Income as per s.24 of Hindu Marriage Act does not include capital assets like lands and hereditaments
provisions of Section 24 herein below :--
"Where in any proceeding under this Act it appears to the Court that either the wife or the husband, as the case may be, has no independent ingoing sufficient for her or his support and the necessary expenses of the proceeding, it may, on the application of the wife or the husband, order the respondents to pay to the petitioner the expenses of the proceeding, and monthly, during the proceeding such sum as, having regard to the petitioner's own income and the income of the respondent, it may seem to the Court to be reasonable."
3. It is generally said that income is an expression of elastic ambit, a word of the broadest connotation, a term difficult to define in any precise general formula. But even in its widest amplitude, the expression, in our view, cannot take within its sweep the capital assets like lands and hereditaments and can only include the return accruing from those assets. Fruits of the tree are income, but not the tree; crops from the field are income, but not field, rents from land or house are income, but not the land or the house. Even our law relating to taxes on income, with its far-flung and ever-widening tentacles, has not covered capital assets for which a separate law relating to wealth-taxes had to be enacted. It is true that by an artificial definition, our Income-tax law has brought within the ambit of income, not the capital assets, but only the capital gains, i.e., profits or gains arising from the transfer of capital assets. But it is not the case of the husband that the wife has transferred any of those lands and has earned or is earning any income in the shape of capital gains.
Calcutta High Court
Gita Chatterjee vs Probhat Kumar Chatterjee on 30 April, 1987
Equivalent citations: AIR 1988 Cal 83, 92 CWN 302
