Dakshinpuri, Ambedkar Nagar and Madangir, Deoli and Deoli village, Khanpur, Khanpur Extension and Tigri — fifty-year-old resettlement plots where every paper names somebody who has died, and the one statute that asks only whether you live there.
Quick answer: This is the one page here about a statute that does not ask whether you are married — and that is exactly why it matters. The sentence we hear most from these colonies is “bijli ka bill dada ke naam hai, mere paas address proof hi nahi hai.” Section 43 of the Electricity Act, 2003 says a licensee shall, “on an application by the owner or occupier of any premises, give supply of electricity to such premises, within one month after receipt of the application” — four words carry it: owner OR occupier. You need not own the house, hold the allotment, or be the name on the old bill. Sub-section (2) makes providing the line part of the duty; sub-section (3) attaches “a penalty which may extend to one thousand rupees for each day of default” to missing the month. ₹100 the Marriage Clerk, ₹200 on the application, and for an old wedding one of two fixed late amounts — ₹500 or ₹1,000, both waivable, neither larger after forty years. Old arrears on a dead man's account? Section 56(2) bars recovery “after the period of two years from the date when such sum became first due” unless shown continuously as an arrear — heavily litigated, so an advocate's question, never ours. And the honest limits, said twice: an electricity bill proves an address. It does not prove a marriage, and it gives nobody a claim on the house — section 43 supplies an occupier precisely because occupation is not ownership. A ceremony in the lane in 1986 already married you under section 7; only the register entry is missing, with no cut-off. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000, civil route ₹15,000. We handle no connection, arrear or dispute, touch no property or succession, provide no witnesses — and take nothing for any of it.
Dakshinpuri, Ambedkar Nagar, Madangir and the colonies around Deoli and Khanpur were laid out in the middle nineteen-seventies for families moved out of central Delhi. The plots were small — twenty-five square yards was a common size — and they were allotted to one named person. Fifty years on, that one plot commonly carries three or four storeys, two or three households, and an allotment paper that still names a man who died in 1998.
Which produces the sentence we hear more often than any other on the telephone, from this belt above all others:
“Bijli ka bill dada ke naam hai. Mere paas apna koi address proof hi nahi hai.”
That belief is wrong, and the provision that makes it wrong is worth setting out in full. It is not in any marriage law. It is section 43 of the Electricity Act, 2003, headed Duty to supply on request:
“(1) Every distribution licensee, shall, on an application by the owner or occupier of any premises, give supply of electricity to such premises, within one month after receipt of the application requiring such supply…”
Four words carry the whole of it: the owner or occupier.
Not the owner. Not the allottee. Not the person named on a fifty-year-old resettlement paper. Not the man whose name is on the existing bill. The occupier — meaning whoever is actually living in those rooms — has a statutory entitlement in his or her own right to apply for a supply, and the licensee has a statutory duty to give it.
And it is a duty, not a discretion. The sub-section says the licensee shall give supply, and it fixes a time: within one month of receiving the application. Two provisos qualify that — where the supply requires “extension of distribution mains, or commissioning of new sub-stations” the licensee must supply “immediately after such extension or commissioning or within such period as may be specified by the Appropriate Commission”, and for “a village or hamlet or area wherein no provision for supply of electricity exists” the Commission may extend the period. Neither proviso is about a built-up South Delhi colony with lines already running down every lane.
Why does a marriage business have any interest in this?
Because of what the marriage file asks for, which is far less than families imagine. It wants identity, it wants age, and it wants the address each of you is actually living at. Registration in Delhi follows residence — and the everyday obstacle in this belt is not the law of marriage at all. It is that neither person in the couple holds a single piece of paper with their own name and their own address on it, because every document in the house belongs to a grandfather.
Section 43 is the quietest and cheapest way out of that, and almost nobody in these colonies knows it exists. An occupier may apply. The connection comes in the occupier's name. The bill that arrives the following month is a document with your name and your address on it, issued by a licensee, which is precisely the kind of paper a marriage file is content with.
Now the honest part, said early rather than buried. This is the one page on this website about a statute that does not ask whether you are married. Every other page here is built on a provision that turns on a marriage — a widow's claim, a dependant's entitlement, an heir's position — and on the awkward fact that the statute never says how anybody is supposed to establish it. Section 43 is the opposite animal. It asks about occupation and nothing else. It does not want to know who you married, when, or whether anybody wrote it down. It is entirely indifferent to your marital status.
And that indifference is the whole value of it. A statute that asks only whether you live somewhere will hand a household its first document in its own name — and that document is the one the marriage file has been waiting for. The Electricity Act does not care about your marriage. It is, in this belt, the thing that most often makes registering one possible.
One thing it is not, and we will say so twice on this page because people get it wrong in both directions. An electricity bill is an address document. It is not evidence of a marriage, it does not make two people husband and wife, and no number of years of joint bills adds up to a marriage certificate. A couple can hold thirty years of bills and still have nothing that answers the question any of the other statutes on this site asks. The bill opens the door to the registration. It is not a substitute for it.
As for the marriage itself, that is already done. Where the rites were performed — in a lane here, or in a village before the family ever came to Delhi — section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 makes the performance of either side's customary rites the act that solemnises a marriage. A ceremony in 1986 made the two of them husband and wife that year, and the absence of any paperwork since has not disturbed it by one day. What is missing is the register entry, and that is still available. There is no cut-off, no expiry, and no year too old. Our late registration page sets out the procedure. All the waiting has cost is one of the two fixed sums the 2014 Order lays down — ₹500 where the filing falls within the second stretch of sixty days, ₹1,000 beyond it — and the ADM or the DM may let either go. A four-decade gap attracts not one rupee more than a four-month one.
One definition deserves setting out next to section 43, because between them they answer most of what households here actually ask.
Section 2(15) defines “consumer”:
“‘consumer’ means any person who is supplied with electricity for his own use by a licensee or the Government or by any other person engaged in the business of supplying electricity to the public under this Act or any other law for the time being in force and includes any person whose premises are for the time being connected for the purpose of receiving electricity with the works of a licensee, the Government or such other person, as the case may be.”
Read the two halves separately, because they do different work.
The first half is the obvious one: a person supplied with electricity for his own use. That is the account holder.
The second half is wider, and it is the half nobody quotes. The definition includes any person whose premises are for the time being connected for the purpose of receiving electricity with the licensee's works. The test there is not whose name is on the account. It is whether the premises are connected. So the Act's own idea of a consumer reaches beyond the name on the bill to the person whose premises are hooked up — which, in a four-storey house on a twenty-five-yard plot, is a considerably larger set of people than the one man whose name was entered in 1979.
We are careful here, and we would ask you to be careful too. What any particular person's rights are under that definition in any particular dispute is a question for a lawyer and, if it comes to it, for a consumer forum or the courts. This page does not tell you that you are a consumer, or what follows if you are. What the definition does is dispose of the assumption that the only person with any standing in relation to a connection is the person named on the account — because the Act plainly contemplates more than that.
And “person” itself is defined inclusively in section 2(49): it “shall include any company or body corporate or association or body of individuals, whether incorporated or not, or artificial juridical person.” An ordinary human being is of course a person; the clause is there to pull in the artificial ones as well.
Most people in these colonies have been told, by somebody, that getting a new connection is a long and uncertain business that depends on knowing the right person. The Act takes a different view, and it is worth knowing what it says before anybody is paid anything.
The duty is to supply within one month of a complete application. And sub-section (2) puts a further duty on the licensee to build what is needed in order to do it:
“(2) It shall be the duty of every distribution licensee to provide, if required, electric plant or electric line for giving electric supply to the premises specified in sub-section (1)…”
So the licensee cannot answer an application by saying there is no line. Providing the plant or the line for the purpose is itself part of the duty. One published copy of the Act that we read carries a proviso to this sub-section, to the effect that no person is entitled to demand or continue to receive a supply for premises having a separate supply unless he has agreed to pay the price determined by the Appropriate Commission; other copies print sub-section (2) without it. We mention the discrepancy rather than quietly choose a version, and nothing on this page depends on that proviso.
Then sub-section (3), which is the one worth remembering:
“(3) If a distribution licensee fails to supply the electricity within the period specified in sub-section (1), he shall be liable to a penalty which may extend to one thousand rupees for each day of default.”
A daily penalty for not supplying on time. Not a vague grievance procedure — a figure, per day, written into the Act.
What we would and would not do with that. We would mention it, once, politely, in writing, if an application had been sitting past a month. We would not threaten anybody with it, we would not promise you it will be imposed, and we certainly would not take money for invoking it. Whether a penalty is imposed in any case, by whom, and on what terms is not ours to say, and anybody who tells you otherwise over a counter is selling you something. The value of sub-section (3) is not that it gets a penalty collected. It is that it tells a household in Dakshinpuri that the one-month period is a real legal period and not a favour.
And the charges are not at the licensee's whim either. Under section 45(1) the prices to be charged for a supply given under section 43 are “in accordance with such tariffs fixed from time to time and conditions of his licence”, and under section 46 the State Commission may by regulations authorise a licensee to charge “any expenses reasonably incurred in providing any electric line or electrical plant used for the purpose of giving that supply.” There is a published tariff and there are published charges. An amount asked for in cash, in a lane, with no receipt, is not either of those things.
The second thing we are told on these calls, after “the bill is in my grandfather's name”, is this: there is an old amount outstanding on that account from years ago, and nobody will touch anything until it is cleared.
That is a real problem and we are not going to pretend it is simple. But there is a sub-section about it, and households here are entitled to know it exists.
Section 56 is headed Disconnection of supply in default of payment. Sub-section (1) is the licensee's power:
“Where any person neglects to pay any charge for electricity or any sum other than a charge for electricity due from him to a licensee or the generating company… the licensee or the generating company may, after giving not less than fifteen clear days notice in writing, to such person and without prejudice to his rights to recover such charge or other sum by suit, cut off the supply of electricity… and may discontinue the supply until such charge or other sum, together with any expenses incurred by him in cutting off and reconnecting the supply, are paid, but no longer…”
Two things in that sentence are worth holding on to. The power to cut off requires not less than fifteen clear days' notice in writing — a notice, in writing, with fifteen clear days to run. And the supply may be withheld until the sum is paid “but no longer”: once the money is paid, the withholding must end.
The proviso is the part that almost nobody has heard of. Where there is a dispute, supply shall not be cut off if the person deposits, under protest, the lesser of two amounts:
“Provided that the supply of electricity shall not be cut off if such person deposits, under protest, — (a) an amount equal to the sum claimed from him, or (b) the electricity charges due from him for each month calculated on the basis of average charge for electricity paid by him during the preceding six months, whichever is less, pending disposal of any dispute between him and the licensee.”
So a disputed bill is not a straight choice between paying the whole claim and losing the supply. The statute contemplates a deposit under protest — and of the two amounts it names, the one payable is whichever is less, which for a household facing a large historic claim and a modest monthly average is the second one.
Then sub-section (2), which is the provision this section of the page exists for:
“Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law for the time being in force, no sum due from any consumer, under this section shall be recoverable after the period of two years from the date when such sum became first due unless such sum has been shown continuously as recoverable as arrear of charges for electricity supplied and the licensee shall not cut off the supply of the electricity.”
A two-year limit, written into the Act, and expressed to operate notwithstanding anything in any other law.
But read the exception in the same breath, because it is the whole of the difficulty: the two-year bar does not apply where the sum “has been shown continuously as recoverable as arrear of charges for electricity supplied”. An amount that has been carried forward on the bills, month after month, as an arrear is in a different position from one that surfaces for the first time after several silent years.
We will go no further than that, and here is why. How sub-section (2) applies to any particular account — when a sum first became due, whether it has been shown continuously, what follows for a person who was not the account holder — has been litigated a great deal, including in the Supreme Court. It is a lawyer's question and a court's question. It is emphatically not a marriage service's question, and we would be doing you an active disservice if we let you leave this page thinking we had answered it.
What we will say is the practical part, which costs nothing. Keep the bills. Keep the receipts. If a demand appears, ask in writing for a statement showing from what date each component became due and whether it has been carried as an arrear since. Put the request in writing even when a counter will take it orally, because the answer to a written request is a document and the answer to a conversation is a memory. And if the amount matters, see an advocate — not us, and not whoever offers to “get it waived” for a fee in the lane.
One more thing, and it is the point of putting this section on a marriage page at all. An old arrear on a grandfather's account is a reason to look at section 43 again. The duty there is to supply on an application by the owner or occupier — it is an application for a supply to premises, by an occupier, in his or her own name. Whether a licensee may lawfully refuse a fresh connection to an occupier on account of somebody else's historic arrears is, once more, a legal question we do not answer. What we can tell you is that the two things are not obviously the same thing, and that a household which has concluded it can never have a document of its own because of a debt from 2004 has concluded something the Act does not plainly say.
Having spent two sections explaining how to get a bill in your own name, we should be exact about what it does for you — because this belt also contains the opposite mistake, made with equal confidence.
What it is. A document issued by a licensee, in a named person's name, for a stated address, dated. For the purpose a marriage file puts it to — establishing where an applicant lives — that is a serviceable thing to have, and far better than a letter from anybody.
What it is not, first: it is not proof that you are married. Not one bill, not thirty years of them, not a bill with both names on it. No provision of any statute on this website treats a utility account as establishing a marriage, and the reason is obvious: the licensee never asked and never enquired. A connection is given to an occupier.
What it is not, second: it is not proof that you own anything. This is the mistake made in the other direction, usually by the generation above. Section 43 gives a supply to an occupier precisely because occupation is not ownership, and a bill in a son's name settles nothing at all about whose house it is. Families in these colonies sometimes refuse to let a daughter-in-law take a connection in her name out of a fear that it strengthens some claim on the property. That fear has the law backwards, and it is worth saying so plainly to whoever in the house is anxious about it. Property and title are outside this office entirely; what we are describing is an address document.
What it is not, third: it is not a substitute for the register entry. It opens the door. It does not walk through it.
What it is not, fourth: it is not something to be manufactured. There are people in every one of these colonies who will offer to arrange a bill, a rent agreement or a ration entry for an address nobody lives at. Refuse, every single time. A made-up address document in a belt where real records exist in four institutions is worse than having nothing: it sits in flat contradiction to papers somebody can pull out and read, and it converts a simple administrative gap into a deliberate false statement. Everything a marriage file needs in these households can be assembled truthfully, and usually in a week.
There is a pattern running through this website that we did not plan and can no longer ignore.
Statute after statute, in fields with nothing in common, Parliament hangs an entitlement on a spouse or an heir and then says not a word about how anybody is to be satisfied that the person standing there is that spouse or that heir.
An Act protecting the elderly lays the duty of maintenance on whichever relative would inherit, and never explains how heirship gets established. A railway statute makes the entitlement depend on whether a dead passenger was married, and reorders its list of dependants by the answer. A law about migrant labour obliges somebody to notify a dead workman's next of kin, leaving who that is entirely open. Acquisition legislation assembles its family unit around his or her spouse, goes to the trouble of counting widows, divorcees and women deserted by families as units in their own right, and says nothing at all about proof. A statute for Delhi's unauthorised colonies extends its recognition to their legal heirs and stops dead there. Gratuity, provident funds, pensions, rent control, life policies, workmen's compensation — all of them put something into a wife's hands, and not one spares a line telling the clerk across the counter how he is supposed to know her when he sees her.
The Electricity Act is the exception, and it is instructive. It never asks the question at all. It asks whether you occupy the premises. And because it asks only that, it is willing to deal with a household that has no marriage document, no allotment in its own name and no standing with any institution — and to issue it a paper.
Put the two facts side by side and you have the argument of this page. The statutes that will one day decide whether a woman in Ambedkar Nagar receives her husband's provident fund, or his gratuity, or a compensation amount, all turn on a marriage and none of them explains how to prove it. The statute that will give her her first document in her own name does not care about her marriage at all. So the sequence that actually works in this belt runs the unexpected way round: use the law that asks nothing to obtain the paper that lets you satisfy the laws that ask everything.
That sequence is the entirety of what this business does. We do not deal in electricity connections, arrears, disconnections or disputes — and the sections above are set out for your information and nothing else. What we do is take a fact that a lane in Deoli witnessed in 1986 and turn it into an entry on a government register. And in a colony of fifty-year-old resettlement plots where every document names somebody who is dead, the hardest part of that has never been the marriage law. It has been finding one honest piece of paper with a living applicant's name on it.
Which is why the one month in section 43 is, for a household here, a more useful thing to know than most of the marriage law on this website.
A single table holding all of the above. Except where a row says differently, the middle column gives the Act's own language.
| Provision | The Act’s own words | What it changes in this belt |
|---|---|---|
| s.43(1) | “Every distribution licensee, shall, on an application by the owner or occupier of any premises, give supply of electricity to such premises, within one month after receipt of the application requiring such supply” | The point of this page. An occupier may apply in his or her own right. Ownership, allotment and the name on the old bill are all beside it. |
| s.43(1), first proviso | Where supply requires “extension of distribution mains, or commissioning of new sub-stations”, supply follows “immediately after such extension or commissioning or within such period as may be specified by the Appropriate Commission” | A qualification on the one month, and not one that fits a built-up colony with lines already in the lane. |
| s.43(1), second proviso | For “a village or hamlet or area wherein no provision for supply of electricity exists”, the Commission may extend the period | Written for unelectrified areas. Quoted so the first proviso is not read as the only one. |
| s.43(2) | “It shall be the duty of every distribution licensee to provide, if required, electric plant or electric line for giving electric supply to the premises specified in sub-section (1)” | The absence of a line is not an answer to an application; providing it is part of the duty. One published copy adds a proviso here; others do not, and the page says so. |
| s.43(3) | “If a distribution licensee fails to supply the electricity within the period specified in sub-section (1), he shall be liable to a penalty which may extend to one thousand rupees for each day of default” | The one month is a legal period, not a favour. Whether a penalty is ever imposed is nobody's to promise. |
| s.2(15) | “‘consumer’ means any person who is supplied with electricity for his own use… and includes any person whose premises are for the time being connected for the purpose of receiving electricity with the works of a licensee” | Two limbs. The second is not about whose name is on the account but about whose premises are connected. |
| s.2(49) | “‘person’ shall include any company or body corporate or association or body of individuals, whether incorporated or not, or artificial juridical person” | An inclusive definition, there to reach artificial persons. A human being is a person without it. |
| s.45(1) | Prices for a supply under section 43 shall be “in accordance with such tariffs fixed from time to time and conditions of his licence” | There is a published tariff. A cash figure quoted in a lane is not it. |
| s.46 | The State Commission may authorise a licensee to charge “any expenses reasonably incurred in providing any electric line or electrical plant used for the purpose of giving that supply” | Legitimate charges exist and are regulated. They are published, and they come with a receipt. |
| s.56(1) | A licensee may cut off supply “after giving not less than fifteen clear days notice in writing”, and may withhold it until the sum and the cutting-off expenses are paid, “but no longer” | Notice, in writing, fifteen clear days. And once paid, the withholding must stop. |
| s.56(1), proviso | Supply shall not be cut off where the person deposits under protest “(a) an amount equal to the sum claimed from him, or (b) the electricity charges due from him for each month calculated on the basis of average charge… during the preceding six months, whichever is less” | A disputed demand is not a straight choice between paying it all and losing the supply. |
| s.56(2) | “no sum due from any consumer, under this section shall be recoverable after the period of two years from the date when such sum became first due unless such sum has been shown continuously as recoverable as arrear of charges for electricity supplied” | A two-year limit — with an exception that has been heavily litigated. Quoted whole, and expressly not applied to anybody's account here. |
| s.50 | The State Commission “shall specify an Electricity Supply Code” providing for recovery of charges, billing intervals, disconnection for non-payment, restoration of supply, and related matters | Much of the day-to-day detail lives in the Supply Code, not the Act. Read that, not a rumour. |
| s.7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 | The customary rites of either side are what solemnise the marriage | The ceremony in the lane in 1986 married you then. Only the entry is outstanding, and nothing has lapsed. |
And the limit on all of it: these are provisions of an electricity statute, serving that statute's own purposes. Nothing in the table tells you that you are an owner or an occupier of anything, that any application of yours must be granted, what any connection will cost you, whether any arrear is recoverable, or what any licensee, Commission, forum or court would decide.
This is the practical heart of the page, and it is the conversation we have most often with callers from these colonies.
A file from Deoli or Khanpur usually looks like this. A resettlement allotment slip from 1976 in a grandfather's name. An electricity bill in the same name, or in a father's. A ration card listing eleven people across three floors. Two Aadhaar cards whose addresses were copied from each other years ago and are now both slightly wrong. A school transfer certificate spelling a name one way. A bank passbook spelling it another. And for the two people who actually want to get married, or who were married in 1986 and want it recorded, not one document issued to either of them, at the address where they sleep, in their own names.
The file does not want very much. Who each of you is. How old each of you is. Where each of you actually lives. That is the shape of the thing, and most of the documents listed above are irrelevant to it.
What it does want is one honest record in the name of a living applicant — and that is where section 43 earns its place on a marriage website. An occupier may apply for a connection. The connection is in the occupier's name. What arrives afterwards is a dated document, issued by a licensee, bearing a living person's name and the address they live at.
The order to do this in matters more than the speed. Begin with the one record you can get honestly in your own name at the address you occupy. Then pull the others into line behind it, in this order: bank, then Aadhaar, then the electoral roll. Do not start with Aadhaar. Families here routinely begin at the end, discover that the update needs a supporting document they do not have, and conclude that the whole thing is impossible. Our Laxmi Nagar page traces that sequence from an absolute standing start; and the Timarpur page takes up the question of what a card issued in some other district really settles, which is less than households expect.
Reckon on weeks for the whole chain, not days. That is the single most useful sentence on this page for anybody planning around a date. A household that rings us a month before a ceremony has time to do this properly. A household that rings us four days before has to work with whatever it already holds.
The name-spelling problem is worth treating separately, because in this belt it beats every other obstacle for sheer frequency. A name written one way by a school in 1971, differently by a bank in 1993, and a third way by whoever filled in a form last year is not a legal difficulty at all — it is an administrative one, and it is fixed by choosing one spelling and bringing the rest to it. Bring us all the versions. We will tell you which one to build on, and that advice is free and takes four minutes.
And on the subject of what to refuse: refuse every offer to have a document produced for you. In colonies where real records sit in four institutions, an invented address does active harm. It is not a shortcut around a gap; it is a false statement standing next to papers anybody can call for. In fifty years of these colonies' existence, we have never seen a marriage file that genuinely required a forged document, and we have seen several that were ruined by one.
Send photographs before anybody travels. On WhatsApp, in any order, as many as you have. Free, about ten minutes, and the quickest possible way to learn which four of your documents the file needs and which thirty are beside the point. For a household where a day off work costs real money, that is not a small thing.
Two questions get muddled together in this belt, and pulling them apart saves a wasted morning.
Where were the rites performed? That is settled history and nothing shifts it. A ceremony in a lane in Dakshinpuri means the marriage was solemnised in Delhi. A ceremony in a village in Rajasthan or eastern Uttar Pradesh means it was solemnised there, in that year.
And where is each of you living at present? That turns on the life being led now, not on the district a family gives when somebody asks where they are from. A household in Ambedkar Nagar since 1977 is a Delhi household, regardless of which village the grandparents left and regardless of what a card continues to print. Three generations on one resettlement plot is not a temporary posting.
For almost every household here, Delhi answers both questions and there is nothing to decide.
Where it becomes a real question is the marriage performed back in the home village before anybody came to Delhi, or a bride who came from there last year. Then two considerations settle it. Where each of you lives now; and where this certificate will be produced over the coming decades, and by whom. If the household's life is here — the work, the school, the hospital, the bank branch — Delhi is the better register. If the real base is still the village and Delhi is where one person works for part of the year, that is the answer instead. Which of the two applies, you will be told on the telephone with nothing yet paid — the occasions when answering honestly loses us the work included.
One further point, which follows from what this page is about. Relatives in two different states each wanting a document to look at is not a reason to make two entries. A single registration works everywhere in the country — the Badarpur page quotes the constitutional words that make it so. Registering twice buys no additional protection; it supplies somebody with a second record to set against the first.
Plainly, because the anxiety around this is out of all proportion to the role. Two people attend, stand in front of the officer, and sign to two statements: that the couple present are the couple the file concerns, and that the rites took place. Nothing is warranted by them, nothing falls on them later, and neither is ever approached again about it. Both turn up carrying two papers of their own — one bearing a photograph, one fixing a residence. None of it is lodged in advance. Eligibility is dealt with on our witnesses page.
The difficulty peculiar to a resettlement colony is the address, not the person. Four households share one plot number. The lane has no name anybody agrees on. Two neighbours' documents give the same address with different block spellings. So the witness is easy to find and hard to describe on paper.
The answer is to choose for traceability rather than convenience. Prefer somebody whose own documents are already consistent — a relative with a settled address elsewhere in Delhi, or a neighbour whose family has been on the same plot since allotment and whose papers say so. Avoid the person whose address exists only as a description. Nothing about him is wrong; it is simply that a certificate can need a witness traced fifteen years on, and “behind the water tank, third lane” will not do it.
Record more about him than feels necessary. The spelling of his name that his own documents use. An address that will still find his family in fifteen years, district included, rather than just this plot. Plus a phone number that is not his. Those few lines are the difference between a man who can be located in 2041 and a dead end at the only moment it will ever matter.
And no part of this is purchasable from us. There is no price at which this office supplies a witness, and anybody making you that offer has earned an immediate no. A name signed by a man who was never in the room is a defect somebody decided to build in, and it comes to light precisely when the paper is examined hardest — which, where plots are shared and claims compete, generally means in front of a person who wants to find it.
Three certified copies, and in a shared-plot house the reason for the third is specific. One with the couple. One with a relative in a different household altogether. And one with somebody outside the family's own quarrels — because the copy that matters is the one you can reach on a day when the staircase between two floors has become a boundary.
In the first week, note down three things and park that note away from the certificate itself: which office put out the document, what date the entry bears, and the serial number against it in the register. Holding those, a duplicate in later years is one form at a counter. Lacking them, somebody will be combing registers for a surname against an approximate year, in a city whose office map has shifted in the meantime.
Take a photograph of it — and then do the bit almost nobody does: open that photograph on somebody else's phone to make sure it works, and say out loud to one younger member of the family which cupboard the original sits in. A file only you know about protects nobody.
Read it right through on the day it reaches you, Aadhaar lying open next to it, not from recollection. The spellings get the most attention, for the reason given earlier on this page. After them: each father's name written the way that man writes it himself, the two birth dates measured against whichever age paper was handed in, the day of the rites, the two addresses, and the register's number. Found today, a mistake costs a form and a modest wait. The identical mistake coming to light two decades from now, while somebody argues a position against the family on the floor below, belongs to another category of problem altogether.
You will not find a single office named on this website. That is a choice. Jurisdiction follows the address as it is actually written, the sub-divisional map of the city was rearranged through 2026, and a name printed here might already be the wrong one by the time somebody had given up a day's earnings travelling on it. Tell us the address in the exact words the Aadhaar prints, and we will find out for you — at no charge — where it goes this month.
Two worries come up here constantly, and both have short answers. First: redrawing a boundary afterwards does nothing whatever to a certificate already issued — it stands, and no step of it is repeated. Second: a register that cannot be found was not thrown out. Registers travelled with the areas they served, into whichever office took the area over. When an old entry has gone silent, the approach that gets somewhere is laid out on our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page — ask the office that holds the area today, in writing, and keep an RTI in reserve for when that yields nothing. An application of your own that has merely stopped moving is something else, and the Lajpat Nagar page handles it, together with the Delhi law that sets time limits for notified services and leaves the officer in default paying the applicant from his own pay.
| Where | What tends to decide the file there |
|---|---|
| Dakshinpuri, Ambedkar Nagar, Madangir | Resettlement colonies of the mid-nineteen-seventies. Every document names the original allottee; the occupier has no paper of their own until section 43 gives them one. |
| Deoli, Deoli village, Duggal Colony | Older settlement alongside the colonies. Addresses described rather than numbered, which is a witness problem more than a legal one. |
| Khanpur, Khanpur Extension, Tigri | Dense later building on small plots. Multiple households on one connection, and old arrears on an account in a dead man's name. |
| Houses with three or four households on one plot | The occupier limb of section 43 is the whole answer here. Ownership is not the test and a bill settles nothing about title. |
| A daughter-in-law with no document in her own name | The commonest file we open from this belt. An occupier may apply, and the fear that it creates a property claim has the law backwards. |
| Weddings performed in the home village years ago | Already a marriage under section 7. Only the record is missing, and no cut-off has run. |
| Anybody offered a bill, rent paper or ration entry for an address they do not live at | Refuse it. In these colonies real records exist elsewhere and a false one stands in open contradiction to them. |
| Sangam Vihar side | Our Sangam Vihar page sets out the unauthorised-colonies statute and what it carries through to legal heirs. |
| Saket, Pushp Vihar, Mehrauli side | Covered on our Saket and Mehrauli page. |
| Kalkaji and Govindpuri side | Our Kalkaji page, written for vending households. |
| Marrying outside the caste or the community | The real differences, which amount to less than families here brace for, are on the inter-caste and inter-religion pages. |
One — concluding that no document is possible because every paper names the grandfather. Section 43 gives a supply on an application by the owner or occupier. Occupation is the test, and the occupier is you.
Two — treating the one month as a courtesy. It is the period the sub-section fixes, and sub-section (3) attaches a daily figure to missing it.
Three — assuming the absence of a line is the end of the matter. Sub-section (2) makes providing the plant or line part of the duty.
Four — paying cash in a lane for what has a published tariff. Section 45 ties the price to the fixed tariff and section 46 to expenses reasonably incurred. Both come with receipts.
Five — believing a disputed demand must be paid in full or the supply goes. The proviso to section 56(1) contemplates a deposit under protest, of whichever of two stated amounts is less.
Six — assuming any arrear from any year is recoverable for ever. Section 56(2) sets a two-year limit, with an exception for sums shown continuously as arrears. How it applies to your account is a lawyer's question, not ours and not a counter's.
Seven — refusing a daughter-in-law a connection in her name for fear it creates a claim on the house. This has the law backwards: section 43 supplies an occupier precisely because occupation is not ownership.
Eight — thinking thirty years of bills prove a marriage. They prove an address. No statute on this site treats a utility account as establishing a marriage, because the licensee never asked.
Nine — starting the document chain at Aadhaar. Start from one honest record in a living applicant's name, then bank, then Aadhaar, then the roll. Beginning at the end is why families conclude it cannot be done.
Ten — accepting a manufactured address paper. In colonies where genuine records sit in four institutions, a false one does active harm and converts an administrative gap into a false statement.
Our charges are all set out here. Spare certified copies, getting a wrong entry corrected, apostille and attestation work, the fully managed arrangement, and the sums collected by the State all appear separately on the fee page.
| What you would be taking | Our figure | Who here chooses it |
|---|---|---|
| Arya Samaj ceremony at our mandir | ₹5,100 | The ceremony on its own, finishing with the mandir handing over its certificate. From that day you are husband and wife by force of section 7, although no government register has either name in it yet. |
| Ceremony with registration handled | ₹7,100 | The ceremony and the official entry done together. The usual choice for anybody marrying today — and the one to enquire about when the address papers are still a month away from being ready. |
| A wedding already held, brought onto the record | ₹6,000 | Far and away what these colonies ask us for most. How long ago it was changes nothing, and which state it happened in changes nothing either — a ceremony in a lane in 1986, or back in the village before the family ever reached Delhi, is a file we open constantly. |
| Special Marriage Act, start to finish | ₹15,000 | Parliament's own civil apparatus, available to any two grown people irrespective of religion or community. The price is in weeks and in exposure — for thirty days a notice sits available to be objected to. |
Anything the State takes is its money and not ours, and every rupee of it is receipted back to you. The Marriage Clerk gets ₹100. Another ₹200 attaches to the application under the 2014 Order. Go the civil way and the District cashier collects a further ₹15. Where the wedding is an old one, that Order brings in exactly one of two sums — ₹500 if you are still within the second sixty days, ₹1,000 after that — either of which the ADM or the DM can simply waive. Whether you are four months late or four decades late, it is the same number.
A few things here have no price at all, and it is worth listing them. Witnesses are not among the things on offer. We do not put a date into a form for a day nobody lived through. We do not issue anything where one of the two never came. Electricity work of every kind is outside us — applications, arrears, disconnections, meters, disputes. We charge nothing for it, we are connected to nobody who does it, and the provisions printed on this page are here to inform you and for no other purpose. Nothing is promised here about the eventual view of any officer, licensee, Commission, forum or judge. Title to a plot, who owns what, heirship, inheritance, nomination forms — none of that is handled at this office. We appear in front of no authority and no court. We pass no comment on anybody's caste or community. We neither recommend conversion nor organise it. And when the honest thing to say is that your money belongs with an advocate rather than with a marriage service, that is what you will hear on the very first call, free — and we say it well aware that it is normally the remark just before the line goes quiet.
Sourced — the Electricity Act, 2003. Section 43 in full: sub-section (1) with both of its provisos, sub-section (2), and sub-section (3). The definitions in section 2(15) (“consumer”) and section 2(49) (“person”). Section 45(1) and section 46 on prices and recoverable expenses. Section 50 on the Electricity Supply Code. And section 56, sub-sections (1) and (2), with the proviso to sub-section (1) quoted in full.
What was confirmed, and against what. Section 43 was read in four separate published copies of the Act, which agreed word for word, one of them a State Government publication of the bare Act. Sections 2(15), 2(49), 45(1), 46, 50 and 56 were read in two independent published copies, which also agreed. One discrepancy, which we would rather print than smooth over: one of those copies carries a proviso to section 43(2) — to the effect that no person is entitled to demand, or to continue to receive, a supply for premises having a separate supply unless he has agreed to pay the price determined by the Appropriate Commission — while other copies print sub-section (2) without it. We have described that proviso rather than relying on it, and nothing on this page turns on it.
Described rather than quoted, and flagged as such above. The Electricity Supply Code and the consumer rules made under the Act, which carry much of the day-to-day detail on documents, deposits, billing and restoration, are referred to generally. We have not quoted them and nothing here should be read as their wording, because they are made by a State Commission and by the Central Government respectively and are amended from time to time.
Sourced — the marriage provisions this page leans on. Three from the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955: section 7, treating performance of either side's customary rites as the solemnising act; section 5(ii), which counts willingness among the conditions a valid marriage must meet; and section 8, whose object is to make proof of a marriage easier. One from the Special Marriage Act, 1954: section 4, which throws the civil route open to a marriage “between any two persons” while carrying its own residence requirement and a month during which a notice may be objected to. Delhi's 2014 Order is the source of four things: Order 8 itself, the ₹200 that rides on an application, the sixty-day measure, and both of the late sums. The ₹100 and ₹15 charges, and the turnaround the department undertakes, come from material the Delhi Revenue Department publishes itself. False declarations are dealt with by BNS s.236; apostille and attestation rates are those the Ministry of External Affairs puts out.
What this page cannot say. Whether you are an owner or an occupier of any premises. Whether any application of yours must be granted, or will be. What a connection will cost in any particular case, what deposit or charge is payable, or what documents a licensee may properly ask for. Whether any arrear is or is not recoverable, whether any sum has been “shown continuously as recoverable as arrear of charges”, or what section 56(2) does on any actual account — a question that has been litigated repeatedly and is for an advocate and a court. Whether anybody is a “consumer” within section 2(15), or what rights follow if they are. What any licensee, Commission, consumer forum or court would decide about anything. Nor can it tell you the office covering any given address, which follows the address as written and moved with the 2026 boundary changes. Reduced to a sentence: this office performs marriages and gets them entered on the register. Electricity connections, bills, arrears and disputes, and all questions of property, title, succession and inheritance, lie somewhere else entirely; nobody on this payroll stands up in front of an authority or a judge; and nothing of the sort is ever charged to anyone. There is a single reason these provisions appear here. The statutes that will one day decide what a household in this belt receives all turn on a marriage and none of them says how to prove it — while the statute that will give that household its first document in its own name does not ask about the marriage at all. Using the second to satisfy the first is the only thing we sell. A household with a genuine fight on its hands over electricity, over a plot or over heirship wants an advocate for it — and a woman is entitled to have one appointed for her free of charge, her means never being inquired into. The statutory basis for that, and the categories legal aid stops short of, are both covered on our Vikaspuri page.
One — approximately what year, and approximately what place? “Here in the lane, around 1986”, or “in the village, before we moved”, is quite enough to start. Between them those two details decide the route and the price.
Two — tell us, honestly, what either of you holds in your own name. It is a perfectly ordinary answer in this belt for that to be nothing at all, and saying so at the start is what lets us tell you the order to fix it in. Nobody here is going to be surprised by it.
Three — keep both Aadhaar cards in front of you and read us the printed line itself, not the version either of you would say from habit. Mention, too, every different spelling under which either name has turned up anywhere.
Ring +91 8376863962. No one raises payment with you until three things have been said out loud: the route your particular facts fall under, what we charge to do it, and what the State separately takes. If the true position is that your next month belongs to paperwork rather than to an appointment, that is what you will be told — and the asking will have been free.
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