The Indian government is making every effort to cut down the rate of NRI marriage menace. In one such attempt, Department of Women Development and Child Welfare in Telangana has decentralized the marriage registration process to the level of village panchayat officers and municipal administration officers to enable people to register marriages compulsorily.

Apart from this, the department, which will at present be the nodal agency for registering marriages, will also be disseminating the knowledge of compulsorily registering marriages via the intricate network of 35,700 anganwadis. This makes registration of marriage easier for married couples and ensures that documentary evidence exists to tackle the issue of wives being deserted.

The new process is crucial as in 2018 alone, the Women’s Commission received 36 complaints of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) wives being deserted and several more complaints of bigamy which become hard to tackle without documentary evidence.

“With no marriage certificate, the married women can’t take their husbands to a court or even ask the embassies to initiate the process of bringing back the husband. In some cases, women have not even been able to apply for a divorce as they have no proof to apply for a divorce and the husband is also not here,” a senior official said.

In the meantime, the decision of registering marriages at the village and municipality level is being seen as a small yet steady step. “The State and Central governments need to bring in specific laws that make a declaration of marriage at the time of Visa or passport mandatory and have provisions for measures against the husband for abandoning his wife,” said a senior official at National Commission for Women.

The move includes:

• 12000 registration units at panchayats, municipalities.
• Rs 45000 per district for awareness on the Marriage Registration Act.
• A fine of Rs 100 for all marriages registered after 30 days.

By Sowmya Sangam