Shahdara, Seelampur, Welcome, Jaffrabad, Maujpur, Babarpur, Vishwas Nagar and Jhilmil — workshops, units and shift work, where almost every household has a provident fund number it has never thought about.
Quick answer: A PF number sits doing nothing for twenty years, and then becomes the largest sum a working household ever has to ask for at once — because the balance is not all that falls due when a member dies. Who gets it turns on one defined word. Paragraph 2(g) of the Employees’ Provident Funds Scheme, 1952 defines “family” as, for a male member, “his wife, his children, whether married or unmarried, his dependant parents and his deceased son’s widow and children”, and for a female member, “her husband, her children, whether married or unmarried, her dependant parents, her husband’s dependant parents and her deceased son’s widow and children” — note the extra category on her side, and that each list begins with the spouse. A wife leaves it only where the member proves she has ceased to be entitled to maintenance, revocably; a husband only where she gives written notice, which she may cancel. And the same definition decides a second payment. Paragraph 22 of the Employees’ Deposit-Linked Insurance Scheme, 1976 — an insurance nobody buys and nothing is deducted for — pays to “the persons entitled to receive the provident fund accumulations of the deceased”. It has no list of its own. Neither scheme explains how anyone proves they are the wife or the husband; both assume it. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000. We file no PF, insurance or pension claims, appear before no authority, complete nobody’s forms — and we provide no witnesses.
Shahdara, Seelampur, Welcome, Jaffrabad, Maujpur, Babarpur, Brahmpuri, Kabir Nagar, Gokalpuri, Vishwas Nagar, Jhilmil, Friends Colony Industrial Area. Small manufacturing units, workshops, scrap and recycling, packaging, garment stitching, plastics, electrical goods. It is one of the most densely working parts of Delhi, and it has one feature that people here rarely think about as a feature at all.
A very large number of people in this belt have a provident fund number — a UAN, a deduction on the slip, a balance they check once a year and otherwise ignore. It came with a job at a unit with twenty or more workers and it followed them, more or less, through three or four jobs after that.
It sits there doing nothing visible for twenty years. And then, on one particular day, it becomes the largest single sum of money the household will ever have to ask for at once — because the provident fund balance is not the only thing that falls due when a member dies. There is an insurance amount attached to it as well, and it is paid automatically, without anybody ever having bought a policy.
The question this page answers is the one nobody asks in advance: when that day comes, who exactly is the scheme going to pay?
The answer is in a definition. Not in a policy document, not in a form, not in anybody's discretion — in the definition of the word "family" in the scheme itself. It is short, it names a wife and a husband by those words, and it is worth reading before a household needs it rather than afterwards.
Readers who came here for the nuts and bolts instead — which step comes when, which papers are wanted, how long it runs — will find all of that laid out across the process, documents and registration pages, with what we charge on the fee page.
Paragraph 2(g) of the Employees' Provident Funds Scheme, 1952 defines "family". It is the definition every other question in this area eventually runs into, and it is not symmetrical between a male and a female member.
| The Scheme's own words | What it means for a household here |
|---|---|
| Paragraph 2(g)(i) — in the case of a male member, "his wife, his children, whether married or unmarried, his dependant parents and his deceased son's widow and children". | Five categories, and the first word is wife. Note also "whether married or unmarried" for children — a daughter who has married is not dropped out of the definition — and that a deceased son's widow is expressly inside it. |
| Paragraph 2(g)(ii) — in the case of a female member, "her husband, her children, whether married or unmarried, her dependant parents, her husband's dependant parents and her deceased son's widow and children". | The same structure, beginning with husband — and one extra category. A female member's family includes her husband's dependant parents. A male member's family does not include his wife's. That asymmetry is discussed in its own section below. |
| The proviso to clause (i) — where a male member proves that his wife has ceased to be entitled to maintenance under the personal or customary law applicable to them, she ceases to be part of the family, unless he subsequently gives written notice to the Commissioner to the contrary. | Not automatic and not a matter of assertion: it turns on the member proving something, and it can be undone by his own later notice. It is not a route to removing a wife by saying so. |
| The proviso to clause (ii) — a female member may, by written notice to the Commissioner, express her desire to exclude her husband from the family, and he then ceases to be part of it unless she later cancels that notice in writing. | A right given to her alone, exercised in writing, and reversible by her. It has no equivalent in clause (i). |
| The Explanation — where a member's child has been adopted by another person, and the adoption is valid under the personal law of the adopter, that child is excluded from the member's family. | A narrow but real carve-out, and the only place in the definition where somebody drops out by operation of law rather than by notice. |
Read it once more and notice what the definition never does. It does not explain how anybody is to establish that they are the wife or the husband. It assumes it. Every scheme built on top of this definition assumes it too.
Alongside the provident fund itself there is a second scheme that most workers in this belt have never heard of by name: the Employees' Deposit-Linked Insurance Scheme, 1976, usually shortened to EDLI. It is not optional, nothing is deducted from the worker for it, and no policy is ever issued.
What matters here is not the arithmetic but the direction of payment. Paragraph 22 of that Scheme provides that on the death of a member, "the persons entitled to receive the provident fund accumulations of the deceased shall, in addition to such accumulations be paid an amount" calculated as the Scheme provides.
Read that clause slowly, because it is the whole point of this page. The insurance money does not have a list of its own. It follows the people who are entitled to receive the provident fund accumulations — which takes you straight back to the nomination, and behind the nomination to the definition of "family" set out above.
So one definition governs two payments. Whatever settles who the family is settles both the accumulations and the assurance amount, at the same time and in the same proceeding.
We are deliberately not quoting a figure. The amount payable under the EDLI Scheme has been revised more than once and is worked out on a formula with a ceiling; any number printed on a website ages badly, and a household planning around a stale figure is worse off than one planning around none. What does not change is the direction of payment, and that is what this page is about.
One practical footnote, because it catches people out and it is dealt with elsewhere on this site rather than repeated here: a nomination made before a member had a family does not simply carry on afterwards. The provident fund scheme's own provision on that point is set out on our Laxmi Nagar page, which takes it sentence by sentence.
Put the two clauses side by side and one difference stands out. A female member's family includes her husband's dependant parents. A male member's family does not include his wife's.
People read that as unfair in one direction or the other depending on where they are standing, and both readings miss what it is doing. The definition was written against a background assumption about which household a married couple lives in and who is being supported by whom. It extends a woman's scheme outward to the parents-in-law she is in fact maintaining.
Whether that assumption still fits your household is not a question this page can answer, and it is not a question the definition asks. The definition applies as written.
What is worth taking from it is narrower and more useful. In both clauses the very first person named is the spouse — "his wife" in one, "her husband" in the other. Everything else in both lists comes after. And the two provisos, which are the only ways a spouse leaves the definition, are both deliberate acts: a male member proving that his wife has ceased to be entitled to maintenance, or a female member giving written notice about her husband, either of which can be undone later.
Nobody leaves this definition by accident, and nobody enters it by assertion. Which is precisely why the relationship needs to be something a household can show rather than something it can only describe.
Anything involving a lump sum and a death gets exaggerated in the retelling, so the limits are stated as firmly as the definition.
It is not saying the definition decides inheritance. It decides who a scheme pays. Who is finally entitled among a family is a different question under different law, and no definition in a provident fund scheme settles it.
It is not saying any amount is payable in any particular case. Entitlement depends on membership, contributions, service and the state of the record — facts about a particular worker that nobody on a website has.
It is not a complete account of either scheme. Both have many other paragraphs, both are amended from time to time, and the figures under the insurance scheme have been revised more than once. What is quoted above is quoted accurately; what is not quoted is simply not here.
It is not telling you how a claim will be decided. That is for the office administering it, on the record in front of it.
And it is not advice. We solemnise and register marriages. We do not file provident fund claims, insurance claims, pension claims or death claims of any kind; we do not appear before the provident fund authorities or any other office; we complete nobody's forms; and we take no payment in connection with any of it. A household with a live claim should go to the employer's own establishment office first and, where that does not answer, to the regional provident fund office — and, where something is disputed, to an advocate.
Because of the first word in each of those two clauses, and because that is the one thing here we can actually do something about.
The same shape turns up across Indian law, written by unrelated authorities for unrelated purposes. Elsewhere on this site we have taken it from other directions: the employees' compensation scheme names a widow before anybody else; the employees' insurance definition of family opens with a spouse; a tenancy on death passes to the spouse ahead of the rest; a woman living in a shared household cannot be shut out of it merely because nothing is in her name; a housing society's committee has to form a view on who succeeded a dead member; a father-in-law may be looked to by a widowed daughter-in-law; and the Income-tax Act decides whose income is whose by asking who the spouse is.
Not one of those provisions explains how the relationship is to be established. Every one of them assumes it. That assumption is the entire gap this business exists to close, and it is the only thing we sell.
Registration does not make a marriage — that needs saying, because people get it backwards. The rites do, under section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, on the day they happen, and Order 8 of Delhi's 2014 Order says registration does not go to validity. Section 8's stated object is narrower: making the fact easy to prove. In a belt where a wedding is held in a lane with four hundred people present and nothing written down, that is the whole of the gap.
When anything has to be claimed against an employment record, the questions that come up are broadly the same every time, whoever is asking them. It is worth setting them out, because it makes clear exactly how narrow our own part in this is.
Who was the member? Identity, and the record matching it — the name as the scheme holds it, the date of birth, the father's name. This is answered by the worker's own documents and by whatever the establishment recorded, and a mismatch here is the commonest reason a straightforward matter stops being straightforward.
Which establishment, and for what period? Answered by the employment record — appointment and relieving letters, slips, and whatever the employer holds. In a belt where six employers in ten years is unremarkable, this is the question that takes the longest, and it is the reason the envelope described above is worth keeping.
What is the entitlement? A question of the scheme, the contributions and the record, decided by the office administering it. Nobody outside that office can answer it and we would not attempt to.
And: who is this person to the member?
That fourth question is the only one this business has anything to do with — and it is the one that most often has no document behind it. The first three are answered by papers that already exist somewhere. The fourth is answered by a marriage certificate, or else by photographs, by an affidavit, by neighbours, and by a delay.
We are not saying the fourth question is the hardest one. Usually it is the easiest, precisely because a certificate closes it in a sentence. We are saying it is the only one a household can settle completely in advance, on an ordinary morning, years before anybody needs it — and that almost nobody does.
One more honest note. A registered marriage does not make a claim succeed. It removes one question from the list. Everything else on that list is about the employment record and the scheme, and belongs with the establishment office, the provident fund office and, where something is genuinely disputed, an advocate.
Four things, none of which costs anything and none of which requires anybody's permission.
Get the marriage registered. It is the shortest answer to every question anybody will ever ask about who is whose spouse — at an establishment office, a bank, a hospital or a claim counter — and it is the one item on this list that never has to be done twice.
Know your UAN and keep it where your family can find it. Not in your head and not only in your phone. Written down, at home, with the employer's name against it. A household that knows the number is asking a question; a household that does not is starting a search.
Check that the details attached to it are your details. Name spelling, date of birth, father's name. A mismatch discovered by a family at a claim counter is a far bigger problem than the same mismatch corrected by the worker himself while employed.
And make sure a nomination exists and reflects your household as it is now. Not because of any scheme this page is recommending, but because a nomination that was made before a marriage, or before children, is a nomination describing a household that no longer exists.
This is the practical reality here and it deserves its own section, because it is what turns a straightforward claim into a long one.
A worker in these units may have had six employers in ten years. Each one meant a joining, a leaving, possibly a fresh number somewhere, and a set of records held by a firm that may since have shut, moved or changed hands. Nobody plans it that way; it is simply how the work is.
The consequence is that the household's proof is scattered across establishments rather than held in one place. And when something has to be claimed, the questions asked are exactly the questions a scattered record cannot answer quickly: which member number, which establishment, what period, and — always — who is this person to the deceased.
What helps, and it is unglamorous. Keep one envelope at home with every appointment letter, every relieving letter, every salary slip you happen to have, and the UAN written on the outside of it. Add the marriage certificate to the same envelope. It is not a filing system and it does not need to be; it is a single place, and a single place is the whole of the advantage.
The one document that does not change with the job is the marriage certificate. Employers change. The relationship does not, and neither does the paper establishing it.
There is no cut-off. Any earlier year and any state. Under the Order two flat amounts apply — ₹500 for a filing in the second sixty days and ₹1,000 later than that — both of which the ADM or DM has power to waive, and neither increases the longer it is left. A wedding from 2010 costs what one from this month costs.
Useful in support: photographs showing the rites actually under way with relatives from both sides in the frame; the card that was printed; anything handed over at the time by the priest or the institution; and documents from the years since that carry the two of you together — an account, a school record, a hospital file.
And regardless of what else is available: both parties attending personally with the originals, two witnesses, and an address taken word for word from the Aadhaar instead of recalled. Should nothing at all yet exist bearing your own name at that address, our Laxmi Nagar page explains how a first record is created, while the late registration page sets out how a file for an old wedding is put together.
A unit here does not stop because one worker has a government appointment. Leave is negotiated, not assumed, and a day taken is usually a day not paid. That single fact decides how a file from this belt succeeds or fails.
What goes wrong. Somebody asks for "a couple of hours in the morning", reaches the counter having checked nothing, finds a document missing or a name spelt differently, and has to come back. The second day is the expensive one, because by then the supervisor has already been asked once.
What works. Treat the phone call as the appointment. Send photographs of every document while you are at home. We tell you which route applies, what it costs, what the State collects separately and what is missing — and only then do you ask for time off, once, for a morning with nothing else in it.
Ask for the day, not the hours. A worker who asks for a morning and needs an afternoon is in a worse position than one who asked for a day at the start. It is also easier to ask for a single day once than for two halves a fortnight apart.
And if you work nights, decide in advance who is the alert one. If only one of you has slept, that is the person who should be carrying the documents and doing the talking.
Their part is small. Two people come, and they sign before the officer to confirm that the couple in front of him are the couple the file names and that the wedding took place. They are guaranteeing nothing and owe nothing afterwards. Both of them arrive holding a pair of documents in their own names, one bearing a photograph and one establishing where they stay. There is no advance filing, and signing on behalf of an absentee is not allowed. Eligibility is on our witnesses page.
Here the difficulty is availability, not willingness. The man on the next machine will agree instantly and cannot actually come, because his shift is your shift and his supervisor is your supervisor. Somebody on a different shift, a different unit, a shopkeeper, a relative who is not in the trade — any of those is worth more than the most enthusiastic colleague.
Confirm both the night before, and keep a third name. A unit's roster changes without notice and the person it changed for is the last to be told.
Buying a signature is not an option here. We will not organise one, and a person touting the service deserves to be turned away at once. Where this certificate might eventually be the paper a widow lays before a claims counter, putting a stranger's name on it is deliberately weakening the one thing she has.
Two certified copies, kept in two different houses. One at home, one with a parent, a brother or a sister living elsewhere. A single rented room is not a safe sole home for the only copy of anything.
Within the first week, write three things down: the office that issued it, what date the entry bears, and the serial the register gave it. Hold those and getting a fresh copy is one form; lose them and a clerk is left searching records by name and a guessed year.
Take pictures of it and store them somewhere either of you can open from whatever device is to hand, not inside a single phone that could be sold on, mislaid or passed to a relative.
Read the whole certificate the day it arrives. Compare every name against the Aadhaar instead of trusting recall; check how each father's name has been entered against how he himself writes it; match the dates of birth to the age document that was produced; then the wedding date, both addresses and the register's own numbering. Asking for a correction now is a form. Finding the same slip years later, at a counter where money is being claimed, is not.
And put it in the same envelope as the work papers. The section above explains why: one place beats a good system nobody maintains.
You will not find a single office named on this site, and the omission is on purpose. Jurisdiction follows whatever address is actually written on the form; the district boundaries were reworked through 2026; and any name we printed might already be obsolete when somebody went looking for it. Give us the address exactly as your Aadhaar sets it out and we will establish, free, where it reports at present. Certificates already granted are unaffected by any later redrawing, and where an old register cannot be located it has simply gone to whichever office inherited that area — our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page deals with writing first and using the RTI route afterwards, and the Lajpat Nagar page with a file nobody is moving.
The state line runs close on the east and north-east. Shahdara, Seelampur, Welcome, Jaffrabad, Maujpur, Babarpur, Brahmpuri, Gokalpuri, Karawal Nagar, Vishwas Nagar and Dilshad Garden are Delhi. Loni and Ghaziabad are Uttar Pradesh, and a very large number of families in this belt live on one side of that line while working, or keeping relatives, on the other. Two things follow: a marriage is solemnised where the rites physically take place, and a notice begun under the civil route in one state cannot be carried into another — it starts again. So the address you give us is the one where you sleep, not the one where the unit is.
| Area | What the file usually turns on here |
|---|---|
| Shahdara, Vishwas Nagar, Jhilmil, Friends Colony Industrial Area | Shift work and an employment record spread across several units. |
| Seelampur, Jaffrabad, Welcome, Brahmpuri | Trade and workshop households; a wedding held in the lane and never recorded. |
| Maujpur, Babarpur, Kabir Nagar, Ghonda | Dense older colonies where the Aadhaar address is the one that governs the file. |
| Gokalpuri, Nand Nagri, Sunder Nagri, Karawal Nagar | Families who moved in from another state and hold their papers there. |
| Dilshad Garden, Seemapuri | Our Dilshad Garden page covers that side. |
| Krishna Nagar, Laxmi Nagar, Shakarpur | See Krishna Nagar and Laxmi Nagar. |
| Loni, Ghaziabad | Uttar Pradesh, with their own system and their own offices. |
| Families whose village is in UP, Bihar or Bengal | Whether Delhi or the home state suits the file better — we will say which, even where the answer costs us the work. |
One — assuming the money "goes to the family" and leaving it there. It does, but "family" is a defined word, and the definition opens with a wife or a husband.
Two — not knowing the UAN. A household that knows the number is asking a question. A household that does not is starting a search, usually in the worst week of its life.
Three — never checking that the name and date of birth on the record are right. A mismatch the worker could have corrected in an afternoon becomes the family's problem at a counter.
Four — leaving a nomination that describes a household from ten years ago. Marriages happen, children arrive, and a form filled in at a first job does not update itself.
Five — assuming the insurance amount has its own list of people. It does not. It follows whoever is entitled to the provident fund accumulations.
Six — treating the definition as a decision about inheritance. It decides who a scheme pays, which is a narrower thing.
Seven — keeping work papers in six places across five employers. One envelope at home beats any system nobody maintains.
Eight — asking for two hours instead of one day. The second trip is the expensive one, because the leave has already been asked for once.
Nine — asking the man on the next machine to witness. He will agree immediately and he cannot come, because his shift is your shift.
Ten — leaving a wedding unregistered because the whole lane attended. Four hundred people remembering is not a document, and the office deciding a claim has met none of them.
Our entire price list. Replacement copies, corrections to an entry, apostille work, the managed package, and everything the State collects separately are gathered on the fee page.
| Route | Our fee | Who it suits here |
|---|---|---|
| Arya Samaj ceremony at our mandir | ₹5,100 | Just the ceremony, closing with the mandir's own certificate. From that day section 7 treats you as married, though nothing has reached a government register. |
| Ceremony with registration handled | ₹7,100 | The wedding and the government record in one exercise — the route that produces the document every scheme on this page assumes. |
| A wedding already held, brought onto the record | ₹6,000 | Any earlier year and any state. Very common from these lanes. |
| Special Marriage Act, whole route | ₹15,000 | The civil route, carrying its own residence requirement and a notice open to objection for thirty days. |
The State's own charges sit on top of ours and come to three receipted sums — ₹100 for the Marriage Clerk, the ₹200 the 2014 Order attaches to the application, and ₹15 for the District cashier where the civil route applies. Older weddings attract two further fixed amounts under the same Order: ₹500 for the second sixty-day window and ₹1,000 beyond it. Both are within the ADM's or DM's power to waive, and waiting longer does not raise either.
Six things carry no price because we do not provide them: witnesses; a date other than the true one; a certificate produced without both of you attending; an assurance about what any official will do; any provident fund, insurance, pension or death claim work whatsoever; and any appearance before any authority.
Sourced — the Employees' Provident Funds Scheme, 1952. Paragraph 2(g), defining "family" to mean, in the case of a male member, "his wife, his children, whether married or unmarried, his dependant parents and his deceased son's widow and children", and in the case of a female member, "her husband, her children, whether married or unmarried, her dependant parents, her husband's dependant parents and her deceased son's widow and children" — together with the proviso to the first clause, under which a wife ceases to be part of the family where the member proves she has ceased to be entitled to maintenance under the personal or customary law applicable, unless he afterwards gives written notice to the Commissioner to the contrary; the proviso to the second clause, under which a female member may by written notice to the Commissioner exclude her husband, subject to her cancelling that notice in writing; and the Explanation excluding a child adopted by another person where the adoption is valid under the adopter's personal law.
Sourced — the Employees' Deposit-Linked Insurance Scheme, 1976. Paragraph 22, under which on the death of a member "the persons entitled to receive the provident fund accumulations of the deceased shall, in addition to such accumulations be paid an amount" calculated as the Scheme provides. No figure is quoted on this page, deliberately: the amount has been revised more than once and rests on a formula with a ceiling.
Sourced — the marriage statutes. Three limbs of the Hindu Marriage Act are used: s.7, treating performance of the customary rites as the act that solemnises; s.5(ii), requiring valid consent; and s.8, stated to exist for the facilitation of proof. From Delhi's 2014 Order come Order 8, the ₹200 application fee, the sixty-day window and both late figures. Published Delhi Revenue Department material gives the expected timescales along with the ₹100 and ₹15 items. The residence condition on the civil route, the Notice Book and the thirty days for objection all come from the Special Marriage Act. False declarations fall under BNS s.236, and the Ministry of External Affairs publishes its own attestation and apostille rates.
What this page cannot say. Whether any particular person is a member, what any particular member is entitled to, or what any amount would be. How any claim will be decided, by whom, or when. Whether either scheme as quoted here has since been amended — both are amended from time to time, and the quotations are accurate as at the date of this page. What anybody should do about a live claim. And which office serves a given address, allotted on the exact address after the 2026 boundary changes. Plainly: we solemnise and register marriages. We file no provident fund, insurance, pension or death claims; we appear before the provident fund authorities and every other office not at all; we complete nobody's forms; and we take no payment in connection with any of it. Paragraph 2(g) is set out here because a working household should be able to read the definition for itself before the day it matters. A live claim belongs with the employer's establishment office, the regional provident fund office, and where something is disputed, an advocate — free legal aid, available to a woman with no income test at all, is described on our Vikaspuri page.
One — say when and where the wedding took place, including a ceremony held years ago in another state, which is ordinary work from these lanes.
Two — give us the address each of you actually lives at, read off the Aadhaar rather than recalled, and say if either of you lives or works across the Uttar Pradesh line.
Three — send photographs of the documents before you ask anybody for leave. Free, ten minutes, and it is the difference between one day off and two.
Ring +91 8376863962. You will hear which route applies, what we charge for it, and what the State takes separately, before any question of payment arises. If the honest answer is that your file belongs in the state you came from, or that what you need is a claim office or an advocate rather than a marriage service, we will say so, and finding that out costs you nothing.
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