Imagine a woman who has invested ten years into managing a house, bringing up children, and putting on hold an illustrious career for the sake of marriage. When the marriage fails, her husband, holding her college degree and the job that she secured many years down the line, enters the courtroom to make his case: she is well educated, she earns, she doesn’t need anything from me. Such claims, made in hundreds of matrimonial courts each year, represent one of the most consistent patriarchal tropes within the ambit of Indian matrimonial litigation. Thankfully, our law has become more and more unwilling to buy such stories.
The issue of whether a wife’s earning capacity – whether actual or potential – disqualifies her from claiming maintenance is not a mere academic curiosity. On the contrary, this is a sociological problem and socio-legal hot-spot that sheds light on the way in which courts perceive unpaid domestic work, professional sacrifices made by women and economic inequality inherent to most Indian marriages. This blog will analyse the matter using famous precedents and feminist theory behind the Indian maintenance jurisprudence.
THE LEGAL CONTEXT: WHAT THE LAW SAYS
Maintenance in India is available under several statutes. Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973[1] – currently Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023[2] – is the secular, summary measure. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955[3], the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956[4], and the Special Marriage Act, 1954[5] are the corresponding Acts.
The eligibility criteria set out under Section 125 of CrPC, while deliberately vague, are that the wife must be “unable to maintain herself.” Notably, there is no need for her to be unemployed or impoverished. The test is one of relative inability; in relation to the standard of living enjoyed during the marriage and to the financial standing of the husband. However, the husbands often take refuge in the education or employment of the wife as a defence against maintenance. But then came the courts’ more nuanced and equitable reaction.
RAJNESH V. NEHA (2020): THE TURNING POINT
No discussion about maintenance jurisprudence can ignore Rajnesh v. Neha (2020) 9 SCC 1[6], the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in this field. Written by Judge Indu Malhotra, the case dealt with the confusion caused by multiple maintenance proceedings being conducted simultaneously through several statutes, providing an opportunity for forum shopping and conflicting orders.
The Court formulated binding principles: consolidation of concurrent proceedings, compulsory affidavits of assets and income from both sides right at the beginning of the proceedings, and criteria for fixing the quantum of maintenance. In the matter of employment of the wife, the verdict was unequivocal.
“The standard of living the wife was used to in the matrimonial home, the status and lifestyle of the husband, and the reasonable needs of the wife must all be considered. Employment of the wife must also be considered by the Court, but employment alone does not act as a bar to maintenance.”
This transforms the query into one that is not dichotomous but rather relational in nature: are her earnings sufficient for her to live at least a standard similar to the one she enjoyed during her marriage? The mandatory declaration of assets is directly aimed at addressing the obfuscation tactics adopted by husbands to conceal their actual incomes.
DOCTRINAL BACKGROUND: EARLY PRECEDENTS
The rule that the wife being employed will not debar maintenance has strong roots in earlier jurisprudence. In Bhagwan Dutt v. Kamla Devi, AIR 1975 SC 83[7]It was laid down by the Supreme Court that having some earnings is not a sufficient reason to refuse maintenance as long as the said earnings are insufficient to provide the wife’s subsistence. The critical point lies in adequacy and not in the very existence of income, a rule that has endured and has grown stronger in significance during the last five decades.
In Savitaben Somabhai Bhatiya v. State of Gujarat, (2005) 3 SCC 636[8], it was reiterated that the issue of maintenance should be based on the husband’s capability and reasonable requirements of the wife, and not on the mere employability of the wife. It became apparent that courts started recognising what economists and sociologists have always known: being qualified does not mean earning income.
Similarly, under Section 24 of the Hindu Marriage Act[9]The courts have held that the independent income of the wife cuts down but does not wipe out the claim, and that the difference in lifestyle between the spouses needs to be considered while determining the amount.
RAJENDRA SINGH V. STATE OF UP: CONTEMPORARY RESTATEMENT
This contemporary development in doctrine has been reinforced by a recent decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Rajendra Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh.[10]. Here, it was firmly held that a woman’s ability to earn independently would not prevent her from claiming maintenance on account of that fact alone. It was reiterated that, in contemporary times, men are using the qualification certificates and work experience of women to evade the consideration of their financial standing.
The court stated that the focus should be placed on the realities of the situation as to whether the woman has made use of the opportunity provided by that qualification to generate income; whether her career suffered because of some responsibility undertaken due to marriage; and whether her current income level is able to sustain the lifestyle that she deserves to enjoy. Earning capacity is an irrelevant factor.
THE FEMINIST LEGAL ARGUMENT: DOMESTIC LABOUR AS ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTION
The judicial evolution discussed above follows the arguments made for decades now by feminist legal scholars. Professor Flavia Agnes has made the point that laws relating to maintenance have traditionally devalued domestic labour, which should be seen as work and not as a moral duty fulfilled through financial maintenance.[11] Recognition that years spent as homemakers make for an economic contribution that should be compensated is finding its place increasingly often in high court decisions, especially those of the Bombay High Court.
Legal commentaries confirm this analysis. Kirti Singh, writing in the Journal of the Indian Law Institute, has demonstrated how the standard of living criterion fails to take into consideration women’s invisible labour in the marital home, which helps her husband’s career but impedes hers. In ethnographic observations of the maintenance courts conducted by Srimathi Basu, it has become clear how women are portrayed as earning members to keep their maintenance awards small, without any relation to reality after divorce.[12]
At their most insightful, the courts realise that the “earning capacity” defence is not a value-neutral one. Rather, it is a tool that allows the externalisation of the costs of divorce to the partner least capable of shouldering those costs.
CONCLUSION: RECOGNITION, NOT ALMSGIVING
The evolution of Indian law on maintenance claims from Bhagwan Dutt[13] through Rajnesh and up to Rajendra Singh[14] suggests a judiciary increasingly aware of the fact that maintenance is not charity provided by the husband to his dependent wife, but an acknowledgement of economic partnership and its unfair dissolution. The earning capacity of a wife does not take away her entitlement to maintenance. It continues only as long as she is unable to maintain herself at the level of comfort that the marriage brought for her, and only because the marriage itself entailed economic partnership.
The man who enters court with the certificate from his wife and claims she does not need anything is making a social, not a legal, claim — one that strips away all her contribution, which can never be translated on a pay slip. The Indian judiciary, at its finest, has rejected such a stripping away. What is needed is for the rejection to be consistently quick and enforced everywhere in the judicial hierarchy.
Author(s) Name: Disha Bhavya (Ajeenkya DY Patil University, Pune)
References:
[1] Code of Criminal Procedure 1973, s 125
[2] Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, s 144
[3] Hindu Marriage Act 1955, s 24
[4] Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act 1956
[5] Special Marriage Act 1954
[6] Rajnesh v Neha and Anr AIR 2021 SC 569
[7] Bhagwan Dutt v Kamla Devi and Anr AIR 1975 SC 83
[8] Savitaben Somabhai Bhatiya v State of Gujarat and Ors (2005) 3 SCC 636
[9] Hindu Marriage Act 1955, s 24
[10] Rajendra Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh (2024) SLP(Crl) No 12831/2022
[11] Flavia Agnes, ‘State, Gender and The Rhetoric of Law Reform’ in Lotika Sarkar and B Sivaramayya (eds), Women and Law: Contemporary Problems (Vikas Publishing 1994) 146–162
[12] Srimathi Basu, ‘The Blunt Cutting Edge: The Production of Law in Maintenance Courts’ (2001) 1(2) Feminist Media Studies 195 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680770120062123> accessed 15 June 2026
[13] Bhagwan Dutt v Kamla Devi and Anr AIR 1975 SC 83
[14] Rajnesh v Neha and Anr AIR 2021 SC 569