Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart, carried his residency dispute to the Bangalore bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal for assessment year 2020-21, the year in which he reported capital gains from the sale of his Flipkart shares. His position before the tax department was that he had shifted his base to Singapore and should be treated as a non-resident for Indian tax purposes that year, which would have kept the gains out of the Indian tax net or shifted the right to tax them to Singapore under the India-Singapore tax treaty.
The dispute turned on how many days Bansal had actually spent in India during the relevant previous year. Section 6 of the Income Tax Act lays down more than one way a person can end up being treated as resident, and the threshold that applies depends on whether the extended allowance for those going abroad for employment or business is available to a given taxpayer in a given year. The Tribunal found that Bansal's stay in India during the year exceeded sixty days, the shorter of the two thresholds under the ordinary residence test, and concluded on the facts before it that he did not qualify for the extended day count that is sometimes available to citizens and persons of Indian origin leaving India for employment abroad.
That finding alone was enough to make him a resident under the domestic law test, but Bansal's stronger argument was always going to be the treaty tie-breaker under Article 4 of the India-Singapore Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, which exists precisely to resolve cases where a person could be treated as a resident of both countries under their respective domestic laws. The Tribunal went into that question as well and held that, applying the tie-breaker criteria, Bansal came out a resident of India rather than Singapore for the year in dispute, which meant the treaty gave him no separate route out of Indian tax residency even if the domestic test alone had left room for argument.
With residency settled against him on both the domestic and the treaty question, the capital gains from the Flipkart share sale stayed taxable in India rather than falling outside the Indian tax base or being reallocated to Singapore under the treaty. The Tribunal's order ran to a lengthy discussion of the facts and the competing residency tests, reflecting how closely contested day-count disputes of this kind tend to be once an assessee has genuinely split time between two jurisdictions rather than relocated in a clean, unambiguous way. Disputes like this one rarely come down to a single disputed day; they tend to turn on how travel records, visa stamps and board minutes are read together over an entire financial year.
The order was not entirely one-sided on the numbers. Alongside its residency findings, the Tribunal directed the tax authorities to verify and release a pending refund of more than Rs 5.8 crore that Bansal said was still owed to him if it had not already been processed, separating the department's obligation to settle undisputed refund amounts from the live dispute over his residential status for the year. That split matters for practice, since it shows a tribunal will enforce a taxpayer's procedural entitlements, such as a pending refund, even while ruling against the taxpayer on the substantive residency question that drove the appeal in the first place.
Disputes of this kind are becoming more common as Indian-origin founders and senior executives increasingly hold assets, employment and board positions across more than one country, often with a major liquidity event, such as a share sale or buyback, falling in the same year as a planned relocation. A taxpayer who assumes that signing a Singapore or Dubai lease and taking up a new role abroad is enough to change tax residency for that year is taking a real risk if the actual day count in India for that specific year does not support the claim.
For Indian-origin entrepreneurs and senior executives who split their calendar between India and a base abroad, the ruling is a pointed reminder that residency is decided on a day count for the specific year in question and on the treaty tie-breaker, not on where a person says their life is centred or where their employer is headquartered. Anyone planning a move that depends on non-resident treatment for a year in which a large capital gain or share sale is expected should track actual days spent in India against both the domestic thresholds and the treaty tests well before the return for that year is filed, since a tribunal assessing the position years later will work from travel records and stay counts rather than intent.