Call for tough law on NRI marriages

A Parliamentary committee has asked the government to ensure verification of prospective NRI bridegrooms in their country of residence, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 14, 2007, 03:28:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A Parliamentary committee has stressed the need for a uniform personal law on matrimonial issues including the mandatory registration of marriages. It has also asked the government to ensure verification of prospective NRI bridegrooms in their country of residence.

Aimed at preventing NRI husbands from duping wives in foreign lands, the Parliamentary Committee of Empowerment of Women has come up with a set of recommendations in the report titled 'Plight of Indian Women Deserted by NRI Husbands'.

The report tabled in Lok Sabha on Monday has recommended uniform personal laws for all religious communities on marriage, divorce, maintenance, property rights and related issues with special provisions for NRI marriages.

The Women and Child Development Ministry had already recommended a mandatory registration of marriages to the Law Ministry, which is holding consultations with states on the issue.

"The committee finds that in the Indian context, the absence of uniform civil laws and the abundance of personal laws of various religious communities make matrimonial disputes extremely difficult to deal with," the report said.

"In marriages with NRIs, registration will not only help a woman fight her case if deserted, but also enable the Embassy to have full information about the marriage," it said.

The committee has recommended that it should be the responsibility of the state to verify the credentials of the prospective bridegroom before registration of the marriage.

"There should be a law ensuring that before the marriage, the state government is informed, which in turn, would inform the Ministry of External Affairs for conducting the verification process. The verification can be done through Indian embassies," Krishna Tirath, chairperson of the committee told HT.

The committee has also recommended changes in rules for issuing passports saying details of the prospective or NRI husbands should be sought before issuing the passport. "It would put a check on fraud NRI husbands," she said.

Krishna Tirath also said that it is not only poor women, who are abandoned by their husbands. "We came across cases where daughters of civil servants were thrown out of their homes in foreign countries. If this can happen to educated women, what would be the condition of poor and semi-literate girls from Punjab, Haryana and Karnataka," she said, while suggesting specific awareness campaigns on the issue.

BS Ramoowalia, who has been involved in an awareness drive against fraud NRI husbands, said, NRI grooms have left their wives with children and are not paying any maintenance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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