How this is put together
Editorial policy
How the casebook is sourced, what is wrong with it, and what happens when you tell us we have made a mistake.
Where the cases come from
Reported judgements, primarily via IndianKanoon, with citations checked against the standard reporters where one exists. Every case page links to the full text so you can read it yourself rather than taking our summary on trust.
A case only gets a page of its own when three things are true: the parties are named, there is a citation or a source to check it against, and there is enough on the record to write about honestly. 75 of the 292 meet that bar. The rest appear in the casebook and in the data, but a page carrying a name, a year and nothing else is padding, and we would rather not publish padding.
What is wrong with the data, stated plainly
Every dataset has problems. Ours has these:
- Reported cases are not a random sample. Most maintenance orders in India are never reported. Those that are skew towards contested appeals, unusual facts and higher incomes. Any median drawn from them is a median of reported cases, not of Indian maintenance orders.
- Financial detail is patchy. The husband's income is recorded in about a fifth of cases and the wife's in a tenth. Where a figure is absent we say "not stated" rather than guessing.
- Some parties are anonymised. Around 56 cases were reported without names. They are useful as material and useless as a page, so they live in the casebook only.
- The inflation adjustment is a blunt instrument. It tracks general consumer prices, which have risen more slowly than school fees, medical costs and urban rent over most of this period. Treat an adjusted figure as an order of magnitude.
How the estimate is derived
From the 25 percent of net income benchmark approved in Kalyan Dey Chowdhury, adjusted for the factors set out in Rajnesh v. Neha that the reported awards show actually moving the number: the length of the marriage, the gap between the two incomes, and children living with the applicant.
The full working is printed under every result, step by step, so you can see which adjustment did what rather than being handed a figure.
Corrections
If a case is summarised wrongly, a citation is off, or a figure does not match the judgement, tell us through the contact form, with the case name and what is wrong. Corrections to case detail are made as soon as we can check them against the source.
We do not quietly edit and move on where a correction changes the substance of a page. The review date changes, and where the meaning changed we say so on the page.
Independence
No advertising, no sponsored placements, no affiliate arrangements and no lawyer referrals. Nobody pays to appear here or to be described in a particular way. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on this page before it happens, not after.