Tughlakabad yard and the container depot, the station colonies, Tughlakabad village and Extension — a belt whose income comes off a railway, and one definition that turns on a marriage.
Quick answer: This is the sharpest example on the whole site. Section 123(b)(i) of the Railways Act, 1989 defines who may claim when a passenger is killed: “the wife, husband, son and daughter, and in case the deceased passenger is unmarried or is a minor, his parent.” Most statutes merely name the spouse, so a missing certificate is a problem of proof. Here marital status is a switch that changes who the beneficiary is. Married — the wife heads the list, before the children, with no test of dependence attached to her at all. Unmarried — the wife drops out of clause (i) and “his parent” takes that place. So the Act asks was he married, arranges the entitlement around the answer, and says not one word about how anybody establishes it. And the provision it serves is generous: section 124A makes the railway liable “whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default” and “notwithstanding anything contained in any other law” — a no-fault liability, so no family has to prove negligence. Its reach includes “the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers”, not just derailments. Honest limits, quoted not hidden: compensation only “to such extent as may be prescribed”, and a proviso excluding five circumstances. A statute that lifts the burden of proving fault, and leaves standing the burden of proving a marriage, puts the certificate at the centre of a family’s position. A village wedding in 1998 already married you under section 7; only the record is missing, with no cut-off. Ceremony ₹5,100, with registration ₹7,100, a wedding already held ₹6,000, civil route ₹15,000. We pursue no railway claim, go before no Claims Tribunal, provide no witnesses — and take nothing for any of it.
Tughlakabad is a railway place. The freight terminal and container depot are among the largest in the country; the yard runs day and night; the station, the village, the Extension and the colonies around them hold thousands of households whose income comes off that railway, directly or at one remove — railway servants, loaders, drivers, contract hands, and the families of all of them.
So this page is about a provision of the Railways Act, 1989, and it is the sharpest example on this entire website of the thing every page here keeps running into.
Section 123(b) defines "dependant" — the people who may claim when a passenger is killed. The definition opens like this:
"'dependant' means any of the following relatives of a deceased passenger, namely:— (i) the wife, husband, son and daughter, and in case the deceased passenger is unmarried or is a minor, his parent…"
Read that sub-clause again, because it does something none of the other statutes on this site do.
The usual pattern in a provision that favours a spouse is simply to say so and stop. Retirement-fund rules begin their list of family with the husband or wife. Pension rules go on paying the surviving partner. Rent legislation hands a protected tenancy to the partner ahead of anyone else. In all of those the gap left by a missing certificate is a gap in evidence — she is the one entitled, and the task is demonstrating it.
Here the Act goes further. It uses marital status as a switch, and the switch changes who the beneficiary is.
If the passenger was married, the wife or husband stands at the head of the list, named before the children.
If the passenger was unmarried, the wife and husband drop out of clause (i) altogether and "his parent" takes that place.
So the Act asks a question — was he married? — and arranges the entitlement differently depending on the answer. And then, like every provision of this kind, it says not one word about how anybody is to establish which of those two states of affairs is the true one.
That is a harder position for a widow than mere want of proof. Where a statute names her as beneficiary and she cannot prove the marriage, she is a beneficiary without evidence. Where a statute arranges itself around the question was he married, and nothing on paper answers it, the structure the Act falls back on is the one for an unmarried man — and the people standing in clause (i) are his parents rather than her.
She is his wife. She has been since the day of the ceremony. Section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 treats the carrying out of the customary rites as the thing that effects a marriage — so a ceremony held in the village in 1998 made the two of them husband and wife that year, and no absence of paperwork disturbs it. What she lacks is the document the system will act on — and in this one statute, lacking it does not merely weaken her claim, it points the definition somewhere else.
The document is still available and the years have cost her nothing. A ceremony from 1998 is registrable today. There is no cut-off and no window has closed. Our late registration page sets out the whole process; The only cost the delay carries is one of the two flat sums in Delhi's 2014 Order — ₹500 if the filing lands inside the second sixty-day stretch, ₹1,000 beyond it — each of them waivable by the ADM or DM, and neither has moved by a single paisa across all the intervening years.
Clause (i) is not the whole definition. Three more sub-clauses follow, and they work on a different principle — they require actual dependence, which clause (i) does not.
(ii) "the parent, minor brother or unmarried sister, widowed sister, widowed daughter-in-law and a minor child of a pre-deceased son, if dependant wholly or partly on the deceased passenger"
(iii) "a minor child of a pre-deceased daughter, if wholly dependant on the deceased passenger"
(iv) "the paternal grand parent wholly dependant on the deceased passenger"
Notice the architecture. In clause (i) a wife, husband, son or daughter is a dependant by relationship alone — no test of actual dependence is attached to any of them. From clause (ii) onward, everybody has to have been dependent in fact, and the standard tightens as the relationship grows more distant: "wholly or partly" for the people in (ii), "wholly dependant" for a pre-deceased daughter's minor child and for a paternal grandparent.
That is a deliberate hierarchy, and a wife sits at the top of it. She does not have to show she was supported. She has to show she was a wife.
And the widowed daughter-in-law appears here too, in clause (ii), if she was dependent wholly or partly — which is the same woman who appears in the maintenance provision our Najafgarh page sets out. Her position in both places rests on a marriage that has ended, which means on a marriage that existed.
Before going further it is worth knowing what this definition is attached to, because the provision it serves is more generous than most people in a railway belt realise.
Section 124A of the same Act:
"When in the course of working a railway an untoward incident occurs, then whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default on the part of the railway administration such as would entitle a passenger who has been injured or the dependant of a passenger who has been killed to maintain an action and recover damages in respect thereof, the railway administration shall, notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, be liable to pay compensation to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only of loss occasioned by the death of, or injury to, a passenger as a result of such untoward incident."
The words that matter are "whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default."
This is a no-fault liability. A family does not have to prove that the railway did anything wrong. They do not have to establish negligence, identify a failure, or show that anybody was careless. The ordinary burden in a damages claim — prove the other side was at fault — is lifted by the statute itself.
And "notwithstanding anything contained in any other law" puts the provision above competing rules that might otherwise cut it down.
Two limits sit in the same sentence, though, and they are part of the honest picture. Compensation is payable "to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only" — so the amount is whatever the prescribed rules set, not whatever a family's loss actually is. And it is for "loss occasioned by the death of, or injury to, a passenger" — the Act's own concept of a passenger, which its Explanation extends to railway servants on duty and to ticket-holders who become victims of an untoward incident.
Why put this on a marriage page at all? Because the generosity of section 124A is exactly what makes the definition in section 123(b) load-bearing. The statute has already removed the hardest thing a family would ordinarily have to prove. What it has not removed — what it simply assumes somebody can establish — is who the dependants are. A provision that lifts the burden of proving fault, and leaves standing the burden of proving a marriage, is a provision that puts a certificate at the centre of a family's position.
Section 124A does not end with the main provision. It carries a proviso, and a page that quoted the generous half and stopped would be doing precisely what this website exists not to do.
"… no compensation shall be payable under this section by the railway administration if the passenger dies or suffers injury due to— (a) suicide or attempted suicide by him; (b) self-inflicted injury; (c) his own criminal act; (d) any act committed by him in a state of intoxication or insanity; (e) any natural cause or disease or medical or surgical treatment unless such treatment becomes necessary due to injury caused by the said untoward incident."
Five circumstances in which the section does not apply. They are set out above in the Act's own words and they are not expanded on here, because this is a marriage page and because each of those clauses raises questions that belong to an advocate and to the Claims Tribunal rather than to us.
What is worth saying about the proviso is structural, and it matters. Clause (e) carries its own carve-out: a natural cause, disease, or medical or surgical treatment is excluded unless the treatment became necessary because of an injury caused by the untoward incident itself. So an exclusion is not always the end of the matter, and whether any of these clauses applies to any particular death is a question of fact that gets decided in proceedings, not at a counter and certainly not by us.
We say that plainly because families in this belt are told otherwise. Somebody will say a case is hopeless, or that it is certain, and ask for money on the strength of it. Neither assurance is worth anything. Nobody can tell you the outcome of a railway claim, and we would not take a rupee to pretend to.
One more definition, because the section turns on it. Section 123(c) defines "untoward incident", and it reaches two quite different kinds of event.
The first group is violence: the definition takes in acts falling within the terrorism legislation it names, and violent attack, robbery, dacoity, rioting, shoot-out or arson committed in a train carrying passengers, or in a waiting hall, cloak room, reservation or booking office, or on a platform or in any other place within a railway station — the clause is described here rather than quoted word for word, because the published texts set out that list at length and a paraphrase should not be relied on as the statute.
The second is quoted, because it is the one that arises most: "the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers."
That short phrase does a great deal of work in practice, in a belt where people board moving trains, travel in crowded doorways and fall. It is why section 124A is not only about derailments and collisions.
What section 125 adds, described rather than quoted because we could not obtain its text from two independent copies: it provides for an application for compensation to be made to the Claims Tribunal, and among the persons who may make it is a dependant of the deceased. That summary should not be relied on as the section's wording — the point for this page is narrower and does not depend on it: whoever applies has to come within the definition, and for a widow that means clause (i) of section 123(b).
Put the provisions back together and look at the shape of them.
Section 124A removes the hardest thing a family would normally have to prove — that somebody was at fault — and does so in the teeth of any other law.
Section 123(c) casts the triggering event widely, down to a passenger accidentally falling from a train.
Section 123(b) then decides who gets the benefit of all that, and puts "the wife, husband, son and daughter" at the head of the list with no test of dependence attached to any of them.
And in the same breath it asks whether the passenger was married, and rearranges the list if he was not.
Not a line anywhere in the Act says how that question is to be answered.
We have had cause to write that same sentence about a long series of unrelated statutes by now, and it has stopped being a surprise. Legislation governing migrant labour obliges somebody to inform a dead workman's next of kin, leaving the identity of that person entirely open. Legislation on acquiring land builds its household around his or her spouse and goes out of its way to treat widows, divorcees and women deserted by families as units of their own — without a syllable on evidence. Legislation drafted for Delhi's poorest colonies carries its recognition through to their legal heirs and ends. Retirement funds, pension schemes, rent control, life policies: each puts something into a wife's hands, and not one of them troubles to say how a clerk in a distant office is supposed to become satisfied that she is the wife.
It is not a drafting failure. A statute about railways has no business restating the law of marriage; that belongs elsewhere, and the division of labour is correct. Somebody, though, has to supply what the statute leaves out — and it is forever the same somebody: a woman, at the point in her life least suited to it, asked for a paper nobody ever handed her.
Filling that silence is the entirety of what this business does. We do not pursue railway claims. We do not appear before the Claims Tribunal. We do not touch compensation, and we are paid nothing for any of it. What we do is turn a fact that a village witnessed into a document an office will act on — and in a belt where the income comes off a railway yard, that one document decides whether clause (i) reads as her or as somebody else.
And the time to get it is now, not then. Nobody is at their most capable of assembling documents in the week after a death. The whole argument of this page is that the paper is cheap and available today and expensive in every other sense later.
A single table holding every provision set out above. The middle column reproduces the Act's language, except in the rows marked otherwise.
| Provision | What the Act says | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| s.123(b)(i) | "the wife, husband, son and daughter, and in case the deceased passenger is unmarried or is a minor, his parent" | The point of this page. Marital status is a switch, and it changes who stands in clause (i). No test of dependence applies to anybody named in it. |
| s.123(b)(ii) | "the parent, minor brother or unmarried sister, widowed sister, widowed daughter-in-law and a minor child of a pre-deceased son, if dependant wholly or partly on the deceased passenger" | From here on, actual dependence must be shown. A wife never has to. |
| s.123(b)(iii) | "a minor child of a pre-deceased daughter, if wholly dependant on the deceased passenger" | The standard tightens as the relationship grows more distant. |
| s.123(b)(iv) | "the paternal grand parent wholly dependant on the deceased passenger" | The outer edge of the list, and the strictest test in it. |
| s.124A, main provision | Liability arises "whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default on the part of the railway administration", and "notwithstanding anything contained in any other law" | No-fault. The family does not have to prove the railway did anything wrong — which is exactly what leaves the definition of dependant doing the heavy lifting. |
| s.124A, limits in the same sentence | Compensation "to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only", for "loss occasioned by the death of, or injury to, a passenger" | The amount is what the rules prescribe, not what the loss was. |
| s.124A, proviso | No compensation where death or injury is due to "(a) suicide or attempted suicide by him; (b) self-inflicted injury; (c) his own criminal act; (d) any act committed by him in a state of intoxication or insanity; (e) any natural cause or disease or medical or surgical treatment unless such treatment becomes necessary due to injury caused by the said untoward incident" | Quoted because omitting it would mislead. Whether any clause applies is decided in proceedings, never by us. |
| s.123(c) | Quoted in part: "the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers". The violence limb is described rather than quoted. | Section 124A is not confined to derailments and collisions. |
| s.125 — described, not quoted | Provides for an application for compensation to the Claims Tribunal, among others by a dependant of the deceased. | Whoever applies must come within s.123(b) — and for a widow that means clause (i). |
And the limit on all of it: these are definitions in one Act for that Act's own purposes. They govern nothing else, and nothing on this page tells you whether any person is a dependant, whether any incident is an untoward incident, or what anybody is entitled to.
Households here often hold more official paper than most of Delhi, and still nothing that answers the one question.
A file from Tughlakabad typically contains a railway identity card, a quarters allotment in a department's records, a pass book or service record, a pay slip, a provident fund number, an Aadhaar printed with a home-district address from before the posting, and — between the two people actually getting married — not a single document naming them as husband and wife.
That last gap is invisible until it matters. A service record with a wife's name entered in it is useful and worth having, and we would never tell anybody to neglect it. But a departmental entry is a departmental entry. When a claim is being decided under a statute whose definition turns on whether a passenger was married, the thing that answers the question is the State's own record of the marriage.
The file wants far less than that stack contains: identity, age, and the address each of you is genuinely living at. It does not want the quarters allotment altered, the service record corrected first, the provident fund nomination sorted out, or anybody's department involved at all. Nothing about registering a marriage requires an employer to be told.
One thing specific to a transfer-posting belt. Where the Aadhaar still prints an address from a district you left years ago, that is ordinary and it decides less than people fear — but it is worth fixing in the right order rather than at the last minute. Begin with a single honest record in the name of somebody living, and pull the others along after it — bank, then Aadhaar, then the electoral roll. Reckon on weeks. Our Laxmi Nagar page traces that sequence from a standing start; our Timarpur page takes up how much a card from another district genuinely decides.
And say no to every offer to have a document made up. In a belt with departmental records, an invented address is worse than useless — it contradicts papers that already exist in a file somebody can pull. Everything a marriage file needs can be assembled truthfully.
Send photographs before anybody applies for leave. On WhatsApp, at whatever hour the shift allows. Free, about ten minutes, and the quickest way to find out which of your many papers the file actually needs and which are beside the point.
Two questions get tangled in a belt where people arrive on a posting, and separating them saves a wasted trip.
Where did the rites take place? That is settled history and nothing shifts it. Rites at a mandir here mean the marriage was solemnised in Delhi; rites back home mean it was solemnised there.
And where is each of you living at present? Residence turns on the life you lead now, not on text printed across a card before a posting came through. A household living in the Extension or the colonies around the yard lives in Delhi, whatever district the family still calls home and whatever a service record shows as a permanent address.
For a household settled here, Delhi answers both, and there is nothing to decide.
Where it is a genuine question is a wedding performed back in the district before a posting. Then two things decide it, and only two: where you actually live now, and where the certificate will be produced over the coming decades. If the family's life is here and the next twenty years of banks, schools and offices are here, Delhi is the better register. If the posting is temporary and the household's real base is the district, that is. Which of the two it is, you will hear on the call with nothing paid yet — including on the occasions when being straight about it sends the work elsewhere.
And one point that follows from this page's subject. If there is a reason to expect this certificate to be produced in another State one day, that is not an argument for registering twice — one registration is honoured throughout India, and our Badarpur page sets out the constitutional provision that says so.
The role is a small one and the anxiety around it is large, so plainly. A pair of people attend, take their place before the officer, and put their signatures to two statements: that the couple present is the couple the file concerns, and that the rites took place. They give no guarantee and owe nothing afterwards. Both arrive holding two papers issued to them personally — one with a photograph, one proving where they live. Nothing is filed in advance, and no absent person's signature can be supplied by another. Who qualifies is on our witnesses page.
The particular difficulty in a railway belt is that people move because their work moves them. The colleague who signs today may be at a different division in two years and in a third State after that. A certificate, meanwhile, can need a witness traced two decades on — and in this belt the moment it is needed is often precisely a claim.
So prefer the person the railway will not relocate. A relative. Somebody from the village or the Extension whose family has been in the same house for twenty years. Anybody whose parents' address will still reach him when his own number has changed three times. The man from the shift who is up for transfer next year is the easiest to ask and the worst choice available.
Record more than just who he is. Write his name as his own documents spell it, a lasting home address with the district attached, and one more contact belonging to somebody else. Sixty seconds spent now decides whether that man is locatable later or a dead end at the one moment it counts.
Nothing of this kind is for sale here. There is no figure at which we would find you a witness, and wherever such an offer is made it deserves refusing on the spot. A signature taken from a person who never set foot in the room is a defect somebody chose to build in — and the place it fails is the place this certificate gets its hardest reading, which in a railway belt means across a table from whoever is deciding a claim.
Three certified copies, and in a transfer belt the third has a clear job. One with the couple, wherever the posting currently is. One with family in the home district, who are not going anywhere. And one with a relative in a third place. The copy that matters is the one somebody can reach on a day when the household itself is in the middle of moving — or in the middle of something worse.
In the first week, set down three things in a place other than with the certificate itself: the issuing office, the date carried on its entry, and the number the register assigned. With that in hand, obtaining another copy in later years takes one application and no more. Lose them and somebody must trawl the registers after a name against a year nobody is sure of — from another State, in all likelihood.
Photograph the certificate and satisfy yourselves that the picture opens from whichever handset is nearest, then brief one relative in the home district on how to retrieve it.
Then read every entry on the day it arrives. Set it beside the Aadhaar rather than trusting recall, and give the spelling of the names your closest attention — a name written one way by a school in the district, differently by a bank here, and a third way by whoever filled the form is the most common defect in files from a belt built by postings. Then both fathers' names in the form each man uses himself, the two dates of birth against whatever age document was handed in, the date of the rites, both addresses, and the serial the register has put on it. Spot a mistake now and it costs one form and a short wait. The same error surfacing in fifteen years, in front of a tribunal deciding whether clause (i) names her, is a different order of trouble altogether.
Nowhere on this website will you find an office named, and that is on purpose. The office a file belongs to follows the address exactly as it reads; Delhi's sub-divisional map was redrawn across 2026; and anything we set in type could already be stale by the time a family travelled on it and spent a day's pay doing so. Read the address out to us in the Aadhaar's own wording and we will establish, free, which office it currently answers to.
Two reassurances, because both come up here. A boundary redrawn after a certificate was issued leaves that certificate every bit as valid, and nothing has to be repeated. And a register that has gone missing was not destroyed — it went to whichever office inherited that area. For an entry that has fallen silent, the working order of steps is set out on our Mayur Vihar Phase 2 page: approach the office that now covers the area in writing, and keep RTI in reserve for when that yields nothing. An application of your own that has simply stalled is a different matter, taken up on the Lajpat Nagar page, together with the Delhi legislation that imposes time limits on notified services and makes the officer in default pay the applicant compensation from his own pocket.
| Where | What tends to decide the file there |
|---|---|
| Tughlakabad yard, the container depot, the station colonies | Households whose income comes off the railway, holding departmental papers but nothing recording the marriage itself. |
| Tughlakabad village, Tughlakabad Extension | Older households and informal housing; see our Sangam Vihar page for the colonies statute next door. |
| Families posted here from another district | An Aadhaar from before the transfer is ordinary. Residence follows where you actually live now. |
| Weddings performed in the home district years ago | Already a marriage under section 7. Only the record is missing, and there is no cut-off. |
| Widows whose claim depends on clause (i) | No test of dependence applies to a wife — she has to show she was a wife. The claim itself is an advocate’s work, never ours. |
| Anybody promised a certain outcome in a railway claim | Nobody can tell you that. Neither a promise nor a dismissal is worth paying for. |
| Okhla, Govindpuri, Kalkaji side | Covered on our Kalkaji page, for vending households. |
| Couples marrying across caste or community | What genuinely alters is on our inter-caste and inter-religion pages — a shorter list than families imagine. |
One — assuming a wife's name in a service record settles the question. A departmental entry is useful and worth having. It is not the State's record of a marriage, and a statutory definition that turns on whether a passenger was married is answered by the latter.
Two — reading clause (i) as a problem of proof only. It is more than that here. Where nothing establishes the marriage, the definition's fallback is the arrangement for an unmarried man, and the parents stand where the wife would.
Three — taking a paperless village ceremony to mean you were never really married. The rites themselves did the marrying, on the day, by force of section 7. All that is wanting is the register entry, and no time limit has run out on getting one.
Four — being hurried by a late-filing amount that has never moved. Two fixed sums, both capable of being waived, and no larger for a twenty-eight-year gap than a three-month one.
Five — thinking section 124A requires proving the railway was at fault. It says the opposite, in terms: liability arises whether or not there was any wrongful act, neglect or default.
Six — assuming it only covers derailments. The definition of untoward incident expressly reaches the accidental falling of a passenger from a train carrying passengers.
Seven — paying anybody who guarantees the outcome of a claim, or who declares it hopeless. Neither assurance is worth anything, and whether a proviso clause applies is decided in proceedings.
Eight — choosing a witness whose posting moves next year. In this belt that is most of the easy choices. Pick the relative or the neighbour the railway cannot relocate.
Nine — keeping every copy wherever the posting currently is. One belongs with family in the home district, who are not going anywhere.
Ten — leaving it until the week it is needed. Nobody assembles documents well in the days after a death. The paper is cheap today and expensive in every other sense later.
What follows is every figure we charge. Replacement copies, corrections to an entry, apostille handling, the managed package, and what the government takes on its own account are itemised separately on the fee page.
| What you are taking | Our charge | Whom it fits here |
|---|---|---|
| Arya Samaj ceremony at our mandir | ₹5,100 | The Vedic rites by themselves, finishing with the mandir handing you its certificate. By virtue of section 7 you are husband and wife from that day forward, with no government register yet carrying either name. |
| Ceremony with registration handled | ₹7,100 | Ceremony and the government entry done as one job — what most couples marrying now take. |
| A wedding already held, brought onto the record | ₹6,000 | What we are asked for most often along this yard. Neither the year nor the district alters anything — rites performed back home in 1998 with nothing committed to paper is routine work for us. |
| Special Marriage Act, start to finish | ₹15,000 | Parliament’s own civil mechanism, open to any pair of people and indifferent to religion or community. The trade-off is time and exposure: a notice remains available for objection across thirty days. |
The government's own collections sit apart from what we charge, and a receipt comes back to you for every one of them. The Marriage Clerk's share is ₹100. Delhi's 2014 Order puts ₹200 on the application itself. Take the civil route and the District cashier adds ₹15. Older weddings attract two further sums under that same Order: ₹500 inside the second sixty-day stretch, ₹1,000 after it, and both of them can be waived by the ADM or DM. Whatever number of years has gone by, neither figure has climbed.
There are nine things no payment buys here. Finding you a witness is not among our services. Nor is writing in a date that nobody lived through. Nor is handing over a certificate when one of the two of you never appeared. We pursue no railway claim, make no application to the Claims Tribunal, and touch no compensation matter of any kind. We give no assurance about what any officer, tribunal or court will decide. Succession, inheritance and property matters fall outside us entirely. Nobody from here stands up before an authority, a tribunal or a judge. We will not pronounce on anybody's caste or community. And conversions are something we neither put forward nor set up. Should your situation really need an advocate rather than a marriage service, that is what you will hear on the first call and at no charge — said in full awareness that it usually brings the conversation to an end.
Sourced — the Railways Act, 1989. Section 123(b), the definition of "dependant", with sub-clause (i) quoted whole — "the wife, husband, son and daughter, and in case the deceased passenger is unmarried or is a minor, his parent" — and sub-clauses (ii), (iii) and (iv) quoted as set out above. Section 124A, quoted whole: the main provision, under which liability arises "whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default on the part of the railway administration" and "notwithstanding anything contained in any other law", with compensation "to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only"; and its proviso, clauses (a) to (e), quoted in full. And from section 123(c), the words "the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers."
What was confirmed twice, and what was not. Section 123(b)(i) and the whole of section 124A including its proviso were read in the Act's text and confirmed against a second, independent published copy, which gave them in identical words. Sub-clauses (ii) to (iv) of section 123(b) were taken from one published copy of the Act only, and are quoted as that copy sets them out.
Summarised rather than reproduced, and flagged that way wherever it appears above. The violence limb of section 123(c) — the terrorism legislation it names, and violent attack, robbery, dacoity, rioting, shoot-out or arson in a train or at a railway station and its parts — is summarised rather than reproduced, because the published texts set that list out at length. The Explanation to section 124A, extending the concept of a passenger to railway servants on duty and to ticket-holders who become victims of an untoward incident, is likewise summarised. And section 125, on an application for compensation being made to the Claims Tribunal by, among others, a dependant of the deceased, is described because its text could not be obtained from two independent copies. None of those summaries should be relied on as the Act's wording, and nothing on this page turns on their precise words.
Sourced — the marriage provisions. Three provisions of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Section 7, under which it is the carrying out of the customary rites of either side that actually effects the marriage. Section 5(ii), making willingness one of the conditions a valid marriage must satisfy. And section 8, whose declared purpose is to make a marriage easier to prove. Section 4 of the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which makes the civil route available for a marriage "between any two persons", bringing with it the residence requirement that Act imposes and the month a notice stands exposed to objection. Four things trace back to Delhi's 2014 Order: Order 8 itself, the ₹200 an application carries, the sixty-day period, and both of the late figures. Two more — the ₹100 and ₹15 charges, and the turnaround the department sets itself — come from the Delhi Revenue Department's own publications. Untrue declarations are dealt with by BNS s.236, and apostille and attestation are charged at the rates the Ministry of External Affairs sets out in its own published schedule.
Where this page stops. It cannot tell you whether any given person is a "dependant" inside section 123(b), or where in that list they fall. Whether any event is an "untoward incident", or whether any clause of the proviso to section 124A applies to any particular death or injury — those are questions of fact decided in proceedings. What anybody is entitled to receive, or what the prescribed extent of compensation is. How any tribunal, officer or court would decide anything. What effect a departmental record, service entry or employer's file has for any purpose. Nor can it tell you the office covering any given address, which follows the precise address and shifted with the 2026 boundary changes. The short of it: this business performs marriages and gets them entered on the register. Railway claims, compensation, the Claims Tribunal, succession and property all lie outside it; nobody from here appears before an authority or a judge; and none of that is ever billed to anyone. These provisions are set out here for one reason: section 123(b) asks whether a passenger was married and arranges the entitlement around the answer, while saying nothing at all about how the answer is to be established. Closing that gap is the only thing we sell. A family that genuinely has a claim to pursue wants an advocate for it. A woman is entitled to that advocate free of charge, with no means test standing in the way — the statutory footing for which, and the things legal aid will not stretch to, are both laid out on our Vikaspuri page.
One — give us the year and the place of the ceremony, roughly. "1998, back in the district" or "last year, here" is plenty to begin with, and between them those two facts settle both the route and the fee.
Two — keep both Aadhaar cards to hand and read us the address printed on each, rather than the version either of you would give from memory. If one of them still shows an address from before a posting, say so at once; it is the ordinary position here and it decides less than families fear.
Three — if either of you works on the railway, mention it. Not because it changes anything we need, and not because any department has to be told — but because it changes which of the things on this page we would want you to have heard before you hang up.
+91 8376863962 is the number. We do not get to money before you have been told the route your particular facts put you on, our charge for handling it, and the sum the government collects quite separately. If it turns out you are better served by an advocate than by us, that gets said as well — and asking has cost you nothing.
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