Your consulate stamped the POA. The sub-registrar in India rejected it anyway. Here is why.

You did the obvious thing. You signed the power of attorney in front of the Indian consulate, couriered it to your brother in India, and the sub-registrar would not act on it. This happens constantly, and it is almost always one of three things.

The attestation was the wrong kind for your country. The document was not stamped in India inside the three-month window. Or a general power of attorney was leaned on to do the sale itself, when a sale needs a registered deed. Consular or notary attestation only proves the document is genuinely yours. It does not cure a stamping gap or a wrong-form problem, and the registrar checks all three.

There are two clean ways to sign a POA abroad so India will accept it, and then one deadline that trips people up.

If your country is in the Hague Apostille Convention, sign before a local notary and get the document apostilled. India has accepted apostilled documents since 2005, so that is legally enough. If your country is not a member, sign before the Indian Embassy or Consulate, or before a local notary and then have the embassy attest it. Either route proves the POA is genuinely yours.

Then the clock. A document signed outside India must be stamped in India within three months of first reaching India, under Section 18 of the Indian Stamp Act. The window runs from the day it lands in India, not the day you signed, and a POA that misses it can be treated as inadmissible. One honest caveat: even with a valid apostille, some sub-registrars still insist on embassy attestation for a property deed, so confirm what your particular registrar wants before you courier anything.

Here is the misunderstanding that costs the most. Your attorney can sign the sale for you; what cannot happen is treating the power of attorney itself as the sale.

The Supreme Court settled this in the Suraj Lamp case: a sale done through a power of attorney, a so-called GPA sale, does not pass valid title. Title passes only through a registered sale deed. A power of attorney can authorise your attorney to execute that deed, but it cannot stand in for it. So two things have to be right. The POA should be a special power of attorney that names the exact property and the specific power to sell, registered where your state requires it and where the sub-registrar expects it in practice. And the buyer still takes the property through a proper registered sale deed.

That is also why a loose general POA is the wrong tool here: it invites exactly the GPA-sale shortcut the court struck down, and it hands the holder far more power than the job needs.

The nightmare version is real: the relative holding your POA sells or mortgages the property without your say, and you find out afterwards from abroad. You have three moves, and you should make all three quickly.

The way to avoid all of the above is to make the POA small on purpose. A dishonest holder can only do what the document lets them.

Use a special power of attorney, not a general one. Tie it to a single property by its survey or plot number, and spell out exactly what the holder may do and, just as usefully, what they may not. Put an end date on it. Keep the signed original with you and give the holder a certified copy for the specific task. And decide up front how you would revoke it, so that if trust breaks down you can act in days, not months.

None of this is expensive. It is the difference between handing someone a key to one room and handing them the keys to the house.

A lawyer drafts the POA and a registrar records it, but the parts that go wrong for NRIs are the cross-border ones: which attestation your country needs, the stamping window, whether your state makes the sale-POA compulsorily registrable, and how the sale that follows is taxed and repatriated.

That coordination is where a CA who does NRI property work earns its place: getting the POA right for your state the first time, then handling the TDS, the return and the repatriation on the sale it enables. It is a lot cheaper than fixing a rejected deed, or a misused one, after the fact.