In a historic decision, the Supreme Court of India has recently laid down guidelines for interim compensation and maintenance in matrimonial cases. This was done to introduce uniformity and concurrence amongst the compensation guidelines followed by lower judiciaries such as the district courts.
The decision to introduce a set of uniform guidelines regarding the settlement of matrimonial cases was taken by a bench of justices, headed by Justice Indu Malhotra and Justice R Subhash Reddy, on the grounds that it is important to avoid any overlapping of cases and conflict in orders issued across different tiers of the Indian judiciary system.
The bench decided on various aspects of the final settlement of matrimonial cases, such as overlapping jurisdiction, the payment of maintenance, the enforcement of the issued orders of maintenance, and the date from which maintenance is supposed to be ordered.
The Supreme Court decided that on decisions with overlapping jurisdiction, if consecutive claims for maintenance are lined up by a party under different statutes, the court can decide to adjust the compensation to be awarded according to the compensation awarded to the applicant on previous occasion. The court can also take a decision if it at all wants to award compensation to the claimant or not.
Under the reforms, the court has made it mandatory for the parties of a case to disclose all the details of the previous proceedings related to the case and all connected orders passed prior to the ongoing proceedings. If there are any modifications to be done from the previous proceedings it has to be done in the same proceeding in which the disclosure is done by the applicant. This has to be done to avoid conflicts of orders between subsequent proceedings and previous proceedings.
With regard to the payment of interim maintenance, the court has decided that both parties of a matrimonial case have to submit an affidavit of assets and liabilities in front of the deciding bench during any maintenance proceedings.
This would be applicable to all magistrate courts, family courts and district courts all over the country.
Regarding the date of granting interim maintenance to the claimant, the apex court has decided that the maintenance is to be paid from the date of filling of the application.
The order for payment of maintenance can be issued like a decree of a civil court according to the provisions of a money decree usually issued by a judiciary under the Code of Civil Procedure.
While passing these rules for the grant of interim maintenance and related proceedings, the Supreme Court of India also said that the rules are not without exceptions as the courts can pass the verdict of a matrimonial case keeping in view of any special circumstances of the case and factors other than those enlisted by the apex court in the new guidelines.
The new guidelines and the judgement by the Supreme Court will soon be circulated within the Indian judicial system, starting with registrars of all the high courts and the district courts of the country.
Comment here