Kiran Sanu bought a flat in Juhu, Mumbai, in 1987 and later moved abroad, first to New Zealand and eventually settling in Australia, where she took up New Zealand citizenship and holds an Overseas Citizens of India card. Her son Amit Sanu married Mughda Sahal in December 2004, and the couple went on to live in the Juhu flat. Years later, a dispute arose over Kiran Sanu's right to the property, and she turned to the Maintenance Tribunal constituted under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007. The matter eventually reached the Senior Citizen Appellate Tribunal, whose order the daughter-in-law then challenged before the Bombay High Court.
The threshold objection raised against Kiran Sanu was a citizenship argument rather than a dispute about the flat itself. Since she had given up her Indian citizenship and now held only an OCI card, the argument ran that she fell outside the protective scheme of the 2007 Act altogether, which exists for the welfare of parents and senior citizens and was presumably intended for people who remain Indian nationals. If that argument succeeded, an entire category of elderly parents who had emigrated and taken OCI status, while their adult children and property disputes stayed behind in India, would have no recourse to the Act's summary maintenance and eviction machinery at all.
Justice N.J. Jamadar rejected that reading by going back to how the statute itself is drafted. Section 2(h) defines a senior citizen as an Indian citizen who has attained the age of sixty, and citizenship does real work in that definition. Section 2(d), which defines a parent, carries no such citizenship requirement and no age threshold either. Since the dispute before the Tribunal concerned a parent's claim rather than a generic senior citizen's claim, the Court held that an OCI cardholder is entitled to invoke the remedies available under the Act so long as the other conditions for relief are satisfied, regardless of whether she still holds Indian citizenship.
That conclusion put the Bombay High Court at odds with a view the Karnataka High Court had taken earlier in Dephny Gladys Lobo v. Assistant Commissioner and Presiding Officer, Senior Citizen Maintenance Tribunal, where citizenship had been treated as relevant to eligibility under the Act. Justice Jamadar did not treat that divergence as a reason to hold back, choosing instead to anchor the ruling in the plain text of the two separate definitions rather than attempt to reconcile the two High Courts' positions. A split of this kind between High Courts on a welfare statute used by elderly Indians and their OCI relatives abroad is the sort of question the Supreme Court may eventually be asked to settle, and until it does, a parent's eligibility may genuinely depend on which High Court's jurisdiction the dispute falls within.
Having cleared that threshold question in Kiran Sanu's favour, the Court turned to the specific order under challenge, which had directed the daughter-in-law to vacate the Juhu flat. Applying the settled Bombay High Court position that the Act's eviction machinery cannot be used as a blunt instrument where the underlying claim does not rest on an established maintenance need, the Court set aside the Appellate Tribunal's direction requiring Mughda Sahal to vacate and restored the Maintenance Tribunal's own order in its place. The two findings sit together rather than in tension: the Court confirmed that an OCI parent can knock on the Tribunal's door at all, while also insisting that whoever does so must still satisfy the Act's actual conditions for relief, rather than treat the forum as a quick route to possession.
Families split across borders in this way are common enough that the ruling's reach goes well beyond one Juhu flat. Many Indian parents who emigrate decades ago keep a residential interest back home, often occupied by a married child or other relative, and disputes of this kind tend to surface only once the parent is elderly and seeks either to return, to secure income from the property, or simply to assert a right to live there undisturbed. A citizenship-based objection of the sort raised here could have shut an entire generation of such parents out of the Act's protective machinery purely on account of a status change that has nothing to do with their need for maintenance or shelter.
Lawyers drafting or defending these petitions should plead the parent-child relationship squarely under Section 2(d) rather than resting the claim on senior citizen status under Section 2(h), since the two definitions now carry materially different eligibility requirements after this ruling. Families structuring succession or occupation arrangements involving a parent who has emigrated should also factor in that an Indian flat remains within reach of the Act's protective machinery for that parent even after Indian citizenship is relinquished, provided the claim is framed and proved as a genuine maintenance or welfare need rather than a bare demand for possession.