It deliberately does NOT let your attorney sell, mortgage, gift, exchange or long-lease any immovable property of yours. That omission is the whole point of the document. One honest qualification to that, because the deed says it four times and a reader is entitled to know where it is not absolute. The exclusion is an exclusion of the power to sell IMMOVABLE PROPERTY. There is exactly one sale power this deed can carry, it is optional, and it reaches no land: if you choose the second option under "Shares, securities and mutual funds", the attorney may buy and sell shares, units and securities in your existing accounts, with every rupee of proceeds credited to your own bank account and no security ever put into the attorney's name. Choose the first option there, or leave that question blank, and the deed authorises no sale of anything at all. Excluding the power to sell property is the cheapest fraud-prevention step a Doaba family can take, and it is also the cheapest document. In Punjab, item (f) of entry 48 of Schedule I-A to the Indian Stamp Act, 1899, as substituted by the Indian Stamp (Punjab Amendment) Act, 2023 (Punjab Act No. 2 of 2024, gazetted 15 January 2024), charges 2% of the consideration or of the Collector rate, whichever is higher, on a power of attorney that authorises the attorney to SELL immovable property where the attorney is not a family member. In the Union Territory of Chandigarh the equivalent charge is higher still and it is not limited to a stranger: the Administration's published rates table charges a general power of attorney carrying the power to sell at 3% of the value or the consideration, whichever is higher. A power that authorises no sale of immovable property enters neither. You pay the plain fixed figure instead — Rs 2,000 in Punjab, Rs 75 in Chandigarh, on the sources and with the caveats set out under Stamping — and, far more importantly, nobody standing at a Sub-Registrar's window in Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Nawanshahr or Kapurthala with your Mukhtiarnama in hand can execute a sale deed of your land with it, because the document on its face says they cannot. Use this deed if you are eighteen or over, of sound mind, own or have an interest in property or affairs in Punjab or in the Union Territory of Chandigarh, and are appointing an individual you trust completely — typically a brother, a son, a mother or a cousin who lives in the village or the town where the property is. It is drafted so that it can be signed abroad before an Indian Consul or Vice-Consul, or before a Notary Public with an apostille, and then stamped in India within three months of first receipt here under section 18 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899. ONE DEED PER OWNER. This template is written for a single Principal acting for that person's own share and no more. It has one name, one age, one address and one signature block, and it cannot be made to carry two executants. Where a khewat is held jointly — and in the Doaba most ancestral khewats are — each co-sharer who wants an attorney must instruct a separate Mukhtiarnama of their own. Do not add a second brother's name to this one by hand: the signing form the deed prescribes in clause 3.4 names one Principal, and an attorney who deals with the whole khasra on the strength of one brother's Mukhtiarnama is acting outside it. Do NOT use it to sell. It grants no power to sell immovable property at all, and even a deed that did grant one would convey nothing: in Suraj Lamp & Industries Ltd. v. State of Haryana, decided on 11 October 2011 and reported at (2012) 1 SCC 656, the Supreme Court held that the sale-agreement plus general-power-of-attorney plus will method transfers no title, and that an interest in immovable property passes only under a duly stamped and registered conveyance. If you genuinely intend to sell, instruct a registered sale deed, or a special power of attorney limited to that one sale — and budget for the 2% under item (f) in Punjab if the attorney is not your spouse, child, parent, sibling, grandparent or grandchild, or for the flat 3% in Chandigarh whoever the attorney is. Do NOT use it if you are already losing mental capacity. India has no enduring or lasting power of attorney; section 201 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 ends the agency the moment the principal becomes of unsound mind, and guardianship is the route instead. Do NOT use it for a court appearance alone — a vakalatnama does that job. Do NOT use it to authorise a company's officer; a board resolution does that. Do NOT use it where the principal is a minor, a company, a Hindu Undivided Family acting as such, or a trustee acting for a trust. And do NOT use it where you need only one narrow job done, such as getting a single mutation sanctioned: a special power of attorney is cheaper to stamp — Rs 1,000 in Punjab, Rs 15 in Chandigarh on the same published tables — and very much safer to hand over. One warning for Chandigarh in particular. If your property is an allotted or leasehold site in a Chandigarh sector, the Estate Officer's allotment file is the title — there is no jamabandi for it — and a transfer needs the Estate Office's own prior permission under Rule 7 of the Chandigarh Estate Rules, 2007 and, on a leasehold site, payment of one-third of the unearned increase. Following the Supreme Court's judgment of 10 January 2023 in Residents Welfare Association v. Union Territory of Chandigarh, SLP(C) Nos. 4950 and 5489 of 2022, the Deputy Commissioner-cum-Estate Officer's Public Notice effective 10 February 2023 permits the transfer and mutation of a residential unit only within a short list of categories, pending the decision of the Chandigarh Heritage Conservation Committee, and whether that decision has since been taken was not established for this template. This deed will let your attorney run the file, reply to a notice and pay the demands; it will not, and cannot, get a transfer through on its own.
