For decades, India's maintenance and alimony framework has rested on a simple, humane premise: usually a woman who left the workforce to raise children or run a household — should not be left destitute when that marriage ends. It is a principle rooted in Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, and the Special Marriage Act, and it has protected genuinely vulnerable women for generations, especially those who have children to care for.
This protective doctrine has stretched so far from its original purpose that now professionally qualified, independent women with no children have started misusing this as a tool to make wealth and courts have become a playground for extortionary pursuits. This warrants judicial vigilance and serious pushback, stopping the miuse of the law to enrich themselves. Infact there are many women today who lie on oath, commit acts of perjury and yet continue to peddle their malafide agenda to pursue wealth making without any element of integrity and shame.
Maintenance petitions are filed by women with Masters qualifications, business entrepreneurs, those who hold permanent residences abroad and those who intentionally claim victim to make money, built many a times on legal guidance to misuse laws, without respecting the original intent.
Supreme Court of India and many High Courts have no risen to the occasion to stop this trending madness. Women today even in ultrashort marriages have made extortion a mission and judicial wisdom thriving must reign supreme. Men are not ATM machines to contribute maintenance or pay alimony to women who lack responsibility and accountability. Further those who indulge in snooping, stalking and lying on oath must be shown the door.
No Children, No Dependency, So What, Exactly, Is Being Compensated?
The sharpest edge of this critique concerns childless marriages. When a marriage produces no children and both spouses are working-age, educated adults, the traditional justifications for long-term maintenance — interrupted careers, custodial burden, lost years of employability — largely evaporate. There is no child whose stability requires a stay-at-home parent to be financially secured. There is no demonstrable career sacrifice if the wife's career continued uninterrupted throughout the marriage or if the woman is in business.
In such cases, permanent alimonystarts to look less like compensation for loss and more like a financial exit bonus attached to the act of marrying and divorcing itself, a arrangement that rewards the dissolution of a short, childless marriage as generously as it rewards genuine long-term sacrifice. Further when such women release that the partner cannot pay, they start making allegations of cruelty and violence and yet file contradictory prayers for restitution of conjugal rights to weaponize extortion. Wise judges at the High Courts in India and Supreme Court have been seeing through this game and have come down heavily on such women even though they are legally mis-guided, but this is yet to percolate into smaller courts who are often flooded with cases and lack application of mind.
Modern marriages today are reduced to a business, especially since intimacy begins in school for many. And when women who hold dual residency permits, they have a lot to hide about, keeping secrets in multiple countries and using law as a tool for extortion and wealth creation.
Family lawyers on both sides of the aisle, including many who represent women,haveopenly acknowledged that this bundling of maintenance demands with criminal complaints or seeking restitution of conjugal rights as leverage in negotiation is now common enough in urban family courts to be a recognizable strategy, not an aberration.
Courts have to deliver justice, not entertain wealth facilitation
Part of the problem is structural, not judicial malice. Indian family courts are chronically under-resourced, and judges hearing maintenance petitions often lack the time, staff, or forensic capacity to conduct the kind of income verification that Rajnesh v. Neha envisioned.
Courts are often clouded with genuine cases and cases filed by women with malafide intent yet engage in wealth chase. Courts in India must look at evidence, must look at conduct of such women and pass reasoned orders rather than merely encourage law as a tool for business and enrichment. Honest courts today look at whether the woman has genuinely suffered or is just fooling around doing forum shopping, filing cases at will and is killing time hanging out near courts instead of indulging in gainful work. Courts have come down heavily on such type of women who are a menace to society and a liability to the country as well.
The doctrine needs to be re-anchored in truthful needs not entitlement by virtue of marital business and women who misuse law must be prevented by all means. Supreme Court of India has time and again pointed out how laws have been misused by women to transfer cases in their favour, to seek alimony and the courts have started discouraging such practices. Courts must introduce monetary penalty on women for demonstrably false or grossly inflated claims so that cost of misusing laws is put in place.
If courts do not visibly distinguish between those who genuinely need and those who indulge in harassment shopping, the courts will be reduced to an alternate banking system where wealth creation is encouraged at the cost of hardship and lives of men who are increasingly becoming victims of this process.