A marriage breaking down across two cities tends to produce litigation in two cities as well, and that is roughly what happened here. The husband had filed a matrimonial suit at the Family Court in Himmatnagar, where the couple's children live with him. The wife, who has since moved to Rajkot to live with her parents, wanted that suit moved to the Family Court at Rajkot, closer to where she now is. She had also filed her own application for custody of the children, but she filed it at Himmatnagar, the place where the children actually reside, not at Rajkot.
That last detail turned out to matter more than anything else argued before the Gujarat High Court. Justice Maulik Shelat was asked, in effect, to let the wife litigate both the matrimonial suit and, implicitly, the custody question from the city she had moved to, away from where her children were living. The Court declined. Its reasoning rests on a straightforward reading of the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, under which jurisdiction to decide a custody dispute follows the child, not either parent.
The Court held that a custody proceeding under the Act cannot be transferred to a family court that has no jurisdiction over the place where the children ordinarily reside. Since the children are settled in Himmatnagar with their father, the Himmatnagar Family Court is the only court competent to decide where they should be placed and on what terms. Moving that question to Rajkot, simply because the wife finds it more convenient to litigate from there, would ask a court with no connection to the children's day-to-day life to rule on what is best for them.
The welfare of the child, the Court reiterated, is the test that governs every custody decision, and that test is easier to apply for a court that sits where the child actually is. A family court in Rajkot would have had to rely entirely on affidavits and reports to understand the children's circumstances in Himmatnagar, whereas the Himmatnagar court can call for local inquiries, seek the children's own views where appropriate, and observe the parties and witnesses directly. Jurisdiction and welfare, on this reasoning, point in the same direction.
Having kept both proceedings, the matrimonial suit and the custody application, at Himmatnagar, the Court went a step further on how they should be managed. It directed that the two matters be placed before the same Family Judge and, where practicable, listed on common dates, so that the wife is not made to travel to Himmatnagar on separate occasions for what is, at bottom, one family dispute playing out across two case files.
The Court also addressed the practical burden the ruling places on the wife, now living several hundred kilometres away in Rajkot. It permitted her to appear through video conference for hearings in both proceedings, reserving physical presence for occasions where it is genuinely necessary, such as cross-examination or another stage of the case that cannot fairly be conducted remotely. That direction softens, without reversing, the inconvenience that comes from keeping the litigation anchored to the children's city rather than her own.
For family law practitioners, the order is a reminder that a transfer petition grounded in a litigant's own relocation will not succeed where the children have not relocated with that parent. Jurisdiction in custody matters tracks the child's residence as a rule, and convenience to a parent, however genuine, does not displace that rule on its own. Where a parent has moved away from the children rather than with them, the better course is to seek accommodations within the court that already has jurisdiction, video-conference access among them, rather than to seek a transfer of the proceeding itself.
The matrimonial suit and the custody application now proceed together before the Family Court at Himmatnagar, with video-conference facility available to the wife for the hearings that do not require her physical presence.