The Delhi High Court has dismissed a husband's revision petition challenging a Family Court order directing him to pay Rs.11,000 per month each to his wife and two daughters, a total monthly liability of Rs.33,000, after finding his claims of poverty, illness, and irregular employment to be bare assertions unsupported by a single document. The ruling, which exposes a pattern of deliberate income concealment through a trail of salary slips, bank statements, and the husband's own mediation commitments, delivers a pointed reminder that a man with demonstrable earning capacity cannot manufacture financial helplessness to escape his legal obligations toward his family.
The marriage between Lokesh Kumar Singh and Neeta Singh was solemnised on June 12, 2006 at Siwan, Bihar, and produced two daughters before the relationship broke down, with Neeta returning to her parental home with the children and subsequently filing for maintenance before the Karkardooma Family Court. The husband fought back on multiple fronts, arguing that Neeta had voluntarily abandoned the matrimonial home without cause, that she was a commerce graduate capable of self-sufficiency, and that he himself was a contract worker doing cloth-dyeing jobs with no fixed income, battling tuberculosis, diabetes, and heart disease while also servicing loans and supporting an elderly mother.
What undid him was his own paper trail: salary slips from February to April 2021 showed gross monthly earnings of approximately Rs.40,000; bank statements recorded a credit of Rs.59,975 from Abhi Homes as recently as March 2022; he had personally committed to paying Rs.25,000 and Rs.30,000 in two separate mediation settlements in 2016 and 2020; and an employment offer on record showed a salary bracket of Rs.80,000 to Rs.1,00,000. The Family Court, weighing all of this, awarded Rs.11,000 per month to each respondent, an order the husband then challenged in revision, attempting to introduce his health and financial hardship arguments for the very first time.
Justice Neena Bansal Krishna found the revision petition legally untenable on both jurisdiction and merits. On jurisdiction, the court was unambiguous, a revision petition is not an appeal, and fresh facts that were never placed before the Family Court cannot be introduced through the revisional back door; the appropriate remedy for changed circumstances is a fresh application under Section 127 CrPC before the originating court. On merits, the court dismantled the husband's poverty plea with his own admissions, noting that his cross-examination confirmed employment across multiple organisations at salaries substantially exceeding the maintenance awarded.
Anchoring its reasoning in Supreme Court precedent, the court held, "It is the sacrosanct duty of the husband to provide financial support to the wife and minor children, even by doing physical labour, and he could not avoid his obligation." The quantum of Rs.11,000 per respondent was further upheld as consistent with the Delhi High Court's own "Family Resource Cake" principle, a formula that equitably distributes collective household income, assigning two portions to the husband and one each to remaining members.
The revision petition was dismissed in its entirety.
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