On April 30, the Delhi High Court did something that no family should ever require a court to do. It ordered an interim freeze on the ₹ 30,000-crore estate and assets of late businessman Sunjay Kapur because the family could not agree on who owned what or whether the will was even genuine. This is not simply a celebrity inheritance saga. It is a parable for a crisis silently unfolding across India’s family business landscape that combines legal dysfunction, financial recklessness and a psychological toll on families that rarely makes the headlines.
The numbers are pretty staggering. A 2025 HSBC Global Private Banking report estimated that nearly 70 percent of India’s 334 billionaires are preparing to pass on approximately $1.5 trillion in wealth—a sum exceeding a third of India’s GDP. This is one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in Indian history. And yet, insights from Entrust Family Office found that fewer than half of Indian business-owning families have a formally documented succession plan in place. The gap between wealth creation and wealth transition is structurally dangerous.
PwC’s 12th Global Family Business Survey, released this February, sharpens the paradox. Indian family businesses are among the most ambitious in the world, with 75 percent targeting growth of over 15 percent through 2026. Yet the same survey flags that succession planning, board diversity and governance modernisation remain areas of urgent, unaddressed need. Confidence and ambition are running decades ahead of preparation. The result, increasingly, is what we see in the Kapur case: wealth built over a lifetime, contested and potentially eroded in a courtroom over months.
What makes the Sona Comstar-linked dispute particularly instructive is its layered complexity. There is the disputed will, allegedly executed days before Kapur’s death, challenged by his children as forged, surrounded by what the Delhi High Court itself called “suspicious circumstances”. There is the Rani Kapur Family Trust, which the late industrialist’s elderly mother claims was created without her informed consent after she suffered a stroke. And there are the children from a previous marriage, whose financial and emotional futures are now entangled in litigation that could stretch for years.
Each layer reflects a different category of governance failure. There is the absence of a clear, registered and legally uncontestable will, the opacity of trust structures built on interpersonal trust rather than institutional safeguards, and the complete absence of governance structures such as a family constitution, defined ownership protocols or dispute-resolution mechanisms that could have insulated both the business and the family from rupture. These are not rare oversights, but systemic omissions across India’s family business ecosystem.
Shareholder wealth dissipation in such disputes is not merely theoretical. In promoter-led companies, contested ownership creates immediate governance paralysis. Boards—however independent on paper—become risk-averse and deferential in the face of legal ambiguity. Strategic decisions, from capital allocation to acquisitions, get delayed or diluted. Institutional investors, particularly foreign portfolio investors, reprice governance risk swiftly, even if silently. Despite Sona Comstar’s strong order book and professional management, no amount of operational performance can fully offset the discount imposed by unresolved ownership disputes.
There is also a deeper institutional issue at play: Indian capital markets still lack a robust framework for promoter succession disclosure. While regulations under the Securities and Exchange Board of India mandate disclosures on material risks, succession planning remains largely voluntary and opaque. This creates an asymmetry where investors price operational risk with precision but remain exposed to sudden governance shocks. As family-owned firms dominate large swathes of the Indian economy, this represents a systemic vulnerability.
Equally underappreciated is the human cost. Research in family psychology consistently shows that protracted inheritance disputes inflict long-term emotional damage, particularly on younger members. Relationships between siblings fracture, intergenerational trust collapses and family identity—often built over decades—unravels in adversarial legal settings. What begins as a financial dispute often ends as a permanent rupture of family cohesion.
India’s lack of an inheritance tax has historically reduced the perceived urgency of succession planning. But the Kapur case illustrates a critical insight: the absence of tax pressure does not eliminate risk; it merely shifts it. Instead of structured tax planning, families face unstructured conflict. Instead of predictable financial outflows, they incur unpredictable legal, reputational and relational costs. In effect, promoter-led companies have substituted fiscal discipline with legal uncertainty.
What, then, should business families do? The solutions are neither novel nor inaccessible, but they require intentionality. First, every family of substance must institutionalise estate planning through a registered, regularly updated will supported by clear medical and legal certification where necessary.
Second, trusts, when used, must be professionally structured, transparently documented and periodically reviewed for legal robustness. Third, families must move beyond ownership structures to governance systems: family constitutions, shareholder agreements and formal dispute-resolution mechanisms such as mediation clauses.
Fourth, and perhaps most critically, succession must be treated as a board-level strategic issue, not a private family matter. Listed family firms should voluntarily disclose succession frameworks, leadership pipelines and contingency plans. This is not merely good governance; it is a signal to investors that continuity risk is being actively managed. Finally, founders must confront the most difficult task of all: initiating conversations on succession while authority still resides with them. Deferred conversations do not disappear; they compound into crises.
Courts are blunt instruments for preserving family legacies. They are slow, adversarial and public. They are also, as the Kapur family is discovering, the institution of last resort when families fail to plan. India stands at the threshold of the largest wealth transition in its history. The question is whether it will be transferred by design, or through litigation and loss.
Tulsi Jayakumar | Professor, economics & policy, and Executive Director, Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship, Bhavan’s SPJIMR
(Views are personal)