A couple who had divorced by mutual consent under Section 28 of the Special Marriage Act went back to the Family Court years later still arguing over their teenage son, and the Family Court tried to solve the problem by splitting custody arrangements down the middle. Its order gave both parents a fifty-fifty share of the boy's vacation and visiting time, treating the two parents as entitled to equal shares of the child's calendar. The Bombay High Court was not willing to let that stand.
Justice Gauri Godse's judgment in SRB v. DA holds, in terms, that the concept of joint parenting as a fifty-fifty entitlement is not recognised under the statutory framework governing child custody and guardianship in India. The court quashed the Family Court's order and sent the matter back for a fresh decision, making clear that a mechanical equal split of a child's time between two parents is not a lawful substitute for an actual assessment of what serves the child's welfare.
The reasoning rests on a distinction that is easy to lose sight of once a custody dispute turns into a contest between two parents asserting competing rights. A parent's claim to equal time is not, by itself, the legal test. The court held that parents' legal rights can never override the child's welfare, and a custody arrangement built around parity between the adults, rather than around what the child actually needs, gets the inquiry backwards. The Family Court, on this view, had focused on fairness between the parents instead of on the welfare of their son.
Pending the fresh decision, the court did not leave the boy in limbo. Physical custody stays with the mother, and the father has been given access during parts of the Diwali, Christmas and summer holidays. That interim arrangement is deliberately not symmetrical, which is itself consistent with the judgment's central point: an interim order need not mirror the equal-time formula the court had just set aside, because the exercise is about the child's circumstances rather than about guaranteeing each parent an equal share.
The ruling will matter well beyond this one family. Family Court judges across Maharashtra, and litigants' counsel drafting custody petitions, have increasingly seen parties propose joint parenting or shared custody arrangements as a negotiated middle ground, often modelled on frameworks more familiar from other jurisdictions. This judgment tells Family Courts in the state that such an arrangement cannot simply be imposed as a formula without the welfare inquiry the law actually requires, whatever its appeal as a way of avoiding an adversarial winner-take-all custody fight.
Family law practitioners negotiating settlements involving older children, where a fifty-fifty time split often looks like the fair compromise to both parents, now have a Bombay High Court ruling to reckon with if that compromise is ever challenged. A consent arrangement freely agreed between parents is one thing, but a Family Court cannot simply impose a joint parenting formula over a contested custody dispute as though equal division were itself the governing legal standard, and any order that reads that way is vulnerable to exactly the kind of challenge SRB brought here.
There is a procedural angle worth flagging as well. Part of the complaint against the Family Court's original order was that it moved to a final decision without giving both sides a full opportunity to lead evidence on what arrangement would actually suit the boy, treating the equal-split formula almost as a default answer rather than as a conclusion reached after hearing the parties out. A custody dispute remitted for a welfare inquiry is not a formality; the Family Court will now need to take evidence on the child's schooling, his own preferences at an age where courts typically give those some weight, and the practical realities of each parent's household, before arriving at whatever arrangement follows.
What happens next for this particular boy will depend on that fresh inquiry, and the High Court's judgment gives no indication of which parent is likely to come out ahead once it is conducted properly. What it does settle, for every other custody dispute pending before a Family Court in Maharashtra, is that neither parent can walk into a hearing and argue for a fifty-fifty split as though equality between the parents were the starting point the law favours. The starting point, and the only one that survives scrutiny on appeal, is the child.