to you in Australia. One trap to clear up: the Departing Australia Superannuation Payment (DASP) is only for former temporary-visa holders. If you held permanent residency or citizenship, you do not use DASP; you access your super under the normal preservation rules, which is why the age-60 timing matters so much.

On the Indian side, once you are ROR your super is a foreign asset you must report in Schedule FA of your Indian return, every year, whether or not you draw anything from it. This is separate from whether the growth is taxed: even in a year you touch nothing, the asset itself has to be disclosed. Leaving it off is what turns a manageable tax question into a Black Money Act 2015 exposure, where the penalties are built to punish non-disclosure of foreign assets rather than the tax itself.

During the RNOR years Schedule FA does not apply to you, so the disclosure obligation switches on at the same moment the accrual tax risk does: the day you become ROR. Treat that date as the trigger for both, and have the super mapped, the drawdown timed and the disclosure ready before you reach it.