NRI dads miss out on kids

Thanks to India's slow legal system, courts in India hold NRI papas from meeting their children separated because of marital discord. Chetan Chauhan tells us.

Updated on: Feb 15, 2008, 02:37:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Parminder Singh has not met his son in India for a decade, thanks to the slow legal system in the country.

The Berlin-based software engineer is not the only father complaining about how courts in India hold NRI papas from meeting their children separated because of marital discord. California-based software consultant Yogish Kode also faces the same trouble every time he comes to India to meet his child.

“Whenever we come to India for a vacation, the entire period gets consumed in the lengthy legal proceedings to obtain a court order to meet the kid. By the time arguments start over our application, it is time to go back. Every time the same process is repeated and the end result is that we are not able to meet our kids,” Kode said.

In the west, Kode said, access of the father to the child is not denied. “The application is heard fast but in India a lot of time is taken, thereby denying the child the right to see both parents. It is like begging before the court to see your child,” he said.

Kode on Thursday made a plea before the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to sensitise Indian judiciary regarding court cases involving children on behalf of 12 NRI fathers. Three of them are from Delhi, two from Chennai, two from Bangalore and one from Orissa.

Sandhya Bajaj, member of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said the panel would write to Chief Justice of the high courts. “For a child, both the parents are important. The law cannot favour one parent. Access to fathers should be provided within the limited time frame,” she said.

Kode, whose wife left with their son in October 2006, said the group is only asking for access to father to meet the child. “The child needs both the parents. We don’t want to take the kids away from the mother,” he said. The NRI fathers have also pleaded that marital discord does not mean that the person would turn out to be a bad father.

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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