The position of a minor in contract

Rules on a minor's agreement:

1. Void ab initio. Only a person who has reached the age of majority under the law he is subject to is competent to contract (s. 11); for most persons in India that age is eighteen. An agreement made by a minor is therefore void from the very start and creates no obligation on him: in the leading case the lender could recover nothing from the minor.
2. Cannot be revived later. Turning eighteen does not breathe life into the old agreement: the former minor cannot ratify it, and a new promise to honour it lacks consideration, because the old "debt" was never owed.
3. Minority can always be pleaded. Even a minor who lied about his age to get the loan may rely on his minority; the rule protects the minor rather than rewarding the lender's trust.
4. Restoring what is still in hand. Where the minor obtained goods or money by such deceit, the court may, on equitable grounds, order him to give back whatever of it he still has; it will not make him repay what is gone.
5. Necessaries. A supplier of goods reasonably necessary for the minor's support in his station in life (food, clothes, education; not luxuries or costly or unnecessary articles: utility, not ornament, is the test) is paid out of the minor's property (s. 68), never by the minor personally, provided the minor did not already have a sufficient supply of them; the claim never exceeds the value of the necessaries supplied, whatever price the minor promised.
6. No specific performance of a minor's agreement can be ordered.
7. Minor as beneficiary. Nothing stops a minor from receiving a benefit: as promisee or beneficiary he can enforce an agreement made for his benefit, such as a promissory note made out in his favour. For the same reason he cannot become a partner in a firm, though, if every partner agrees, a firm may let him share in its benefits (Indian Partnership Act, 1932, section 30).
8. Contracts by a guardian. A minor cannot contract, but his guardian may make a valid contract for him if it is within the guardian's powers and for the minor's benefit, and the minor can then enforce it; a guardian cannot, for instance, bind the minor to buy immovable property, while a sale of the minor's property by a court-appointed guardian with the court's sanction can be enforced by either party to it.

Conclusion. The law shields the minor from his own agreements: for necessaries only his property answers, and a contract binds him only when a guardian makes it within his powers for the minor's benefit.