Step one: control and management, not the karta
The basic test sits in Section 6(2), and the operative word is wholly. An HUF is resident if the control and management of its affairs is situated wholly or partly in India during the year. It is non-resident only if that control and management is situated wholly outside India. So even a small part of the HUF being run from India, a coparcener taking decisions there, the family's banking and assets handled in India, keeps it resident.
The key consequence is that the test follows the HUF, not the karta. An HUF with an NRI karta abroad is not automatically non-resident; if any part of its control and management remains in India, it stays resident and is taxed the ordinary way. The common myth, my karta is an NRI so our HUF is an NRI HUF, is simply false unless the whole management has genuinely moved abroad. For most families with roots and property in India, that is a high bar to cross.
Step two: the not-ordinarily-resident sub-test
Being resident is not the end of it, because a resident HUF can still be not ordinarily resident, which limits what India taxes. This second step, in Section 6(6), does look at the karta. A resident HUF is not ordinarily resident if its karta, the manager, was a non-resident in nine of the ten years preceding, or was in India for 729 days or less in the seven years preceding.
So the two steps work differently and are easy to conflate: step one decides resident or non-resident by the HUF's own control and management, ignoring the karta's personal residence; step two, only if the HUF is resident, brings in the karta's history to decide ordinarily or not ordinarily resident. The practical payoff is the same at the end: a non-resident HUF and a not-ordinarily-resident HUF are both taxed only on Indian-source income, with foreign income left out, while an ordinarily resident HUF is taxed on its worldwide income. Placing the HUF correctly across these two steps is what a CA does before filing.