Ajmal Khan Road, Bank Street, Gaffar Market, Naiwala, Beadonpura, Regharpura and Dev Nagar — a market of family firms where the business is the family, and one word in the Income-tax Act decides whose income is whose.
Quick answer: In a thousand shops between Ajmal Khan Road and Pusa Road one sentence is said with great confidence and very little examination — “dukaan to biwi ke naam pe hai.” Section 64 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 has something specific to say about that. Its opening words: “In computing the total income of any individual, there shall be included all such income as arises directly or indirectly…” Clause (ii) catches income arising “to the spouse of such individual by way of salary, commission, fees or any other form of remuneration whether in cash or in kind from a concern in which such individual has a substantial interest”, and clause (iv) catches income “from assets transferred directly or indirectly to the spouse … otherwise than for adequate consideration”. Three things the market version gets wrong. The proviso needs both that the spouse “possesses technical or professional qualifications” and that the income is “solely attributable” to applying them. Explanation 2 measures the twenty per cent “at any time during the previous year” and counts relatives’ holdings together. And Explanation 1 puts the income with whichever spouse has the greater total income — not automatically the husband — with a right to be heard before it is moved. Every word of it runs on being a spouse. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000. We are not accountants: we prepare no returns, advise on no income, structure no business — and we provide no witnesses.
Ajmal Khan Road, Bank Street, Gaffar Market, Arya Samaj Road, Naiwala, Beadonpura, Regharpura, Pahari Dhiraj, Dev Nagar, Old and New Rajinder Nagar at the edges. Jewellery, sarees, electronics, spares, hotels, clinics. It is one of the oldest continuously trading markets in the city and it has a particular shape to it: the business is the family, and the family is the business.
A shop here is usually a proprietorship or a small partnership. It is run by two, three or four people who are related to each other. The accounts are kept by whoever is good at accounts. Somebody's wife handles the counter, or the billing, or the purchasing, and she is paid something for it because she is working. Somebody's father put a property in his daughter-in-law's name years ago because it seemed sensible at the time.
And in a thousand shops between here and Pusa Road, a sentence is said with complete confidence and very little examination: "dukaan to biwi ke naam pe hai."
There is a provision of the Income-tax Act that has something specific to say about that, and about a spouse's salary from a family concern, and it is not widely read in this market. It does not make any of those arrangements wrong. It simply decides, in certain circumstances, whose income the income is — and the word it turns on is "spouse".
This page sets it out in the Act's own words, with its exceptions and its limits, because a trading family should know what a provision says before somebody at a wedding tells them what it says. We are not accountants and this is not tax advice; the last section of this page says exactly what we do and do not do, and it is short.
If what you actually want is the ordinary mechanics of getting married and registered — the sequence, the papers, the timing — those are on the process, documents and registration pages, and our charges are on the fee page.
Section 64 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 is headed "Income of individual to include income of spouse, minor child, etc." Two of its clauses concern a husband and wife directly.
| The Act's own words | What it means in a Karol Bagh firm |
|---|---|
| Section 64(1), opening words — "In computing the total income of any individual, there shall be included all such income as arises directly or indirectly" — followed by the clauses. | "Shall be included." It is not a discretion and it is not a penalty. It is a computation rule about whose return certain income belongs in. |
| Clause (ii) — income arising "to the spouse of such individual by way of salary, commission, fees or any other form of remuneration whether in cash or in kind from a concern in which such individual has a substantial interest". | This is the salary case. A wife paid by the family firm in which her husband has a substantial interest — and note how wide the words are: salary, commission, fees or any other form of remuneration, in cash or in kind. Naming the payment something else does not take it outside the clause. |
| The proviso to clause (ii) — nothing in the clause applies "where the spouse possesses technical or professional qualifications and the income is solely attributable to the application of his or her technical or professional knowledge and experience". | A real and important exception, examined in its own section below. It has two conditions, not one, and both have to be met. |
| Clause (iv) — income arising "to the spouse of such individual from assets transferred directly or indirectly to the spouse by such individual otherwise than for adequate consideration or in connection with an agreement to live apart". | This is the transferred-asset case. The words "directly or indirectly" and "otherwise than for adequate consideration" are the operative ones. Transferring something to a spouse as a gift is one thing; where that asset then earns, this clause decides whose income the earning is. |
Notice what both clauses have in common. Neither one asks whether the arrangement is genuine, whether the work was really done, or whether anybody intended anything at all. They ask whether the person is the spouse.
Two Explanations to section 64 do the technical work, and both matter to a family firm.
Explanation 2 defines the threshold: for the purposes of clause (ii), an individual is deemed to have a substantial interest in a concern "(i) in a case where the concern is a company, if its shares (not being shares entitled to a fixed rate of dividend whether with or without a further right to participate in profits) carrying not less than twenty per cent. of the voting power are, at any time during the previous year, owned beneficially by such person or partly by such person and partly by one or more of his relatives; (ii) in any other case, if such person is entitled, or such person and one or more of his relatives are entitled in the aggregate, at any time during the previous year, to not less than twenty per cent. of the profits of such concern."
Three things in that are worth pausing on in a market of family partnerships. The figure is twenty per cent. It is tested "at any time during the previous year", not on some closing date. And — the part that surprises everybody — the holdings of the individual and one or more of his relatives are counted together. In a firm owned by a father, two sons and an uncle, nobody's twenty per cent is being measured in isolation.
Explanation 1 answers the next question, which is whose return the income lands in when both spouses are involved. For the purposes of clause (ii), the individual is "the husband or wife whose total income (excluding the income referred to in that clause) is greater; and where any such income is once included in the total income of either spouse, any such income arising in any succeeding year shall not be included in the total income of the other spouse unless the Assessing Officer is satisfied, after giving that spouse an opportunity of being heard, that it is necessary so to do."
That has a quiet fairness built into it. It is not "always the husband" — it is whichever spouse has the greater total income leaving that item aside. And once the item has been included in one spouse's income, it is not to be moved to the other in a later year unless the Assessing Officer is satisfied it is necessary, after giving that spouse an opportunity of being heard. A right to be heard, written into a clubbing provision.
And the point this page exists to make. Every one of those words operates on a person being a spouse. Section 64 does not define the term and does not need to — it assumes the relationship and asks the reader to know whether it exists. In the ordinary case nobody ever has to prove it. In the case where somebody does, the couple with a registered marriage produce one page and the couple without it are establishing the relationship before anybody reaches the provision that turns on it.
Of everything on this page, the proviso to clause (ii) is the part most often half-remembered, and half-remembering it is worse than not knowing it.
What it says is that the clause does not apply "where the spouse possesses technical or professional qualifications and the income is solely attributable to the application of his or her technical or professional knowledge and experience".
The first condition is about the person. She possesses technical or professional qualifications. That is a fact about her, and it is either so or it is not.
The second condition is about the money. The income has to be solely attributable to the application of that knowledge and experience. Not partly. Not mainly. The word in the statute is "solely".
The market version of this proviso stops after the first condition — "she is qualified, so it does not apply." That is not what the clause says. Both limbs are joined by "and", and the second one is written in unusually strict language.
What follows from that is a records point rather than a scheme. Where a spouse genuinely has qualifications and is genuinely paid for applying them, the facts supporting that are ordinary business records — what her qualification is, what she actually does, what the firm would pay somebody else for the same work. A family that keeps those in the ordinary course has them. A family that has never written any of it down is relying on memory about a period that may be examined years later.
And to be explicit, because this is a market where people are used to being sold things: we are not suggesting anybody arrange their affairs any particular way, and we would not know how. The proviso is set out here because it is part of the section and leaving it out would be a distortion.
A tax provision travels badly in conversation, so the limits are stated as firmly as the text.
It is not saying marriage costs you money. Section 64 is a computation rule about whose income an item is. It does not create a charge that would not otherwise exist, it does not tax the same rupee twice, and it is not a penalty for being married. Anybody using it to argue against registering a marriage has the thing upside down.
It is not saying you cannot employ your spouse. Nothing in the section prohibits anything. It decides where income is computed, and that is all it decides.
It is not saying the proviso is unavailable. It is a real exception with real effect in real cases. It simply has two conditions and the second one is strict.
It is not a complete account of section 64. The section has other clauses — concerning a son's wife, minor children, and transfers to other persons or associations for a spouse's benefit — and other Explanations, and none of them is set out here. It is also amended from time to time. What is quoted above is quoted accurately; what is not quoted is simply not on this page.
And it is not advice. We solemnise and register marriages. We are not chartered accountants or tax practitioners. We do not prepare returns, advise on income, structure anybody's business, appear before any tax authority, or take a rupee in connection with any of it. A trading family with a question about section 64 should put it to its own chartered accountant, who will want the facts — and a page on the internet does not have the facts.
Because of one word, and because of what this business actually does.
Section 64 operates on a person being a spouse. So does a great deal of Indian law, written by different legislatures for entirely unrelated purposes. Across this website we have set the same pattern out from other directions: the compensation scheme names a widow before anybody else; the employees' insurance definition of “family” starts with a spouse; a tenancy on death goes to the spouse ahead of the rest; a shared household cannot be closed to a woman living in it merely because her name is on nothing; a housing society's committee must form a view on who succeeded a dead member; and a father-in-law may be looked to by a widowed daughter-in-law. Elsewhere in the same Income-tax Act, a gift received on the occasion of an individual's marriage is treated differently from every other gift — that one is set out on our Connaught Place page.
Every one of them assumes a fact and never explains how you would establish it. That is the gap this business fills, and it is the only thing we sell.
And it bears stating once, because people get it backwards. Registering does not make a marriage. The rites do, under section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, on the day they are performed, and Order 8 of Delhi's 2014 Order says registration does not go to validity. Section 8's object is narrower and more useful: making the fact easy to prove. Nothing in section 64 is triggered by a certificate. The relationship is the trigger. The certificate is only how you show it without an argument.
Not a scheme. Records — the sort any well-run firm has anyway.
The marriage on the record. A registered marriage is the shortest answer to every question anybody will ever ask about who is whose spouse, in a bank, a hospital, a firm's books or an assessment.
Who does what in the firm, written down somewhere. Roles, responsibilities, and what each person is paid for doing them. In a family business this is the thing nobody writes down, because everybody knows it — until the people who knew it are being asked about a year that ended four years ago.
Qualifications on file. Where a family member holds a technical or professional qualification, a copy of it in the firm's papers costs nothing and is worth having.
And separate what is separate. A household that runs its shop account and its family account through the same pocket is making its own life harder in every direction — not only for tax, but for every bank, lender and insurer it will ever deal with. That is a general observation about running a business, not advice about anybody's affairs.
This one costs people a second visit more often than anything else in this belt, and it is entirely avoidable.
A great many families here live above, behind or very near the shop, and over the years the two addresses have blurred. The bank statement carries the shop. The Aadhaar carries the house. The electricity bill is in a firm's name. A letter from a supplier goes to one and a hospital card to the other.
For a marriage file, the question is residence — where you actually live. Not where the business is, not where the firm is registered, not where post is convenient. So the address that goes on the form is the address where you sleep, and it has to match the proof you are producing for it.
Three practical things. Put the Aadhaar, the bank record and one other document side by side and decide which version of your address is the true one. Use that version everywhere in the file, in the same words. And if the only document you hold at your home address is in a firm's name rather than yours, say so when you ring — that is a solvable problem and it is far better solved on a phone than at a counter.
No cut-off exists. Any earlier year and any state. The Order attaches ₹500 where the file is lodged in the second sixty days and ₹1,000 afterwards, each of which the ADM or DM may waive, and neither figure grows with time — a wedding from 2012 costs what one from this month costs.
What helps: pictures in which the ceremony itself is visible with both families present; the printed invitation; whatever the priest or institution issued on the day; and later papers carrying both names.
What is needed whatever else you have: the two of you in person with originals, a pair of witnesses, and the address copied off the Aadhaar rather than written from memory. If neither of you holds a paper in your own name at that address, building the first one is dealt with on our Laxmi Nagar page, and the shape of an old-wedding file is on the late registration page.
Every trading family in this belt runs into the same scheduling problem, and it is worth planning for rather than improvising.
A shop in Karol Bagh opens late morning and shuts late in the evening. The people who can sign for the business are the same people who have to be at a counter. And the one day the market is shut is the day every family in the lane has already earmarked for everything else it has been postponing.
What goes wrong. Somebody decides to go "in the morning before opening", arrives without having checked the papers, finds something missing, and by then the shop needs opening. That morning is spent and the whole thing restarts a fortnight later.
What works. Do all the preparation by phone in the afternoon, when the shop is open and quiet and you are in front of your own papers. Send us photographs of every document. Settle which route applies, what it costs and what is missing. Then give one morning to the appointment itself with nothing else in it.
Plan around your own weekly closing day rather than assuming ours. Government counters keep government hours, which do not follow the market's rhythm, so the day your shop is shut is not automatically a day anything can be done. Tell us which day yours closes and we will tell you honestly whether it helps.
And avoid the wedding season for your own file. A jewellery or saree business in October and November has nobody to spare, including the two people getting married and the two who agreed to witness.
Their part in it is tiny. Two people show up and put their names to a statement before the officer: that the pair in front of him are the pair the file names, and that the wedding did take place. They are not standing surety for anything, and once they walk out they owe nobody anything. What each brings is two papers made out to that person — one carrying a photograph, one fixing an address. Nothing has to go in ahead of the day, and signing for an absent person is not permitted. Eligibility is set out on our witnesses page.
The trap here is choosing the obvious person. The shopkeeper next door is willing, close by and entirely unavailable, because his day is your day. Somebody with a salaried job, a relative who does not trade, or a friend from outside the market is worth ten of him.
Confirm both the evening before and hold a third name. A trading week changes at short notice and nobody thinks to tell you.
Signatures are not for sale. We arrange none and anybody offering should be sent away. A certificate carrying a signature from somebody who was never in the room is weakest precisely when it is being looked at hardest.
Two certified copies, in two different places — and in this belt that specifically means not both in the shop. A business premises is the worst possible single home for a family's personal documents: too many people pass through it, and a fire, a theft or a sealing takes everything at once.
Copy three details into a notebook and a phone in the first week: the issuing office, the date shown against the entry, and the number the register allotted it. With those, a replacement is a short application. Without them, somebody has to comb registers for a name and an approximate year.
Photograph it and keep the pictures where both of you can open them from any device, rather than in one handset.
Sit down with it the day it reaches you and check the lot. Compare each name against the Aadhaar instead of trusting recall. Look at how the two fathers' names have been entered against how each of them signs. Match the dates of birth to whichever age document was handed over. Then the wedding date, the two addresses in the form you agreed on, and the register's own numbering. Asking for a fix now takes a form. Finding the same slip a decade later, while somebody is already querying something, takes a great deal more.
This website names no office anywhere, deliberately. Where a file goes is decided by the address as it is written down, the district map was redrawn across 2026, and any office name we printed could be stale by the time somebody relied on it. Tell us the address in the Aadhaar's own words and we will find out where it reports today, before you have paid anything. A later change of boundary does nothing to a certificate that has already issued, and where an old register seems to have gone missing it has in fact been taken over along with the area — our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page covers the letter-first, then RTI, route, while the Lajpat Nagar page covers a file that has gone silent.
Karol Bagh is central, so there is no state line to worry about — which removes one problem and creates another. Families here are frequently spread across three or four addresses: a house in Rajinder Nagar, a shop in Ajmal Khan Road, a flat somebody's parents own in West Patel Nagar, and a village address that still appears on an old document. The form does not want the family's addresses. It wants where each of the two of you resides. Decide that before you fill anything in, and produce a document for it.
| Area | What the file usually turns on here |
|---|---|
| Ajmal Khan Road, Bank Street, Gaffar Market | Trading hours, and a shop address that has quietly become the family's address on half its documents. |
| Arya Samaj Road, Naiwala, Beadonpura | Family firms where several relatives hold the business between them. |
| Regharpura, Pahari Dhiraj, Dev Nagar | Older residential lanes; the Aadhaar address is the one that governs the file. |
| Old and New Rajinder Nagar | A very mobile population — see our Timarpur page on documents printed with an address in another state. |
| West and East Patel Nagar, Shadipur | Mixed housing and workshops; residence rather than the workplace decides the file. |
| Paharganj, Ram Nagar, Jhandewalan | Covered by our Paharganj page. |
| Connaught Place and the inner ring | Our Connaught Place page deals with gifts received on the occasion of a marriage. |
| Families whose home town is elsewhere | Delhi or the home state — we will say which suits the file, even where the answer costs us the work. |
One — treating "the shop is in her name" as the end of a sentence. Section 64 asks a different question from the one that phrase answers, and it asks it about a spouse.
Two — remembering the proviso only as far as "she is qualified". The clause requires the qualification and that the income be solely attributable to applying it.
Three — assuming twenty per cent is measured on one person. Explanation 2 aggregates an individual's holding with those of one or more relatives.
Four — assuming it is tested on a closing date. The words are "at any time during the previous year".
Five — assuming clubbing always lands on the husband. Explanation 1 puts it with whichever spouse has the greater total income leaving that item aside.
Six — never writing down who does what in the firm. Everybody knows it, until somebody is asked about a year that closed four years ago.
Seven — putting the shop address on a marriage form. The form asks about residence, not about the business.
Eight — going "before opening" without checking the papers first. That morning is lost and the shop still needs opening.
Nine — asking the neighbouring shopkeeper to witness. His hours are your hours, which is exactly the problem.
Ten — keeping every copy of everything at the shop. One certified copy belongs somewhere a business cannot lose it.
Our whole price list, on one page. Replacement copies, corrections to an entry, apostille work, the managed package and what the State collects separately all sit on the fee page.
| Route | Our fee | Who it suits here |
|---|---|---|
| Arya Samaj ceremony at our mandir | ₹5,100 | The rites, with the mandir's certificate at the end. You are married from that day under section 7, with no State register aware of it. |
| Ceremony with registration handled | ₹7,100 | The wedding and the government record in one exercise — the route that ends with the document every provision on this page assumes. |
| A wedding already held, brought onto the record | ₹6,000 | Any earlier year, any state. Common from trading families who simply never got round to it. |
| Special Marriage Act, whole route | ₹15,000 | The civil route, with its own residence requirement and a notice open to objection for thirty days. |
Separately from what we charge, the government collects three receipted items — ₹100 payable to the Marriage Clerk, a ₹200 fee that the 2014 Order requires to accompany the application, and, only where the civil route is taken, ₹15 for the District cashier. Where the wedding is an old one, two further flat amounts apply under the Order: ₹500 for a filing in the second sixty days and ₹1,000 later than that. The ADM or DM has power to waive either, and neither amount increases the longer you leave it.
Six things carry no price because we do not supply them: witnesses; a date other than the real one; a certificate produced without both of you attending; a promise about what any official will do; any tax, accounting or business work whatsoever; and any appearance before any authority.
Sourced — the Income-tax Act, 1961. Section 64(1), opening words: "In computing the total income of any individual, there shall be included all such income as arises directly or indirectly". Clause (ii): income arising "to the spouse of such individual by way of salary, commission, fees or any other form of remuneration whether in cash or in kind from a concern in which such individual has a substantial interest", with its proviso — "Provided that nothing in this clause shall apply in relation to any income arising to the spouse where the spouse possesses technical or professional qualifications and the income is solely attributable to the application of his or her technical or professional knowledge and experience". Clause (iv): income arising "to the spouse of such individual from assets transferred directly or indirectly to the spouse by such individual otherwise than for adequate consideration or in connection with an agreement to live apart". Explanation 1, making the relevant individual "the husband or wife whose total income (excluding the income referred to in that clause) is greater" and providing that once included in one spouse's income it shall not be included in the other's in a succeeding year "unless the Assessing Officer is satisfied, after giving that spouse an opportunity of being heard, that it is necessary so to do". Explanation 2, deeming a substantial interest where shares carrying "not less than twenty per cent. of the voting power" are "at any time during the previous year, owned beneficially by such person or partly by such person and partly by one or more of his relatives", or in any other case an entitlement, alone or with relatives in the aggregate, to "not less than twenty per cent. of the profits of such concern".
Sourced — the marriage statutes. From the Hindu Marriage Act: s.7, making the customary rites the act of solemnisation; s.5(ii), free consent as a condition; s.8, whose stated object is facilitating proof. Delhi's 2014 Order gives Order 8, the ₹200 payable with the application, the sixty-day period and the two late figures. Turnaround expectations and the ₹100 and ₹15 items are from the Delhi Revenue Department's published material. The Special Marriage Act supplies the civil route's residence requirement, its Notice Book and its thirty-day objection period. An untrue declaration attracts BNS s.236, and attestation and apostille charges are the Ministry of External Affairs' published rates.
What this page cannot say. How section 64 applies to any particular family, firm, payment or asset — that depends entirely on facts nobody on a website has. Whether any arrangement is or is not within a clause or within the proviso. What any Assessing Officer, appellate authority or court would decide, or when. What anybody ought to do about their own affairs. Whether the section as quoted here has since been amended — it is quoted accurately as at the date of this page, and the Act changes. And which office serves a given address, allotted on the exact address after the 2026 boundary changes. Stated plainly: we solemnise and register marriages. We are not chartered accountants or tax practitioners; we prepare no returns, advise on no income, structure no business, appear before no authority, and take no payment in connection with any of it. Section 64 is set out here because a trading family should be able to read the words for itself. Any actual question belongs with your own chartered accountant, who will ask for the facts.
One — tell us when and where the wedding took place, including a ceremony from years ago in another state, which is ordinary work here.
Two — give us the address each of you genuinely lives at, read off the Aadhaar rather than recalled, and say if the only paper you hold for it is in a firm's name.
Three — send photographs of the documents in the afternoon. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the difference between one morning and two.
Dial +91 8376863962. You will be told the applicable route, our price for it, and the government's own charges, and only then does any question of payment arise. If it turns out your file really belongs in the state you came from, or that a chartered accountant or an advocate is the person you need rather than us, we will tell you that plainly, and you will not have been charged for finding out.
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