HYDERABAD: In an effort to tackle the menace of NRI marriages and bigamy in Telangana, the Department of Women Development and Child Welfare has decentralized the marriage registration process to the level of village panchayat officers and municipal administration officers to enable people to register marriages compulsorily.
Not just this, the department, which will now 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 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 on 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.
Meanwhile, 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.