Not under the Act. Residence under s.6(1) is decided once for the whole previous year and there is no provision for apportioning it, so a person who is resident is resident for every day of the year including the days after he left for good. The route that does exist is the treaty: where the person is also a resident of the other State for the later period, the tie-breaker in the residence article can place him there for that period, and the income of that period then falls outside the Indian charge.
Start with what the Act does not give you. Section 6(1) fixes status by reference to days of stay 'in the previous year', and s.5 then applies that single status to the whole of the year's income. There is no clause that apportions a year, no relief for the part of the year after a genuine emigration, and no discretion in the officer to give one. A client who crosses 182 days in India before he leaves in October is resident for the year, and the third limb of s.5(1) brings in the salary he earns abroad from November to March. That is the honest starting point and it should be said to the client early, because it is what makes the day count worth fighting.
Two things do work, and they work differently.
The first is inside the Act and it is not a split at all. Explanation 1(a) to s.6(1) substitutes 182 days for 60 days for an Indian citizen who leaves India in the previous year for the purposes of employment outside India. It does nothing for a person already over 182 days in the year itself — the 60-day figure appears only in the second limb — so it is a conditional argument that is reached only after the arithmetic, and the note in this library on counting the days sets out how it is run.
The second is the treaty, and it does allocate a period. Where the person is a resident of India under s.6 and also a resident of the other State under that State's law for the later part of the year, the residence article's tie-breaker decides which State he is a resident of for that period, and the allocation articles then follow. The Bangalore Tribunal did exactly that in Dy. CIT v. Kumar Sanjeev Ranjan, applying Article 4 of the India-US agreement to a period of dual residence, finding the centre of vital interests closer to the United States on the second limb, and holding that the income of that period could not be brought to tax in India. Two orders already in this library run the same exercise on other treaties and are worth reading together, because one goes each way on the facts: the Delhi Tribunal in Sameer Malhotra treated the assessee as a resident of Singapore for the period on habitual abode, and the Mumbai Tribunal in Ashok Kumar Pandey found the centre of vital interests closer to India and taxed the foreign income here.
What the treaty route requires is often skipped. The person has to be a resident of the other State under that State's own law for the period — which is a question of that country's law and not of Indian law — and s.90(4) then requires a certificate of residence from that government before any relief under the agreement can be claimed. The tie-breaker is a fixed sequence, not a balance of factors: permanent home available to him, then centre of vital interests, then habitual abode, then nationality, then mutual agreement. Each limb is reached only if the one before it does not decide the question, so a submission that opens on habitual abode without disposing of the permanent home has skipped a step the officer will use.
Two limits on how far the allocation goes. It reaches the income of the allocated period and nothing else, so Indian-source income of the same period and all income of the earlier period stay where they were. And it does not touch the Act's annual status for anything other than the charge: the return is still filed on the status the Act gives, and the reporting schedules follow that status rather than the treaty's allocation.
One further point that is put in every one of these files and is worth having ready. The Board refused a general exclusion of days for a year in which people were stranded in India by the pandemic flight ban, reasoning that a general exclusion could leave a person resident nowhere. Any argument that asks for days to be discounted because of circumstance rather than under a provision will be met with that refusal.
A client who has plainly ceased to live in India expects the year to be halved, and an adviser who lets that expectation stand will lose the file. Saying at the outset that the Act gives a single annual status, and that the only apportionment available runs through the other country's residence law and a certificate, changes what evidence gets collected and when — the tenancy, the local licence, the family's movement dates and the certificate all have to be in hand before the tie-breaker is argued, not after the officer has asked for them.
I hold a Mauritius TRC. Can the department still deny me treaty relief on the capital gains?
We outsource back-office work to our Indian subsidiary. Does that give us a permanent establishment in India?
My protocol has an MFN clause and I applied the lower rate India later agreed with an OECD member. Was I entitled to?
My closing stock is worth more than it cost me. Does the rise in value get taxed, and does it matter that the goods were lying outside the place where I trade?
The AO has taxed my advance licence and DEPB benefits in the year I exported. Is that the right year?
I am a foreign company on a turnkey contract. I fabricated the platform abroad and only installed it in India. Can the Department tax the offshore fabrication profit because the contract was one indivisible whole?
Our family business is run entirely outside India, but two coparceners are partners in Indian firms with family money. Does that make the family resident in India?
I am resident in India but my rubber estate and my business are in Malaysia. The treaty says that income may be taxed there. Can India tax it as well?
Every page in this library links to what it was written from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.