Bhopal/Jabalpur: Madhya Pradesh high court has held that a son-in-law is also covered under the purview of Maintenance & Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, which makes it mandatory for children to look after aged parents.
With this, a division bench comprising Chief Justice Suresh Kumar Kait and Justice Vivek Jain dismissed the petition of a Bhopal resident, who was told by his elderly father-in-law to vacate their house after he stopped giving money for maintenance.
Petitioner Dileep Marmath said that his 78-year-old father-in-law, Narayan Verma, had filed an application in the subdivisional magistrate court under Maintenance & Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, following which the SDM ordered him to vacate the house.
Marmath appealed against it to the district magistrate, who rejected it. Then, he moved high court.
In his petition, Marmath contended that a son-in-law is not covered under the 2007 Act. Besides, he had contributed Rs 10 lakh towards construction of the house of his father-in-law, a retired BHEL employee, and presented a bank statement in court to substantiate his claim.
During hearing of the petition, the court found that the father-in-law had allowed Marmath and their daughter Jyoti to live in his house under an understanding that they would look after him. In 2018, his daughter died in a road accident. Marmath remarried and stopped giving money to his father-in-law for maintenance.
The division bench said that the father-in-law can file a suit against the petitioner to vacate the house. The house has not been transferred in Marmath’s name, and the father-in-law, who gets some pension from his Provident Fund contribution, needs money to look after his ailing wife and children for which his house could come in handy.
With this observation, HC dismissed the petition, upholding the SDM’s order to Marmath to vacate the house.
