Ban on polygamy, child marriage among recommendations of Uttarakhand UCC draft

Dehradun: A complete ban on polygamy and child marriage, a common marriageable age for girls across all faiths and enforcing similar grounds and procedures for divorce are understood to be among the major recommendations of a panel which drafted a Uniform Civil Code for Uttarakhand.

The five-member government-appointed panel, headed by retired Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai, Friday submitted the four-volume report running into 749 pages to Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, who said the draft will be examined, studied and discussed before it is tabled in the assembly on February 6.

A special four-day session of the assembly has been convened from February 5-8 to pass a legislation on the UCC.

Sources said the panel has also recommended that boys and girls will have equal inheritance rights, registration of marriages will be made mandatory and the marriageable age for girls would be increased so that they can become graduates before marriage.

Couples whose marriages are not registered would not get any government facilities and arrangements will be made at the rural level to register marriages, sources said.

The contents of the draft, however, have not been made officially public.

The UCC will provide a legal framework for a uniform marriage, divorce, land, property and inheritance laws for all citizens irrespective of their religion in the state.

If implemented, Uttarakhand will become the first state in the country after Independence to adopt the UCC. It has been operational in Goa since the days of the Portugese rule.

The sources said the recommendations also say that everyone will get adoption rights. Even Muslim women will have the right to adopt and the procedure for adoption will be simplified.

They said the practices of halala and iddat will be banned.

Also, declaration of live-in relationships will be mandatory, they said, adding it will be a self declaration for which there will be a legal format.

The draft has not included population control in its ambit, the sources said, adding Scheduled Tribes, which constitute 3 per cent of Uttarakhand's population, have also been left out of its purview.

The report will enter public domain only after it is tabled in the assembly, officials here said.

The draft has recommended common grounds for divorce for both men and women and putting an end to the practice of child marriage, the sources said.

They said all divorces will have to be taken through a court of law and the cooling period for all in such cases will be six months.

Custody of children can be given to their grandparents if their parents are locked in a dispute, the sources said, adding the procedure for guardianship of orphaned children will be simplified.

If a son who is the sole breadwinner in the family dies, the compensation given to his wife will include taking care of his parents. Even if she remarries she will have to share the compensation she gets on the death of her first husband with his parents. If the wife dies and there is no one to look after her parents, taking care of them will be her husband's responsibility.