‘NRI husbands can’t leave if marriage not registered’

NEW DELHI: Non-resident Indian (NRI) men who wed in the country will have to compulsorily register their marriages within a week and update their marital status on their passports, central government officials said. The decision by an inter-ministerial panel on Wednesday is an attempt to prevent NRI husbands from abandoning their wives.

NEW DELHI: An inter-ministerial panel decided on Wednesday that non-resident Indian men who wed in the country will have to compulsorily register their marriage within a week and update their marital status on their passport, in an attempt to stop NRI husbands from deserting their wives, four officials familiar with the development said.

The panel was set up last year to review the legal and regulatory challenges faced by women deserted by NRI husbands.

It comprises external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, home minister Rajnath Singh, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and women and child development (WCD) minister Maneka Gandhi.

The panel also decided that failing to update marital status on the passport can result in the document getting revoked, one of the four officials said.

“The group of ministers decided that necessary amendments will have to be made in the Passport Act to incorporate the changes,” the official added.

The panel also agreed to make it mandatory to register all NRI marriages with registrars. “The law ministry has agreed to incorporate the necessary clause by amending the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969,” a second official said.

At present, only a handful of states, including Punjab that was the first to formulate such guidelines, have compulso- ry registration of NRI marriages.

But the panel could not arrive at a consensus on a proposal to attach the property of the NRI man who deserts his wife and fails to respond to summons, a second official said.

Swaraj and Gandhi suggested that if the man did not own any property, his share in the parental property should be attached, a third official said.

“The law ministry officials present in the meeting said the proposal to attach property is legally not tenable. The ministerial panel has directed the law ministry to revisit the proposal and suggest what could be done within a week,” said a fourth official.

The panel also decided to allow the ministry of external affairs to put summons, which are issued to NRI men who have not responded to earlier summons, on the ministry’s website. Such notices were to be treated as “deemed to have been served”.

The Union home ministry has already agreed to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure that will allow notification of summons put on the website of the ministry of external affairs to be treated as “deemed to have been served”.

The current practice is that once a woman files a complaint, the police writes to embassies, which sends a summon. Such summons hardly get served as the person usually moves to a new place or provides an incorrect address.

The panel was set up after a sharp rise in the number of NRI men deserting their wives after marrying them in India. The complaints ranged from grooms who disappeared to husbands who were preventing their wives from travelling to India.

In comparison, The National Commission for Women (NCW), an autonomous body under the WCD ministry, recorded 346 complaints from women married to NRIs in 2014.