New Delhi (ILNS): The Muzaffarnagar Family Court in Uttar Pradesh has ordered a wife to give her husband monthly maintenance of Rs 2,000. The husband is a tea seller, in dire straits, while the wife is a retired worker of the Army.
The husband has been asking for this alimony for ten years, and now that the order has come, he wants a third of his wife’s Rs 12,000 pension. The two are not divorced, but do not stay together either.
In the Khatauli Tehsil area of Muzaffarnagar, Kishori Lal married Munni Devi 30 years ago. They did not get along well, and shortly after marriage, they started living separately. Munni Devi got a job as a fourth class employee in the Indian Army in Kanpur, while Kishori Lal managed pretty badly with his tea shop.
When Munni Devi retired from the Army, she started getting a pension of Rs 12,000 every month.
Kishori Lal, however, could never come out of extreme poverty. Seeing his wife comfortable, he filed a lawsuit for alimony in the Family Court of Muzaffarnagar. That was ten years ago. He had asked the court to order his wife to give him regular alimony because his condition was quite pathetic and he knew it was likely to worsen in the coming days.
Kishori had demanded one-third of the wife’s pension as an allowance, which would have been Rs 4,000. The court, however, thought it fit to order a Rs 2,000 maintenance.
Kishori has been left dissatisfied, though.
This is not the first case of a wife being ordered to pay alimony to her husband.
A Delhi court had ordered a businesswoman to pay alimony every month to her husband who is struggling with poverty. The court had also ordered the woman to hand over one of her four cars to the husband. Later, this decision of the lower court was also upheld by the Delhi High Court.
-India Legal Bureau