Arya Samaj Court Marriage Kirari & Nithari

Quick answer: Section 116 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 — Birth during marriage, conclusive proof of legitimacy — is the sharpest marriage provision on this whole site: a person born “during the continuance of a valid marriage between his mother and any man” is “conclusive proof that he is the legitimate child of that man”. And “conclusive proof” is a defined term — the Court “shall, on proof of the one fact, regard the other as proved, and shall not allow evidence to be given for the purpose of disproving it”. Contrary evidence is not weighed; it is shut out. Three rungs, and families are never told they differ: may presume (the court “may either regard such fact as proved… or may call for proof of it”), shall presume (“shall regard such fact as proved, unless and until it is disproved”), and conclusive proof — where there is no “unless”. Everything else on this website runs on the ordinary standard, a fact being “proved” only when a “prudent man ought… to act upon the supposition that it exists”. Section 116’s single condition is a valid marriage — and under section 7 your courtyard ceremony in 2013 already was one, so what is missing is not validity but provability. The commonest mistake here: believing a certificate is pointless once the children are born. Section 116 nowhere requires that the marriage was registered before the birth. Honest limits, quoted not hidden: the conclusive proof applies “unless it can be shown that the parties to the marriage had no access to each other at any time when he could have been begotten” — a question of fact for proceedings, never a counter. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000, civil route ₹15,000; late amounts ₹500/₹1,000, both waivable, no larger after eleven years. We go to no court, arrange no tests, take no paternity, legitimacy, custody or maintenance work, provide no witnesses — and take nothing for any of it.

The Strongest Thing a Marriage Does for a Child, in One Sentence

Kirari, Nithari, Prem Nagar, Mubarakpur Dabas and the lanes that run between them are among the youngest places in Delhi. Not old in building — much of it has gone up in the last twenty-five years — but young in people. The households here are in their twenties and thirties. The children are small. Walk past any gate in the morning and what you see is school uniforms.

So this page is about a provision that concerns those children, and it is the sharpest marriage provision on this entire website.

Section 116 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 carries the heading Birth during marriage, conclusive proof of legitimacy, and it reads:

“The fact that any person was born during the continuance of a valid marriage between his mother and any man, or within two hundred and eighty days after its dissolution, the mother remaining unmarried, shall be conclusive proof that he is the legitimate child of that man, unless it can be shown that the parties to the marriage had no access to each other at any time when he could have been begotten.”

Everything on this page turns on two expressions in that sentence: valid marriage, and conclusive proof.

Begin with the second one, because most people — including many who have read the section — underestimate it badly. “Conclusive proof” is not a figure of speech and it is not the same as a strong presumption. It is a defined term, and the Adhiniyam defines it in its own section 2:

“‘conclusive proof’ means when one fact is declared by this Adhiniyam to be conclusive proof of another, the Court shall, on proof of the one fact, regard the other as proved, and shall not allow evidence to be given for the purpose of disproving it.”

Read the last clause again. Not “the court shall give it great weight”. Not “the burden shifts”. The court shall not allow evidence to be given for the purpose of disproving it. The door is shut. Somebody who wants to argue the other way is not told that his evidence is weak; he is told that his evidence will not be received at all.

There is nothing else like that anywhere else on this website. Thirty-eight pages here have set out provisions that give a spouse or a child something — a compensation entitlement, a provident fund, a pension, a maintenance claim, a place in a list of dependants — and every single one of them leaves the family to go and prove the relationship by ordinary means, against whatever the other side wants to say. Section 116 is the one provision that does not leave it open. Establish the valid marriage, and the legitimacy of the child born during it is not merely presumed but placed beyond contradiction.

And that is the whole reason this page exists, because the condition is the thing we do. The section does not operate on cohabitation. It does not operate on reputation, or on the neighbours' knowledge, or on thirty years of living together. It operates on a valid marriage — and the practical question for a household in Kirari is whether anybody can show, years from now and to somebody who was not there, that a valid marriage was continuing on the day a child was born.

The marriage itself is almost certainly already valid. Under section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 a marriage is effected by the carrying out of whichever side's customary rites are followed, so a ceremony in a courtyard here in 2013, with eighty people present and nothing written down, made the two of them husband and wife on that day. Nothing about section 116 requires a certificate for the marriage to be valid. What the certificate does is make the validity provable without argument — and a provision whose entire force depends on a condition is only as useful to you as your ability to establish that condition.

And the document is still available, whatever year the wedding was. A ceremony from 2013, or 2003, or 1993 can be brought onto the register now. No deadline was ever set and none has passed. Our late registration page takes the procedure step by step. The waiting has cost only one of the two fixed sums in Delhi's 2014 Order — ₹500 where the filing falls inside the second stretch of sixty days, ₹1,000 beyond it — both of which the ADM or the DM may waive outright, and neither of which is any larger for a gap of twenty years than for one of four months.

Three Rungs, and Why This One Is at the Top

To see how unusual section 116 is, it helps to know that the Adhiniyam has a vocabulary for degrees of certainty, and that it defines each level in its own section 2. There are three rungs, and families are almost never told that they are different.

The bottom rung — what the court may do. “‘may presume’” means that “the Court may either regard such fact as proved, unless and until it is disproved or may call for proof of it.” The court has a choice. It can accept the fact, or it can ask you to prove it properly.

The middle rung — what the court must do unless contradicted. “‘shall presume’” means that “the Court shall regard such fact as proved, unless and until it is disproved.” Now the court has no choice at the start — but the other side may come forward and disprove it.

The top rung — conclusive proof. The court regards the fact as proved and shall not allow evidence to be given for the purpose of disproving it. There is no “unless and until”. The question is closed.

Now place the rest of this website on that ladder, and the point of section 116 becomes obvious.

The provision our Trilokpuri page is built on — section 44 of the same Adhiniyam, which lets a marriage be shown by the opinion expressed by conduct of a person with special means of knowledge — delivers a relevant fact. That is below even the bottom rung: it means the evidence may be received and considered, nothing more. It is a long way from being told that your marriage is accepted.

And the ordinary standard that everything else runs on is the Adhiniyam's own definition of “proved”: a fact is proved when, after considering the matters before it, the court “either believes it to exist, or considers its existence so probable that a prudent man ought, under the circumstances of the particular case, to act upon the supposition that it exists.” Its mirror, “disproved”, is drawn the same way. That is the test every undocumented family on this site is asked to satisfy — the judgement of a prudent man, weighing it up, case by case, on whatever happens to be available on the day.

Section 116 lifts a family off that ladder entirely, for one specific question. Not for the marriage itself — the marriage still has to be established. But once it is, the legitimacy of the child born during it stops being a matter of what a prudent man would think. It becomes a fact the court is forbidden to receive contrary evidence about.

The gap between the bottom of that ladder and the top of it is the entire value of a piece of paper that costs a few thousand rupees.

The One Door Left Open, and We Will Not Pretend Otherwise

Section 116 has an exception written into the same sentence, and a page that quoted the strong half and stopped would be doing exactly what this website exists not to do.

The conclusive proof applies “unless it can be shown that the parties to the marriage had no access to each other at any time when he could have been begotten.”

That is the only escape the section provides, and it is a narrow one. Not that the relationship was unhappy. Not that somebody doubts it. Not that a man says so. The exception is about access — and it has to be shown that there was none at any time in the relevant period.

What that means in practice, how it is shown, what evidence bears on it, and how it has been treated by the courts are all questions for an advocate, and they are completely outside this office. We will not tell you whether the exception would apply to anybody's situation, because nobody can tell you that at a counter. It is a question of fact decided in proceedings.

And a harder thing, said plainly because families in this belt get told otherwise. There are people who will offer, for money, to resolve a question about a child's paternity or legitimacy — through a test, through a “certificate”, through an affidavit, through contacts. We do none of it and we will not refer you to anybody who does. We do not arrange tests of any kind. We do not take paternity, legitimacy, custody, guardianship or maintenance work. We do not go to any court. There is no amount of money at which that changes, and anybody who tells you a payment will settle such a question is selling you something that is not theirs to sell.

What this office does is the narrow thing the section leaves to somebody else. Section 116 asks whether there was a valid marriage continuing when the child was born. It does not say a word about how that is to be shown. Putting a marriage onto the State's own register, including one performed years ago in a lane here with nothing written down, is the whole of what we sell — and it happens to be precisely the condition this provision runs on.

One further honest point about scope. Section 116 is a provision of a law of evidence. It tells a court what it must regard as proved. It is not a welfare scheme, it does not pay anybody anything, and it does not by itself decide any question of succession, inheritance, maintenance or property — all of which lie outside this business in any event. Its value is that it closes one question which, left open, is the question that gets reopened again and again across a child's life: at a school counter, at a bank, at a passport office, in a dispute among relatives, and at the worst possible moment, in front of somebody deciding what a dead man's family is entitled to.

“Valid Marriage” — Already True, and Separately, Provable

Two things get run together whenever this section is discussed in a lane, and separating them is the most useful thing this page can do.

First: is the marriage valid? For the great majority of households here the answer is yes, and has been since the day of the rites. Under section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 a marriage is solemnised by whichever side's customary rites are gone through. Section 5(ii) of the same Act places willingness among the conditions a valid marriage must satisfy. Nothing in either provision asks for a document. A ceremony in a courtyard in Nithari in 2013 was a marriage in 2013.

Second, and separately: can it be shown? That is not the same question, and it is the one that decides whether section 116 is any use to you. A provision that begins “born during the continuance of a valid marriage” is only as strong as a family's ability to establish that a valid marriage was continuing on a particular date.

Notice what section 116 needs, and what it does not. It needs the marriage — the valid marriage — and it needs the child's birth to fall within its continuance (or within the two hundred and eighty days after dissolution, the mother remaining unmarried). It does not need a date of registration. The register entry is not what creates the marriage and section 116 nowhere says the marriage must have been registered before the birth. Which is worth stating flatly, because the belief that registering now is pointless for a child already born is the commonest mistake this page exists to correct, and it stops households here from doing something cheap and useful.

Why a marriage certificate does the job better than anything else available. A certificate issued by the State is a record made by a public officer, of a ceremony, on a stated date, naming two people. Section 8 of the Hindu Marriage Act states its own purpose: registration exists to make a marriage easier to prove. That is literally what it is for. Set against the alternatives a family in this belt would otherwise be reduced to — wedding photographs, a mandir receipt, the memory of elders, a neighbour's word — a government entry is in a different category of document.

And a caution in the other direction, because the mistake runs both ways here. No certificate decides anything about a child on its own, and no office hands over a conclusive-proof finding across a counter. Section 116 is addressed to a court. Its definitions bind a court. What a school clerk, a bank, a passport office or a government department asks for is a separate matter, governed by whatever instructions that body works under. A registered marriage makes life considerably easier at all of those counters, and we will say so; but the specific power in section 116 is a power that operates in proceedings.

Two further things this page will not do, since we are being exact about scope. It will not tell you whether any particular child's birth fell within the continuance of any particular marriage. And it will not tell you what effect anything here has in a case. Both are for an advocate.

The One Statute on This Site That Says What It Wants

There is a pattern across this website that we did not set out to build and can no longer pretend is a coincidence.

Again and again, across subjects that share nothing with one another, Parliament attaches something of real value to being a spouse or an heir — and then has nothing whatever to say about how that is to be shown.

Welfare law for the old fastens the maintenance duty onto whoever would inherit, without a word on how heirship is to be worked out. A statute about railways turns the whole order of dependants on whether a dead passenger had married, and is mute on how that is shown. A law for migrant workmen directs that a dead man's next of kin be told, while never saying who answers to that description. Land acquisition law centres its household on his or her spouse, carefully treats widows, divorcees and women deserted by families as households of their own, and offers nothing on evidence. A statute drawn up for the city's unauthorised colonies extends recognition as far as their legal heirs and no further. Pensions, provident funds, gratuity, policies of insurance, rent control, compensation for workmen: all of them deliver something to a wife, and none of them tells the man behind the counter what he is supposed to look at.

Section 116 is the exception, and it is the exception in a revealing way. It does not ignore the question. It names its condition expressly — a valid marriage — and then, having named it, delivers the strongest consequence in the whole of the law of evidence. It is the one provision on this site that is honest about the fact that it is running on a marriage, and about how much it is prepared to do once the marriage is there.

And it is the clearest possible answer to a question families here ask us constantly, usually sheepishly: we have been married eleven years and the children are at school — what is the point of a paper now?

This is the point. Not that the marriage becomes real; it was real in 2013. Not that the children become legitimate; they already are, because they were born during a valid marriage. The point is that the paper converts an inheritance of arguments into a closed question. It takes a fact that currently depends on the memory of people who will not live for ever, and on the goodwill of relatives who may not keep it, and it puts that fact into a register where the law's own strongest provision can get hold of it.

This is all that this business consists of. Court is somewhere we never go. Paternity, legitimacy, custody, guardianship and maintenance work is declined, and tests are not arranged by us. Heirship, inheritance and property are not touched here. What we do is perform the Arya Samaj ceremony and get marriages entered on the government register — and in a belt this young, where almost every household has children small enough that the questions are still twenty years away, that is work worth doing early rather than late.

Because the pattern on the rest of this website tells you exactly when the question gets asked. Nobody is ever asked to prove a marriage on an ordinary Tuesday. They are asked in the week after a death, at a counter, by somebody who was not there, about a ceremony nobody wrote down — and in a young belt that moment is decades away and will arrive all the same.

The Provisions, in One Place

Below, in one place, is every provision this page has relied on. The middle column carries the statute's wording itself, unless the row states otherwise.

And the limit on every row of it: these are provisions of a law of evidence and of the marriage Acts, serving their own purposes. Nothing in the table tells you that any marriage was valid or continuing on any date, that any child's birth fell within it, whether the access exception would apply to anybody, or what any court, officer, school, bank or department would decide about anything.

A Young Belt's Papers, and the Three the File Actually Wants

Files from Kirari and Nithari look different from files anywhere else we work, and the difference is age.

A household here is often eleven or twelve years into its marriage and has two children under ten. What it holds is this: two Aadhaar cards, usually with the address updated at some point and usually not matching each other; a rent agreement, or no rent agreement; an electricity bill in a landlord's name; a bank passbook; the children's school records; and, with any luck, the children's birth certificates. Of all that, the documents that concern the two adults as a couple number zero.

And then the other pattern, which is the reason this page is addressed to young families. The children's birth certificates exist, and they name both parents. Households take enormous comfort from that, and it is worth having — but a birth record is a record of a birth. It records what was stated when the birth was registered. It is not the State's record of a marriage, and section 116 does not run on a birth certificate; it runs on a valid marriage.

Against that, what the marriage file asks for is three things: identity for each of you, age for each of you, and the address each of you is actually living at. That is all. It does not want the children's records touched. It does not want the school told. It does not want the rent agreement fixed first, the landlord involved, the bill transferred, or anybody's employer informed. And it does not require either of you to explain to anybody why you are doing it eleven years late, which is a question people brace for and are never asked.

The address is the obstacle here, almost always. This is a belt of rented rooms, informal tenancies and bills in other people's names. The order to fix it in matters more than the speed: get one truthful document in a living applicant's own name at the address you occupy, and then bring the rest up to it — bank first, Aadhaar after, the electoral roll last. Our Deoli and Khanpur page sets out the statutory route to that first document in a belt where every paper names somebody else, and our Laxmi Nagar page builds the whole chain from a standing start.

Allow weeks for it, not days. That is the single most practical sentence on this page for anybody working to a date.

Name spellings deserve a paragraph of their own in a belt like this one, because families here have papers made in three different states. A name recorded one way by a school in another district, differently by a bank in Delhi, and a third way on a child's birth record is the commonest hold-up in files from Kirari — and it is clerical, not legal. Send every version across. Within a few minutes, at no cost, we will tell you the one to standardise on. And it matters more here than elsewhere, because a provision about a child works best when the parents' names on the child's records and on the marriage entry are the same names.

And on what to refuse: say no to every offer to have a document produced for you. Rent agreements for rooms nobody lives in, bills arranged for a fee, affidavits that say what somebody thinks you need said. Where school and birth records are already sitting with officials, a fabricated paper openly contradicts documents that anybody is able to send for, and it converts a clerical shortfall into a lie. There is nothing a marriage file needs in these households that cannot be put together honestly.

Photograph everything and send it over before anybody gives up a shift. On WhatsApp, in no particular order. Free, ten minutes, and at the end of it you know which three papers matter out of the thirty you own.

Delhi, or the District Both of You Came From

Two questions get collapsed into one in a belt built by migration, and pulling them apart saves a wasted trip.

In what place were the rites carried out? Past and unalterable. Rites in a Prem Nagar courtyard put the solemnisation in Delhi; rites back home put it in that district, in whichever year it was.

Second question: what address is each of you living at today? The answer comes from how you actually live, not from a district printed on a card or the village named when somebody asks where the family is from. Two children raised in a rented room in Kirari means a Delhi household. Neither the length of the tenancy nor whose name the bill carries alters it.

For most households here Delhi answers both, and there is nothing to weigh.

Where it is a genuine question is the common case in this belt: a wedding performed in the home district, before or soon after the family came to Delhi. Then two things decide it, and only two. The address you live at today; and, over the decades to come, where this paper will be handed across counters, and by whom. Where the children attend school here, and the counters of the next two decades are here, the Delhi register is the right one. Where the household's true centre remains the district and Delhi only provides part of the year's earnings, the district is the answer.

You will hear our answer on the call itself, before a rupee changes hands — including the times when giving it straight means the work goes elsewhere.

And one point that follows from this page's subject. Where the family expects questions to arise in a different state one day — relatives there, land there — that is no reason to register the marriage twice. One entry carries throughout India — the Badarpur page prints the constitutional text that makes it so. Two entries add no safety at all; they hand somebody a rival document to place beside the first, which is the last thing a family wants when a provision depends on a date.

Two Witnesses in a Belt Where Everybody Arrived Recently

Flatly, because the worry is far larger than the role. Two men attend, stand where the officer puts them, and set their names to two propositions: that the couple in the room are the couple the papers are about, and that the ceremony took place. No undertaking is given by either, no liability follows either, and neither hears about it again. Each man comes with a pair of documents in his own name — one bearing his photograph, one establishing his residence. Nothing at all is filed in advance. Eligibility is covered on our witnesses page.

The difficulty here is specific, and it is not the one people expect. It is not finding two willing people — this belt is full of relatives and neighbours. It is that most of them arrived recently and may leave. The man two doors down came from Bareilly four years ago and may go back. The cousin in the next lane is on a rented room and a changing number.

So choose for durability, and for this page's subject in particular. Prefer somebody whose own documents already agree with one another, and whose family address in the home district will still find him in twenty years. And prefer somebody who was genuinely present at the ceremony and can still describe it — because on a page about a provision that turns on a marriage continuing on a particular date, the witness whose memory matters is the one who was in the courtyard.

Note down more than seems called for. Whichever spelling his papers carry. An address in the home district that will outlast him, district named, rather than the rented room he is in now. And a number that rings somebody who is not him. Three lines, and they decide between a man who can be traced in 2046 and nothing at all on the day it counts.

We do not sell any part of this. No sum of money gets a witness out of this office, and anybody putting that to you deserves to be turned down on the spot. A signature from somebody who never set foot in the room is a fault that was put there deliberately — and on a paper whose entire point is to settle a question past arguing, a deliberate fault is precisely what opens it up again.

Where the Certificate Should Live When the Children Are Small

Three certified copies, and in a young household the reasoning is different from anywhere else on this site. One stays with the couple. One goes to family in the home district, who are not moving. And the third is for the children — not now, but in twenty-five years, when they are the ones at a counter and both of you may not be there to explain anything.

That third copy is the whole argument of this page in physical form. A provision that makes the legitimacy of a child conclusive, on proof of a valid marriage, is a provision that the child will one day need to invoke. The document should outlive the people who obtained it.

Within the first week, put three things on paper and store that paper apart from the certificate: which office issued the document, what date the entry bears, and the serial against it in the register. Holding those, a duplicate thirty years on is a single form at a counter. Lacking them, a grown child is working through registers after two names and a year they can only estimate.

Photograph it, and then do the step almost nobody does: open that photograph on a different phone to be sure it works, and tell the oldest child, in plain words, where the original is kept. A child of nine will remember that for fifty years.

And read every line of it the day it arrives, with both Aadhaar cards and the children's birth records open beside it rather than going from memory. Spellings get the hardest look, and here with a particular purpose: check that the parents' names on the marriage entry read the same as the parents' names on each child's birth record. Then both fathers' names as each man writes them himself, both dates of birth against whichever age paper went in, the date of the rites, both addresses, and the register's serial. Caught this month, a mismatch is one form and a short wait. Found in thirty years by somebody trying to line two documents up, it is the thing that puts the question back on the table.

Which Office, and Why None Is Named Here

There is no office named on any page of this site, deliberately. Jurisdiction tracks the address exactly as it is written down; the city redrew its sub-divisional map over the course of 2026; and anything we put in print might be wrong by the time a household had spent a day's earnings acting on it. Give us the address in the words the Aadhaar uses and we will establish, free, which office it belongs to this month.

Two reassurances, since both questions come from this belt. Where a boundary shifted after a certificate had issued, the certificate is unaffected — it holds, and nothing is done over. And where a register cannot be located, it has not been destroyed; it went with its area to whichever office inherited that area. For an old entry that has fallen silent, the working sequence is on our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page: a written request to whoever holds the area now, keeping an RTI for the point at which that comes back with nothing. Your own application sitting still is a separate matter, taken up on the Lajpat Nagar page together with the Delhi legislation that imposes deadlines on notified services and makes the officer at fault compensate the applicant himself.

Kirari, Nithari and the Lanes Around Them

Ten Things a Young Household Gets Wrong Here

One — believing a certificate is pointless now that the children are born. Section 116 asks whether there was a valid marriage continuing at the birth. It nowhere requires that the marriage had already been registered.

Two — treating a birth certificate as the marriage record. It records a birth and what was stated at the time. The provision runs on a valid marriage, which is a different document.

Three — reading “conclusive proof” as a strong presumption. It is a defined term, and the definition ends with the court not allowing evidence to be given to disprove the fact.

Four — assuming all presumptions are the same. They are three different things: may presume, shall presume, and conclusive proof. Only the last one closes the question.

Five — quoting the strong half of section 116 and forgetting the access exception. It is in the same sentence, and whether it applies to anybody is decided in proceedings and never at a counter.

Six — paying somebody to “settle” a question about a child. No payment settles it, no office hands out a finding, and we arrange no tests and take no such work at any price.

Seven — letting the names drift between the marriage entry and the children's records. A provision about a child works best when the parents' names read the same on both. Check it on the day the certificate arrives.

Eight — starting the document chain at Aadhaar. Begin with one honest record in a living applicant's name at the address occupied, then bank, then Aadhaar, then the roll.

Nine — choosing two witnesses who arrived last year and may leave next year. Prefer somebody who was in the courtyard and whose family address will still find him in twenty years.

Ten — keeping both copies in the rented room. The third copy belongs to the children, for a day twenty-five years from now when neither of you is at the counter.

What We Charge

Every figure this office charges is printed below. Additional certified copies, fixing an incorrect entry, apostille and attestation, the fully managed option and the State's own collections all have rows of their own on the fee page.

The State's collections are the State's money, never ours, and each rupee returns to you on a receipt. ₹100 is what the Marriage Clerk takes. The 2014 Order loads another ₹200 onto the application. On the civil route a further ₹15 goes to the District cashier. An older wedding draws exactly one further sum under that Order — ₹500 if you are inside the second sixty days, ₹1,000 if past them — and either can be waived by the ADM or DM. The figure is identical whether you are four months behind or eleven years.

Several things here are simply not for sale, whatever is offered. Finding you a witness is not a service of ours. A date nobody actually lived through does not get entered on a form by us. Nothing is issued where only one of you turned up. Paternity, legitimacy, custody, guardianship and maintenance work is all declined; tests of every kind are outside us; and we will not pass you on to anybody who says a payment will settle a question of that sort. No court and no authority ever sees anybody from here. We make no undertaking about the eventual view of a judge, an officer, a school, a bank or a department. Heirship, inheritance, nomination forms and property have no place in this office. Nobody's caste or community is commented on, and conversion is neither recommended nor set up. When the true answer is that an advocate, and not a marriage service, deserves your money, that is what gets said on the first call for nothing — said in full awareness that it is generally the last remark before the line falls quiet.

Sources, and What This Page Cannot Say

Sourced — the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Section 116, quoted whole, with its heading Birth during marriage, conclusive proof of legitimacy. And from section 2, the definitions of “conclusive proof”, “shall presume”, “may presume”, “proved” and “disproved”, each quoted in the Adhiniyam's own words above.

What was confirmed, and against what. Section 116 was read in two independent published copies of the Adhiniyam, which gave it in identical words, and its heading in two. The section 2 definitions of “conclusive proof”, “proved” and “disproved” were likewise confirmed in two published copies, in full. Two points of honesty about the citation itself. First, published copies letter the section 2 definitions differently — some as section 2(1)(b) and others as section 2(b) — so we have cited the definitions by name rather than leaning on a clause letter. Second, the definitions of “may presume” and “shall presume” were taken from a single published copy of the Adhiniyam, and are quoted as that copy sets them out; nothing on this page turns on their precise wording, only on the three-way distinction they draw.

Described rather than quoted, and flagged wherever it appears above. Section 44 of the same Adhiniyam is described on this page rather than reproduced, because it is quoted in full on our Trilokpuri page; the description here should not be relied on as its wording. We have also not set out how any court has interpreted section 116, or the access exception, and nothing here should be read as doing so.

Sourced — the marriage law behind this page. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 supplies three provisions: section 7, by which carrying out either side's customary rites is what solemnises a marriage; section 5(ii), which makes willingness one of the conditions of validity; and section 8, written in terms to ease the proof of a marriage. The Special Marriage Act, 1954 supplies section 4, under which the civil route is available for a marriage “between any two persons”, bringing with it that Act's residence condition and the thirty days across which a notice can be objected to. Four items trace back to Delhi's 2014 Order: Order 8, the ₹200 on an application, the sixty-day measure, and the two late figures. Two more — the ₹100 and ₹15 charges and the department's own stated turnaround — come from Delhi Revenue Department publications. BNS s.236 is the provision on untrue declarations; apostille and attestation rates are those published by the Ministry of External Affairs.

What this page cannot say. Whether any marriage was valid, or was continuing on any particular date. Whether any child's birth fell within the continuance of a marriage, or within the two hundred and eighty days the section allows. Whether the access exception would apply to any situation — a question of fact decided in proceedings. What any court would hold about anything, or what weight any school, bank, passport office or department would give to any document. Nor does anything here decide a question of succession, inheritance, maintenance, custody or guardianship, none of which this office touches. Neither can it identify the office for any given address, since that tracks the written address and shifted when the boundaries were redrawn in 2026. In one sentence: this office performs marriages and puts marriages on the register. Courts, paternity, legitimacy proceedings, tests, custody, maintenance, heirship and property all lie somewhere else; no one drawing a wage here stands up before a judge or an authority; and none of it is ever billed to anybody. Section 116 is printed here for a single reason. It is the only provision we have found in which the law, having named a marriage as its condition, then gives the strongest consequence it is capable of giving — and it says nothing whatever about how the condition is to be established. Establishing it is the only thing we sell. A household with a real dispute about a child wants an advocate, and a woman may have one appointed free of charge with nobody examining her means — the statutory basis for that, and what legal aid does not reach, are both on our Vikaspuri page.

Before You Call

One — roughly what year, and roughly where, were the rites performed? “Here in the lane, about 2013” or “back in the district, before we came” is enough to begin. Those two details between them fix the route and the figure.

Two — how many children, and what years were they born in, approximately? The marriage file is unaffected by the answer. We ask for a different reason: it decides which passages of this page we would want said out loud to you before we hang up.

Three — have both Aadhaar cards in front of you and read out exactly what is printed, rather than the address either of you says from memory. Tell us as well about every spelling either name has ever appeared under, including on the children's papers.

The number is +91 8376863962. Payment comes up only after three things have been put to you: which route your own facts belong to, our charge for it, and the separate amount the State collects. Should the real position be that the coming weeks are for documents and not for an appointment, you will hear that instead — and you will have paid nothing to find out.

Kirari, Nithari and the Lanes — Your Questions58 Questions Answered