Nand Nagri, Sunder Nagri, Mandoli, Saboli and Harsh Vihar — blocks built by resettling households, where everything a family holds flows from how it was once counted.
Quick answer: These blocks exist because households were counted and resettled. Parliament answered that same question again in 2013, and the answer begins with a husband or wife. Section 3(m) of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 defines a family as one that “includes a person, his or her spouse, minor children, minor brothers and minor sisters dependent on him” — the spouse named second, before the children, and the only person in that list carrying no test of minority and no test of dependence. Then its proviso: “widows, divorcees and women deserted by families shall be considered separate families” — Parliament stopping a woman with no man from vanishing into somebody else’s count, in mandatory terms. Then its Explanation, going further still: “An adult of either gender with or without spouse or children or dependents shall be considered as a separate family.” And section 3(c)(vi) brings in “a family residing on any land in the urban areas for preceding three years or more” — residing, not owning. Every one of those turns on a marriage. Not one of them says how to prove one. A widow whose 1987 wedding in these lanes was witnessed by a hundred and fifty people and recorded by nobody has the proviso on her side and no way to switch it on. She has been married since 1987 — section 7 makes the rites the operative act — and the record is still available, with no cut-off. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000, civil route ₹15,000. This Act reopens no old allotment and we do no acquisition, compensation or resettlement work at all — we provide no witnesses, and if you need an advocate we say so first.
Nand Nagri and Sunder Nagri exist because households were moved and put somewhere. That is what the word in the name means. Families were counted, allotted a number, and resettled — and everything a household here owns or holds flows from how it was counted on that day.
The counting that built this colony happened decades ago, under arrangements long replaced. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and nothing on this page is about anybody's old allotment.
But the question "who counts as one household?" did not go away, and Parliament answered it again, carefully, in 2013. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 is the current law on displacement, and it contains the State's most recent and most deliberate statement of what a family is for the purpose of being counted.
Section 3(m) defines it, and look at what the sentence does first:
"'family' includes a person, his or her spouse, minor children, minor brothers and minor sisters dependent on him."
The spouse is named second, immediately after the person himself — before the children. Not as a dependant, not inside a residual category, but as the first other human being the definition reaches for. Parliament, setting out to describe a household in a line, began with a husband or wife.
And notice "his or her spouse." The drafting is deliberately symmetrical. The definition does not assume the person being counted is a man.
Then notice what the rest of the list requires. Minor children. Minor brothers and minor sisters "dependent on him" — so a brother is in the household only if he is both a minor and dependent. The qualifications pile up on everybody else in the sentence. They do not pile up on the spouse. A husband or wife is simply in, with no test of minority and no test of dependence attached.
That is a small piece of drafting and it tells you how the State thinks. When it has to draw a line around a household, the line goes around a married couple first and works outward.
Section 3(m) does not stop at the definition. It carries a proviso, and the proviso is the reason this page exists.
"Provided that widows, divorcees and women deserted by families shall be considered separate families."
Read that again and consider what it is doing. Parliament has just defined a household around a married couple. It then immediately turns and says: a woman whose marriage has ended is not to be swept into somebody else's household. She is a household.
Three categories, each named separately, and the third is the remarkable one. A widow — the marriage ended by death. A divorcee — the marriage ended by decree. And "women deserted by families" — a category with no decree, no certificate of anything, and no formal event at all. Parliament reached past the legal forms to describe a situation: she was simply left.
Why does a statute about land bother with this? Because the drafters knew exactly what happens otherwise. When a State counts households and hands out entitlements per household, the woman with no man is the person who disappears. She gets folded into her late husband's brother's count, or her father's, and the entitlement attaches to him. The proviso is there to stop that, and it is written in mandatory terms — shall be considered separate families.
And here is where it touches everything else on this website. The proviso works by asking a question about a marriage. Is she a widow? Then there was a marriage, and it ended by a death. Is she a divorcee? Then there was a marriage, and a court ended it. Was she deserted by a family? Then there was a family to be deserted by.
In each case the proviso's protection switches on only if the marriage can be established. And the statute, having gone to the trouble of writing the protection, says not one word about how anybody is to prove the marriage it depends on. It assumes. Like every provision of this kind, it assumes.
There is a third layer to section 3(m), and in some ways it is the boldest.
"Explanation.—An adult of either gender with or without spouse or children or dependents shall be considered as a separate family for the purposes of this Act."
An adult is a family. With a spouse or without one. With children or without. With dependants or without. For the purposes of this Act, being an adult is enough.
Put the three layers together and you can see Parliament thinking. The definition draws the ordinary case — a person, a spouse, minor children, minor dependent siblings. The proviso rescues women whose marriages have ended from being counted into somebody else's household. And the Explanation then says, more broadly, that adulthood by itself makes you a unit — so a grown son living in his father's house is not merely a line in his father's count.
What that combination is for is obvious once you have seen a colony like this one. In a resettlement colony, three generations live in a plot allotted to one man. When the State counts, everything turns on how many families are standing there. One, or four? The 2013 Act's answer is considerably more generous than the instinct of whoever is holding the clipboard.
We must be careful, and we will be. This is the definition of "family" in one Act, for the purposes of that Act. It does not govern ration cards, housing schemes, pension schemes or anything else — each of those has its own definition, and some of them are much narrower. Nothing on this page tells you how you would be counted for any purpose, by anybody. We do not do land acquisition work, we do not advise on compensation or on rehabilitation and resettlement entitlements, we take no claim before any Collector, Authority or Tribunal, and we are paid nothing for any of it.
The reason these three layers are set out here is narrower and it is the subject of the rest of this page: all three of them are hinged on a marriage, and none of them tells you how to prove one.
One more definition from the same section, because it corrects a belief that runs very deep in colonies like this one: that the law only cares about people with papers.
Section 3(c) defines "affected family", and it opens with the obvious case — "(i) a family whose land or other immovable property has been acquired". Then it keeps going for five more clauses, and the people in those clauses own nothing.
Clause (ii) reaches "a family which does not own any land but a member or members of such family may be agricultural labourers, tenants including any form of tenancy or holding of usufruct right, share-croppers or artisans or who may be working in the affected area for three years prior to the acquisition of the land, whose primary source of livelihood stand affected by the acquisition of land."
And clause (vi) is the urban one, which matters most here: "a family residing on any land in the urban areas for preceding three years or more prior to the acquisition of the land or whose primary source of livelihood for three years prior to the acquisition of the land is affected by the acquisition of such land."
Residing. Not owning, not holding title, not possessing a registered document. A family that has lived on urban land for three years or more is inside the definition of "affected family" on the strength of having lived there.
The other clauses show the same instinct — (iii) covering Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who lose rights recognised under the 2006 forest rights legislation; (iv) families whose livelihood for three years depended on forests or water bodies, "and includes gatherers of forest produce, hunters, fisher folk and boatmen"; and (v) a member of a family assigned land by a State or the Central Government under any of its schemes where that land is under acquisition.
Notice the pattern across all six. Twice the Act asks about ownership, and four times it asks about something else entirely: where you live, what you do, how long you have done it. It is a statute that knows perfectly well that most of the people affected by a land acquisition have nothing in their own name.
What the three-year clauses actually need, though, is proof of a household over time — that this family resided here, for this long. And the question of who is in the family takes you straight back to section 3(m), and from there to a marriage.
Two more definitions, quoted because they are the formal names for the thing that happened to the households in these blocks.
Section 3(k): "'displaced family' means any family, who on account of acquisition of land has to be relocated and resettled from the affected area to the resettlement area."
Section 3(zc): "'Resettlement Area' means an area where the affected families who have been displaced as a result of land acquisition are resettled by the appropriate Government."
That is a definition of Nand Nagri, written in 2013 about something that happened long before. An area where displaced families are resettled by the government. The Act was not written about this colony and does not apply to what was done here — but it named the category, and reading your own neighbourhood in a statutory definition is a strange and clarifying thing.
Why it is worth putting on this page. Because the whole legal architecture of displacement is built on the word family, repeated in definition after definition — affected family, displaced family, the families who are resettled. Every entitlement, every count, every allotment attaches to a family. And "family", as we have seen, is a word that begins with a spouse.
And one honest limit, stated plainly. This Act does not reopen anything. It gives nobody here a claim about an allotment made decades ago. If you were under-counted in 1980, this statute is not the answer, and anybody who tells you it is should not be believed. It is set out on this page as the clearest available statement of how the State now thinks about households — not as a remedy.
This is the section the rest of the page exists for, and it is the thread that runs under every page on this website.
Set the provisions side by side and watch the same thing happen four times.
Section 3(m) draws the household around "his or her spouse" — and never says how the office counting that household establishes that the two people in front of it are married.
The proviso protects "widows, divorcees and women deserted by families" — and never says how a woman shows she is a widow, or that there was a marriage to be divorced from, or a family to be deserted by.
The Explanation makes an adult a separate family "with or without spouse" — and so requires somebody to know which of those two she is.
And section 3(c)'s three-year clauses turn on a family having resided or worked somewhere — which requires knowing who the family is.
Four provisions in one section of one statute, every one of them resting on a marriage, and not a line anywhere about proving it.
This is not a criticism of the drafting. It is how statutes are built. A law that hands something to a spouse has no business explaining the law of marriage; that sits elsewhere. But the consequence is real and it lands on the same person every time: somebody turns up at an office and is asked to show something, and whether she is counted as a household or as a line in somebody else's depends on what she can produce.
And in a colony like this one, what she can produce is often nothing. The marriage happened in 1987, in these lanes or in a village in Bulandshahr, performed properly in front of a hundred and fifty people, and recorded nowhere. Her husband died in 2011. Her brother-in-law holds the plot papers. When somebody with a clipboard asks whether she is a separate family, the proviso in section 3(m) is on her side — and she has no way of switching it on.
She is a married woman, and has been one since 1987. Section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 treats the performance of the customary rites as the thing that marries people — so the absence of a document leaves the marriage itself entirely untouched. Our Trilokpuri page sets out what the evidence law allows in place of a certificate, and what that route costs — it works in a court, as a relevant fact, on the word of witnesses who are getting older.
What closes the gap is one document, and it is still available. A wedding from 1987 can be brought onto the record now. There is no cut-off and no deadline that has gone past. Our late registration page sets out the whole process, and the only thing the delay costs is one of two fixed amounts under Delhi's 2014 Order — ₹500 where the filing falls in the second sixty-day stretch and ₹1,000 beyond it — both of which the ADM or DM may waive, and neither of which has grown by a rupee in the intervening decades.
That is the whole of what this business does. Not entitlements, not compensation, not land. One document, which turns a fact a hundred and fifty people witnessed into something an office will act on.
Everything quoted above, collected. Each entry is the Act's own wording.
| Clause | What the Act says | Where the marriage comes in |
|---|---|---|
| 3(m) — "family" | "includes a person, his or her spouse, minor children, minor brothers and minor sisters dependent on him" | The spouse is named immediately after the person, with no test of minority or dependence attached — unlike everybody else in the list. |
| 3(m) proviso | "widows, divorcees and women deserted by families shall be considered separate families" | Each of the three categories is defined by a marriage that existed and then ended. The protection cannot switch on unless the marriage can be shown. |
| 3(m) Explanation | "An adult of either gender with or without spouse or children or dependents shall be considered as a separate family for the purposes of this Act" | Requires somebody to know whether there is a spouse or not. |
| 3(c)(i) | "a family whose land or other immovable property has been acquired" | "Family" carries the 3(m) meaning throughout. |
| 3(c)(ii) | A family owning no land whose members are "agricultural labourers, tenants including any form of tenancy or holding of usufruct right, share-croppers or artisans" or working in the area for three years, whose primary livelihood is affected | Ownership is not required — but the household has to be identifiable. |
| 3(c)(vi) | "a family residing on any land in the urban areas for preceding three years or more prior to the acquisition of the land", or whose primary livelihood for three years is affected | Residence alone brings an urban household inside the definition. |
| 3(k) — "displaced family" | "any family, who on account of acquisition of land has to be relocated and resettled from the affected area to the resettlement area" | The formal name for what happened to households in these blocks. |
| 3(zc) — "Resettlement Area" | "an area where the affected families who have been displaced as a result of land acquisition are resettled by the appropriate Government" | A statutory definition of a colony like this one. |
And the limit on all of it, repeated because it matters: this is the definition of "family" in one Act, for that Act's own purposes. Ration cards, housing schemes and pension schemes each have their own definitions and some are far narrower. Nothing here tells you how you would be counted by anybody, for anything.
The practical knot in these blocks is that the documents the household depends on were issued to somebody who has died, and nobody ever changed anything.
A file from Nand Nagri or Sunder Nagri usually looks like this: an allotment or possession paper from the resettlement, in a grandfather's or father's name; an electricity account still billed to him; a water connection in a brother's name; two or three families living on a plot that was counted as one; and between the couple actually getting married, not a single document naming either of them at the address they sleep at.
None of that has to be sorted out before a marriage can be registered. We say this early and often because it is the belief that costs households here the most years. Three things are what the marriage file is after: identity, age, and the address each of you genuinely occupies. Whose name sits on the plot is irrelevant to it. The allotment can stay exactly where it is. A deceased relative can remain on the electricity account. And no brother's agreement is required for any of it.
Where the address is the real obstacle, the way through is to get one honest record standing in the name of a person who is alive, and let the others be pulled along after it. In practice that usually means the bank first, then the Aadhaar, then the voters' list — a job counted in weeks rather than an afternoon, which is exactly why this call belongs a month before any date is fixed. How that first record gets assembled with nothing to begin from is on our Laxmi Nagar page; what an Aadhaar printed in another state does and does not decide is on our Timarpur page.
And refuse every offer to "get the papers made". A document that places your name at an address you have never slept at buys nothing except a weakness built in on purpose, and it fails you at the single counter that mattered. Every component of a marriage file can be put together honestly.
Photographs first, before anyone loses a day's work. Send pictures of what you have on WhatsApp whenever the day allows. It costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and the defects that send a family back a second time nearly always show in a photograph and almost never come out in conversation.
Two separate questions get tangled here, and pulling them apart saves people a journey.
Where were the rites performed? That is a fact about the past and nothing alters it. A ceremony in these lanes was solemnised in Delhi. A ceremony in a village in western Uttar Pradesh was solemnised there.
Where do you actually live now? Residence is a question about your present life, not a line printed on a card in another decade. A household that has been in one of these blocks since the resettlement lives in Delhi, whatever district the family still calls home and whatever any old document prints.
For most families in this belt both answers are Delhi, and there is no real question to settle. The household has been here two generations or three; the wedding was here; the offices, the banks and the claims will all be here.
Where it genuinely is a question is a wedding performed back in the district. Then it turns on two things: where you actually live now, and where the certificate will one day be produced. A household whose whole life is in Delhi is almost always better served registering here even for a village ceremony, because Delhi is where it will be asked for. A household whose centre of gravity has moved back is better served there. Which of the two it is, you will hear on the call itself, with nothing paid yet — and you will hear it even on the occasions when the truthful answer hands the job to somebody else.
What witnesses do is narrow, and the anxiety around it is wide, so here it is plainly. Two people come, stand in front of the officer, and put their signatures to two propositions: that the couple present are the couple the file describes, and that the ceremony took place. They guarantee nothing. No obligation of any kind follows them afterwards. Each of them arrives with a pair of documents issued to him personally — one carrying a photograph, one establishing where he lives. Nothing goes in beforehand, and nobody may sign on behalf of a person who stayed away. Who qualifies is set out on our witnesses page.
The particular feature of these blocks is that everybody is from somewhere else originally, and everybody has stayed. Households resettled together fifty years ago are still neighbours, still on the same lane, still at the same gali number. That is a real advantage, and it is worth recognising: a witness from this colony is more likely to be findable in twenty years than a witness from almost anywhere else in Delhi.
So use it deliberately. Prefer the neighbour whose family has held the same plot since the allotment over the friend who moved in last year. Prefer somebody in their thirties or forties over the oldest and most knowledgeable relative — he is the better source of knowledge and the worse signature on a form that may need verifying in 2050.
Take down more than a name. The block and plot number, a full name as it appears on his own documents, and a second contact who is not him. It costs a minute now and is worth a great deal to whoever has to find that man decades later.
Nothing here is bought. We will not organise a witness for any sum, and an offer from any other office to produce one deserves a flat no the moment it is made. Putting a stranger's signature on that certificate means a weakness has been engineered into it on purpose, and the giving way happens at the precise counter where the paper was meant to carry the most weight.
Three certified copies, and in a shared plot the third is the one that matters. One with the couple. One with whoever keeps the household's papers. And one outside the plot entirely — a married sister in another colony, a cousin in Ghaziabad, anybody whose cupboard is not the same cupboard. Where several families share one address and the documents live in one trunk, a single quarrel, a single death or a single leaking roof can put the whole file out of reach of the person who needs it most.
Within the first week, get three things into a notebook: which office put its seal on it, what date the entry itself bears, and the number the register gave it. With that trio in hand, a duplicate years later is one application. Go without them and somebody will be working through old registers looking for a name beside a year that is only an estimate.
Photograph it, make sure both of you can open the picture from whatever phone is to hand, and tell one person outside the plot how to find it.
On the day it arrives, work through it entry by entry. Lay it next to the Aadhaar rather than relying on what you remember, and reserve your sharpest attention for the transliteration — a name set down one way by a school back in the district, another by a bank in Delhi, and a third by whoever typed the form, is what goes wrong most often in paperwork from colonies of this kind. After that: each father's name spelt the way he himself spells it, the two dates of birth measured against whatever age document was handed in, the date of the ceremony, both addresses, and the number the register has given the entry. Catch an error now and it is one form and a modest wait. Let the same error sit for thirty years and it resurfaces in front of an official deciding whether a woman is a household in her own right or merely a name inside her brother-in-law's — which is a far costlier place to find it.
No office name appears anywhere on this website, and that is a decision rather than an omission. Where a file belongs follows the address exactly as it is written; Delhi's sub-divisional boundaries were reworked through 2026; and a name set in type here could be out of date by the time a family relied on it and gave up a day to travel. Tell us the address in the Aadhaar's own wording and we will find out, free, where it reports today.
Two worries worth settling, because both come up in these blocks. A boundary redrawn after your certificate was issued leaves that certificate exactly as valid as it was — nothing has to be redone. And an old register nobody can locate has not been destroyed; it has passed to whichever office took over that area, which matters here because records touching a resettlement colony have had half a century of reorganisations to travel through. For chasing an entry that has gone quiet, our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page takes the two stages in order — a written request to the office itself, and RTI only once that has drawn a blank. Where it is the application rather than the record that has stalled, the Lajpat Nagar page is the one: it explains the Delhi statute that puts a clock on notified services and obliges the defaulting officer to pay the applicant compensation himself.
| Area | What the file usually turns on here |
|---|---|
| Nand Nagri blocks, Sunder Nagri | Allotment papers in a grandfather’s name and weddings from the 1980s with no record. The marriage file needs neither the plot nor the allotment touched. |
| Mandoli, Saboli, Harsh Vihar, Gokalpuri side | The same pattern, with the household often spread across two plots and counted as one. |
| Dilshad Garden, Jhilmil, Seemapuri | Resettlement and industrial belt together; see our Shahdara page for the provident fund end of it. |
| Karawal Nagar, Mustafabad | Covered on our Karawal Nagar page — households with no employer and no provident fund at all. |
| Weddings performed back in the district | Solemnised there, registrable here if your life is here. We will say which suits the file. |
| Widows holding no certificate | Not without a route — the evidence law is set out on our Trilokpuri page. It is a court route and an advocate’s work, not ours, and we take nothing for it. |
| Three families on one allotted plot | Park the third certified copy well away from the plot — with a relative whose almirah has nothing to do with this household’s. |
| Couples marrying across caste in a close-knit colony | Our inter-caste page sets out what actually changes, which is less than families expect. |
One — waiting for the allotment or plot papers to be settled first. The marriage file and the property are unconnected. Households here lose years to this, and the marriage file is by far the easier of the two.
Two — believing a wedding with no paper left you unmarried. Section 7 married you on the day the rites were performed. Only the record is absent.
Three — assuming it is too late now. No cut-off exists. A wedding from 1987 is registrable in 2026.
Four — being hurried by a penalty that does not move. Two fixed sums, both waivable, neither larger for a forty-year gap than for a four-month one.
Five — expecting to be counted as a separate household without being able to show why. The proviso in section 3(m) is on a widow's side. It cannot help her if the marriage behind it cannot be established.
Six — reading a definition in one Act as though it governed everything. Ration cards, housing and pension schemes each define "family" their own way, and some far more narrowly.
Seven — choosing a witness who moved into the colony recently. In a belt where households have held the same plot for fifty years, permanence is available. Use it.
Eight — writing down a relationship instead of a person. "Tauji" cannot be traced in 2050. A full name, the block and plot, and a second contact can be.
Nine — keeping every copy in the household trunk. One quarrel, one death or one leaking roof and the file is beyond the person who needs it.
Ten — letting somebody arrange a document for you. A paper naming an address you never slept at is a weakness you paid for, and it fails where it counted.
Everything we charge, set out below. Replacement copies, fixing an entry, apostille handling, the managed package, and the government's own charges are each listed on the fee page.
| Route | Our fee | Who it suits in this belt |
|---|---|---|
| Arya Samaj ceremony at our mandir | ₹5,100 | Just the Vedic ceremony, closing with the mandir’s own certificate in your hand. Section 7 makes you married from that afternoon, long before any government register has your names. |
| Ceremony with registration handled | ₹7,100 | Ceremony and government entry handled as one job — what most couples getting married today take. |
| A wedding already held, brought onto the record | ₹6,000 | Most of what comes to us from this belt. Whichever year, whichever district — rites performed in a gali in 1987 with nothing committed to paper is routine work, not hard work. |
| Special Marriage Act, start to finish | ₹15,000 | The civil route, open to any two people whatever personal law would otherwise apply. Slower and public: a notice lies open thirty days for objection. |
The government's charges stand outside our fee and come back to you as receipts in your own hand: ₹100 to the Marriage Clerk, ₹200 carried by an application under Delhi's 2014 Order, and — on the civil route only — ₹15 to the District cashier. Where the wedding belongs to an earlier year, that Order adds two further fixed sums, ₹500 inside the second sixty-day window and ₹1,000 once it has gone, and both sit within the ADM's or DM's power to waive. Neither figure has moved in all the time you have waited.
Nine things cannot be bought from us at any price. We will not find you witnesses. We will not write down a date that never happened. We will not issue a certificate with one of you absent. We will not promise what any officer, Collector, Authority or court is going to do. We do no land acquisition work and give no advice on compensation or on rehabilitation and resettlement entitlements. We touch no succession, inheritance or property matter. We appear before no court, tribunal or authority. We offer no opinion on anybody's caste or community. And we neither propose nor arrange a conversion. And when the truthful reply is that an advocate rather than a marriage service is what your situation calls for, it comes on the first call and it costs nothing — even though saying it is usually the end of the call.
Sourced — the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, section 3. Clause (m), defining "family" as one that "includes a person, his or her spouse, minor children, minor brothers and minor sisters dependent on him"; its proviso, that "widows, divorcees and women deserted by families shall be considered separate families"; and its Explanation, that "An adult of either gender with or without spouse or children or dependents shall be considered as a separate family for the purposes of this Act." Clause (c), "affected family", with sub-clause (i) on a family whose land or other immovable property has been acquired; (ii) on a landless family whose members are "agricultural labourers, tenants including any form of tenancy or holding of usufruct right, share-croppers or artisans" or working in the affected area for three years, whose primary livelihood stands affected; (iii) on Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have lost rights recognised under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006; (iv) on families whose primary livelihood for three years depended on forests or water bodies, "and includes gatherers of forest produce, hunters, fisher folk and boatmen"; (v) on a member of a family assigned land by a State or the Central Government under any of its schemes where that land is under acquisition; and (vi) on "a family residing on any land in the urban areas for preceding three years or more prior to the acquisition of the land" or whose primary livelihood for three years is affected. Clause (k), "displaced family". And clause (zc), "Resettlement Area".
Every clause set out above was taken from the Act's own printed text, then checked a second time against an unrelated published copy of the same statute. One printing difference is worth recording rather than hiding: the proviso to clause (m) appears as "widows, divorcees" in one published text and "widows, divorces" in another, which is plainly a typographical variation in the second. Nothing on this page turns on it, and the reading used here is the one the sense requires.
Sourced — the provisions on marriage itself. Three sections of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955: s.7, under which the customary rites of either side are what actually solemnise the marriage; s.5(ii), requiring willingness; and s.8, whose stated object is making a marriage easier to prove. Alongside them, s.4 of the Special Marriage Act, 1954, extending the civil route to "any two persons" — together with the residence condition that Act imposes and its thirty-day objection window. From Delhi's 2014 Order come Order 8, the ₹200 attached to an application, the sixty-day window and both late figures. The ₹100 and ₹15 charges, and the turnaround the department expects of itself, are published by the Delhi Revenue Department. Untrue declarations fall under BNS s.236, and the Ministry of External Affairs publishes attestation and apostille rates.
What this page cannot say. How anybody would be counted, by any authority, for any purpose — the definition quoted here governs one Act and no other, and other schemes define "family" their own way. Whether this Act applies to any land, acquisition or household. What anybody is entitled to by way of compensation, rehabilitation or resettlement, or whether any past allotment was correctly made. Whether any woman falls within the proviso, which turns on facts we have never seen. Whether any person is a widow, a divorcee or deserted. How any Collector, Authority, Tribunal or court would decide anything. And which office serves a given address, allotted on the exact address after the 2026 boundary changes. In short: our work is performing marriages and getting them registered. Land acquisition, compensation and resettlement entitlements are not ours; succession, inheritance and property matters are not ours; we stand before no authority or court; and not a rupee is taken for any of it. These definitions are set out here for one reason: they are the State's most careful recent statement of what a household is, every layer of them is hinged on a marriage, and not one of them says a word about how a marriage is to be proved. That is the gap, and closing it is the only thing we sell. A household that genuinely needs the acquisition and entitlement questions resolved needs an advocate for them — and a woman can obtain free legal aid for it without any income test being applied.
One — give us the year and the place of the ceremony, roughly. "Around 1987, here in the block" or "1994, back in the district" is enough to start with, and it settles both the route and the fee.
Two — have the Aadhaar in front of you and read us the address it prints for each of you, rather than the one you would recite from memory. Mention whose name the plot papers carry as well — not because it affects the marriage file, which it does not, but because most households here need to hear that said out loud.
Three — say how many of the wedding party are still living. The registration itself does not require any of them. We ask because an answer like “two, maybe three” is the difference between something worth doing this month and something you can leave until next year.
Call +91 8376863962. Money does not enter the conversation until you have heard three things: the route your facts put you on, our charge for it, and what the government takes separately. Should the truthful answer turn out to be that an advocate, not a marriage service, is who you want, you will hear that as well — at no cost for having asked.
Expert articles on every marriage topic — read before you decide
Complete 2026 process from notice to certificate.
Read Article →Full checklist — Aadhaar, affidavits, witnesses.
Read Article →Transparent breakdown — official + service costs.
Read Article →Your rights, family pressure, police protection.
Read Article →Apostille, Embassy NOC, spouse visa explained.
Read Article →Honest truth about Arya Samaj same-day option.
Read Article →