Selling property in India from abroad usually means someone has to physically show up — for registration formalities, for buyer negotiations, sometimes for multiple rounds of documentation. Rather than making repeated trips, many NRI sellers execute a Power of Attorney (PoA) authorizing a trusted person in India, often a relative, to sign and complete the sale on their behalf. It's a common and legitimate tool — but it changes who can act, not who is legally and financially on the hook for the sale.
Getting the document itself right
Sources broadly recommend a Special (or Specific) PoA — narrowly scoped to the particular property and transaction — over a General PoA that hands over broader authority than a single sale requires. Because the NRI seller is abroad at signing, the PoA generally needs to be executed either before a local notary, with the notarized document then apostilled if the country is a Hague Apostille Convention member (the US, UK, Singapore, and Australia are commonly cited examples), or directly before the Indian Embassy or Consulate in the seller's country of residence, which sources describe as the route that needs no separate apostille step since the embassy's own attestation is accepted in India.
Neither of those steps is the end of it. A foreign-executed PoA generally isn't usable for an Indian property transaction until it's been stamped and adjudicated in India: sources point to Section 18 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899, as requiring the document to be presented for stamping within three months of first arriving in India, with a District Collector empowered to adjudicate the correct duty — and at least one court decision cited in these sources describes a PoA presented after that window being impounded and penalized rather than simply accepted late. Stamp duty itself is a state subject with rates that vary by state, so confirm the current requirement in the state where the property sits, and don't treat the three-month figure as something you can safely let slide.
The part a PoA cannot change
Whatever authority the PoA grants over signing and paperwork, it does not shift tax liability. Sources are consistent on this point: acts done by a PoA holder are legally treated as acts of the principal — the NRI seller — meaning Section 393(2) TDS is still calculated against the seller's status as an NRI (not the resident status of whoever holds the PoA), and the resulting capital gain is still assessed to the seller's own PAN. A PoA holder signing the sale deed doesn't make the transaction a resident-seller sale for tax purposes, and doesn't create any separate tax exposure for the PoA holder personally — the seller remains the one who owes the tax, claims any refund of excess TDS, and is named on the return.
In practice, a PoA is a logistics tool, not a tax-planning one — it solves the "I can't be there in person" problem and leaves the Section 393(2) withholding, refund, and capital-gains-reporting questions exactly where they'd be if the NRI seller had signed everything personally.