Meenakshi Batra, a retired central government school teacher, went to the Delhi High Court after a Family Court turned down her claim for interim maintenance under Section 24 of the Hindu Marriage Act against her husband, Vijay Kumar Batra. Her case rested on the familiar argument in these applications: pending final disposal of the matrimonial case, she needed enough from her husband to meet her monthly expenses, which she put at ₹1,16,150. Against that, she had disclosed a pension of roughly ₹35,329 a month and interest income of about ₹34,000 a month from her savings. The gap between what she said she needed and what she said she received was the entire basis of her application, and it is the kind of gap that comes up in almost every interim maintenance matter involving a retired or near-retirement spouse, where the real fight is rarely about whether money exists but about which pot of money counts as income for the purpose of Section 24.
The husband's side resisted on the footing that a woman with a government pension, accumulated retirement savings and steady interest income could hardly claim she had no independent means. That argument runs into the usual difficulty in maintenance litigation, where a spouse's retirement corpus sits in the account but is not, strictly, income earned every month the way a salary is. The Family Court had apparently leaned toward treating the corpus itself, or a notional return projected from it, as part of her monthly resources, and declined interim relief on that basis.
Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Renu Bhatnagar, sitting as the Division Bench, drew a sharper line between the capital and its yield. The entire retiral corpus, the Bench held, cannot be treated as recurring monthly income. What can be counted is the interest or other return that the investments actually generate, not the principal sitting behind them. A pensioner is not expected to start eating into a lifetime's savings simply because the savings exist; forcing a retired person to draw down a fixed deposit or provident fund corpus to pay maintenance would defeat the purpose of having built that corpus for old age in the first place. That reasoning cuts both ways, since it protects a retired applicant's corpus from being treated as a pool the other spouse can point to for immediate liquidation, while also stopping an applicant from inflating her claimed need by ignoring what the same corpus is already earning her every month.
That did not mean the corpus was irrelevant to the enquiry. The Bench was careful to say the existence of a retirement corpus forms part of the overall financial circumstances of a party claiming maintenance, even if it cannot be converted into a monthly income figure by itself. On the numbers Meenakshi Batra herself had placed on record, her pension and interest income, taken together with the corpus sitting behind that interest, were enough for the Court to conclude she had not discharged the threshold requirement under Section 24: showing that she lacked independent income sufficient for her own support.
The appeal was accordingly dismissed, and the Family Court's refusal of interim maintenance stood. The ruling fits into a line of recent Delhi High Court orders drawing a similar distinction between earning capacity, actual income and underlying capital when interim maintenance applications are argued on both sides with projected or notional figures rather than hard numbers.
For practitioners, the value of the order lies less in its outcome than in how it structures the enquiry. A spouse resisting maintenance can no longer simply point to the other side's retirement savings and ask the court to impute a monthly income from the full amount. Equally, a spouse seeking maintenance who has a retirement corpus generating real interest cannot expect that interest to be ignored just because it comes from savings rather than a salary. Pleadings in interim maintenance applications on both sides will need to separate principal from return far more carefully than they have tended to. That means affidavits of means should break out fixed deposit and provident fund balances from the interest or dividend they actually throw off in a given month, rather than lumping a lump sum corpus and its yield into one figure labelled income, since it is that mixed figure which tends to produce the kind of dispute that landed this case in the Division Bench in the first place.