What the power of attorney has to say
A general authority to "manage my affairs in India" will not get a sale deed registered. The document has to identify the property, and it has to spell out the specific powers your attorney needs: to sign and execute the sale deed, to appear before the sub-registrar and present it for registration, to admit execution, meaning to confirm to the registrar that the deed was signed, to receive the sale consideration, and to hand over possession.
Special or general is the wrong question to start with. What matters is whether the powers you actually need are written down. Anything not granted is not granted, and the sub-registrar reads the document literally.
Under Section 2 of the Powers-of-Attorney Act 1882, when your attorney signs in their own name under the authority you gave them, that signature is as effective in law as your own.
The rule that catches NRIs: Section 33
This is the provision that decides whether your document works, and most people have never heard of it.
Section 33 of the Registration Act 1908 says that for the purposes of presenting a document for registration, only certain powers of attorney "shall alone be recognized". Where the principal does not reside in India, the recognised form is one "executed before and authenticated by a Notary Public, or any Court, Judge, Magistrate, Indian Consul or Vice-Consul, or representative of the Central Government".
Read that carefully. It is not enough to sign the POA and post it. You have to execute it in front of one of those officers, and that officer has to authenticate it.
Since 1 July 2024, Section 84 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, which replaced Section 85 of the Evidence Act, lets a court presume a POA authenticated that way really was executed and authenticated. That presumption is worth having if the sale is ever questioned.
Which officer, and in which country
The two routes that work are an authentication in the country where you live, and the Indian mission route. What counts as authentication depends entirely on the country you sign in, so check yours before you book anything.
The mission route itself takes two forms. Some missions execute the document, meaning you sign in front of a consular officer. Others attest a document you had notarised locally. The mission's own page decides which, and they differ even between posts in the same country.
Which of those applies depends on whether your country and India are both parties to the Hague Apostille Convention. An apostille is a single certificate a country issues to prove that a document from it is genuine. Some countries take the apostille route, others take a consular attestation chain, and the Indian mission route works regardless.
We set out the route for the United States, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia and Singapore on a separate page, because the issuing authority and the order of steps genuinely differ.
One exception to know before you book anything. If you are signing in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait or Qatar, there is no apostille to get, because none of the three is a party to the Apostille Convention. The document goes through the Indian Embassy or Consulate instead, and in the UAE and Kuwait the missions require the executant to attend in person.
What the mission asks you to bring can turn on which passport you hold, and the missions do not all publish the same thing. Read your own mission's page, or our country page, before you pay for a local notarisation you may not need. If your country is not one of the six we cover, check it against the Hague Conference list before you book.
Does the power of attorney itself have to be registered?
Honest answer: it is not settled nationally, and you should register it anyway when the POA authorises a sale.
A power of attorney is not named in the central list of compulsorily registrable documents in Section 17 of the Registration Act. But the Karnataka High Court has held that where a document gives the attorney a right to sell immovable property, it creates an interest in that property and so requires compulsory registration.
Several states have legislated the point rather than leaving it to the courts, so the answer turns on where the property is. Ask about your state before you assume the central position applies.
Kerala is the one to know about, and it is the one most often missed. Section 17(1)(g), inserted with effect from 30 September 2013, makes a power of attorney creating any power of management, administration, development or transfer relating to immovable property compulsorily registrable, unless it is given to a father, mother, wife, husband, son, adopted son, daughter, adopted daughter, brother, sister, son-in-law or daughter-in-law. On 28 July 2026 a Division Bench of the Kerala High Court applied it to exactly this situation: a power of attorney executed abroad and authenticated at an Indian mission still has to be registered in Kerala before it can be used to sell. The court held that the Section 33 route only makes the document good for presenting documents for registration, and that compulsory registration is a separate requirement that stands on its own.
Maharashtra has required registration of an irrevocable power of attorney relating to transfer of immovable property since 1 April 2013. Karnataka has enacted a similar requirement, but it is not law yet, and a lot of writing about it says otherwise. The Registration (Karnataka Amendment) Act 2025, Karnataka Act 42 of 2025, was gazetted on 28 July 2025. That is the Act being published, not brought into force: it commences on a date the State Government appoints by notification, and the implementing rules were still a draft out for consultation in February 2026. Check the current position before you rely on it either way. Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu have their own amendments on the same subject, each worded differently.
Registering it costs far less than losing the transaction.
The Suraj Lamp myth
You will be told that the Supreme Court "banned" property sales on power of attorney. It did not.
In Suraj Lamp and Industries v State of Haryana, decided 11 October 2011 and reported at (2012) 1 SCC 656, the Court struck down the practice of transferring property by a bundle of agreement to sell, general power of attorney and will, used to avoid stamp duty. It reiterated that "immovable property can be legally and lawfully transferred or conveyed only by a registered deed of conveyance".
In the same judgment the Court said in terms: "We make it clear that our observations are not intended to in any way affect the validity of sale agreements and powers of attorney executed in genuine transactions." It then gave close to your situation as the example, an owner who grants a power of attorney to a spouse, child, sibling or other relative to manage their affairs or to execute a conveyance.
The POA is how your attorney signs. The registered sale deed is what moves the title. Those are two different documents doing two different jobs.
What goes wrong on the day
Refusals nearly always come down to one of five things.
The POA does not specifically authorise sale, or does not authorise presenting the document for registration. The authentication is not one of the forms Section 33 recognises. The document was never stamped in India, or was stamped after the window closed, or the duty was never adjudicated, which means asking the stamp authority to fix the amount. The property is described loosely enough that the sub-registrar cannot match it to the record. Or the attorney turns up without their own identification and the original POA.
Each of those is fixable in advance and expensive to fix on the day, because the buyer, the registrar's appointment and often a bank disbursal are all lined up behind it.