Loan EMIs that a husband pays to build his own assets cannot be used to cut down the maintenance he owes his estranged wife. That is the finding of a Supreme Court bench of Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Augustine George Masih, which on April 16, 2026 raised the appellant’s monthly maintenance from Rs 15,000 to Rs 25,000 and held that the duty to maintain a spouse takes precedence over financial choices the husband makes on his own account.
How the dispute reached the Supreme Court
Deepa Joshi and Gaurav Joshi married in New Delhi on May 7, 2023, under Hindu rites. The marriage did not last a year in the matrimonial home. She left, alleging neglect and physical and mental harassment at the hands of her husband and his family, and went back to her parents.
She had no income of her own. She filed an application at Tanakpur under Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, asking for Rs 50,000 a month.
The husband never appeared. Proceedings went ex parte.
The Family Court awarded Rs 8,000. The Uttarakhand High Court raised it to Rs 15,000 on appeal. Still treating that as short of what her husband’s earnings could actually sustain, the wife carried the case to the Supreme Court. Two questions came up for decision there: was the High Court’s figure adequate given the husband’s real income, and were the loan-repayment deductions on his salary a legitimate reason to scale that income down?
The income the husband disclosed, and what the lower courts did with it
By his own affidavit the husband, who works as a Manager at Canara Bank, earns a gross monthly income of Rs 1,15,670. Both the Family Court and the High Court had taken that figure and knocked a substantial chunk off it before computing maintenance, on the footing that his loan repayment deductions were close to unavoidable.
The Supreme Court refused to accept that reasoning. Where loan repayments end in the creation or acquisition of assets, the bench held, they are in substance capital investments — not essential expenditure. In the court’s own phrasing, such repayments partake the character of capital investment and cannot be equated with essential or unavoidable expenditure. A commitment the husband entered into voluntarily, and one that adds to his own balance sheet over time, cannot be allowed to push aside an obligation the law places on him.
There was a practical concern behind this too. If salary deductions of this type were routinely read down the husband’s income, the court observed, a husband could simply take on fresh loans and watch his maintenance liability fall in step — a result the bench refused to endorse.
What the court drew from earlier rulings
The judgment goes back to three decisions to set the standard. Chaturbhuj v. Sita Bai (2008) laid down that maintenance is meant to prevent destitution; a wife does not have to prove she would otherwise be unable to survive. Shamima Farooqui v. Shahid Khan (2015) added that the amount must be real, not illusory, and enough to let the wife live with some dignity. Rajnesh v. Neha (2021) held that the figure has to be fair, reasonable, and aligned with the parties’ status and what the husband can actually afford.
Those three together left little footing for what the lower courts had done. The liability to maintain a spouse, the bench said, is a primary obligation and cannot be subordinated to the husband’s financial arrangements.
The revised figure and what the order requires
The bench then weighed the husband’s Rs 1,15,670 gross income against the wife’s complete lack of independent earnings and the fact of her forced separation within a year of the marriage. Rs 25,000 a month, the judgment concludes, is a just and reasonable figure in the circumstances.
The court was careful to say that maintenance should not end up imposing an irrational or excessive burden on the husband. That is why the figure sits well below the Rs 50,000 the wife had originally claimed, while still being a meaningful correction over the High Court’s Rs 15,000.
The High Court’s order has been modified to that extent. Arrears are to be cleared within three months, and the monthly sum is payable on or before the 7th of each calendar month.
For family courts dealing with similar disputes, Deepa Joshi v. Gaurav Joshi now puts a clear marker down. When a husband’s pay slip shows deductions for loans that are, in truth, funding his acquisition of property, those deductions do not shrink what he owes his wife. Cases built on that kind of salary-side arithmetic are going to be tested against this judgment going forward.
