The divorce stands, but it comes with Rs 20 lakh — a wife with no other income gets permanent alimony

A Division Bench of Justices Sujit Narayan Prasad and Sanjay Prasad affirms a decree dissolving a 2003 marriage and modifies it by awarding a lump sum of Rs 20,00,000, payable in four equal instalments within twelve months.

The marriage was solemnised at Jamshedpur in February 2003. On the husband's pleaded case the wife stayed twenty-four hours in the marital home before accompanying him to Punjab, where he was employed, asked to return to her parents' house within weeks, and was brought back to Jamshedpur by his parents after a month and a half. A Family Court dissolved the marriage on his petition in 2016. She appealed. On 9 October 2026 a Division Bench of the Jharkhand High Court left the dissolution standing and attached a price to it: twenty lakh rupees of permanent alimony, in four instalments, with liberty to come back to court if the money does not arrive.

What was pleaded

The husband's suit was for dissolution of marriage by a decree of divorce under Section 13(1)(i-a) of the Hindu Marriage Act — cruelty. It was allowed by the Principal Judge, Family Court, Jamshedpur by judgment of 22 April 2016 in a matrimonial suit of 2008, and the wife brought a first appeal in 2016 that was decided a decade later.

The judgment records the husband's account of the marriage: that it was without dowry; that the wife insisted on returning to her parents' home soon after moving to Punjab; that her father then filed a case under Section 498A of the Penal Code; and that she was in distress because of what he described as her own family's attitude towards her, her parents having refused to speak to her. It records, as part of that account, two occasions on which she is said to have attempted to take her own life. These are the pleadings of one side in a matrimonial suit, and the appeal was not about re-opening them.

Monthly or lump sum

In reaching its figure the Bench worked through a recent Supreme Court order on quantum, and the comparison explains the shape of what it finally did.

In that case the Apex Court had revised the permanent alimony fixed by a High Court, taking account of the husband's income and financial disclosures, the inflationary cost of living and the wife's continued reliance on maintenance as her sole means of support. It settled on Rs 50,000 a month, subject to an enhancement of five per cent every two years. As to the couple's son, then twenty-six, it declined to direct any further mandatory financial support while leaving the father free to assist voluntarily with educational or other reasonable expenses, and clarified that the son's right to inheritance remained unaffected and any claim to ancestral or other property could be pursued in accordance with law.

This Bench went the other way on form, choosing a single sum rather than an indexed monthly payment. For a wife with no independent income and a husband whose compliance cannot be assumed, the trade-off is real: a monthly order keeps pace with inflation but requires enforcement every month, while a lump sum payable in four instalments inside a year ends the relationship between the parties and makes any default a single, provable event.

Fixing the figure

What the appeal was about, in the end, was money. The Bench weighed the husband's obligations and financial capacity against the reasonable requirements of the wife, and recorded the fact that decided the quantum: she “has no other source of income other than the amount of alimony so received from the respondent-husband for her livelihood and sustenance”.

On that footing a lump sum of Rs 20,00,000 was held “just, fair, and reasonable as permanent alimony” — an amount that “balances the financial capacity of the husband with the legitimate entitlement of the wife to secure the future”.

The payment terms are specific, and built for a party who may have to chase them. The sum is to be paid in four equal instalments within twelve months of the order, with the first instalment within two months. Because, as the Bench put it, a financial crunch should not disturb the wife's survival, she is given express liberty to approach a court in accordance with law if the amount is not credited to her account as directed.

And then a sentence that is doing real work in a judgment of this kind: “This Court, however, hope and trust that the respondent husband will not invite such situation and will abide by the direction so passed.” Permanent alimony orders are notoriously hard to enforce, and the Bench has set the terms up so that default is a single, provable event rather than a negotiation.

Order

The judgment and decree of 22 April 2016 was affirmed, with the modification that the husband pay Rs 20,00,000 as final alimony on the terms directed. The appeal was disposed of and decreed in those terms, and any pending interlocutory application disposed of.

The marriage lasted, in the husband's own telling, a matter of weeks. The litigation about it ran from 2008 to 2026.