SOURCE - https://www.indianexpress.com/news/28-yrs-after-divorce--woman-gets-alimony/769490/
28 yrs after divorce, woman gets alimony
A court has granted maintenance to a woman nearly three decades after she divorced her husband. The courts took 17 years to decide the woman’s maintenance plea that she had filed in April 1995, 12 years after the divorce, due to lack of awareness on her legal rights.
As the case lingered on, her son attained adulthood.
On March 25, Additional Sessions Judge Rajneesh Kumar Gupta finally ordered Tilak Nagar resident Inderjeet Singh, a former IAF sergeant, to pay maintenance to his former wife Jasbir Kaur, dismissing his appeal against a magisterial court’s order of May 26, 2010.
The magisterial court had asked him to pay her Rs 3,000 per month from the date of her filing the application in April 1995.
The court had also ordered him to pay, with retrospective effect, Rs 3,000 per month to his son “from December 1985 to November 1996, when he attained adulthood”.
Kaur was married to Singh in February 1978; the couple divorced on March 14, 1983 on mutual consent. In her plea for maintenance, Kaur had alleged that she divorced Singh as per the provisions for divorce by mutual consent, which her in-laws had secured from her under duress.
When the magistrate ordered Singh to pay maintenance, he moved the sessions court challenging the order, citing insufficient means of income.
But during the deposition by Kaur and her son, the court found that Singh ran an eatery and had a shop, while his second wife ran a beauty parlour. The court concluded that Singh had substantial income to maintain his former wife.
