10225 - Maneka sees point in single mom's passport plea - Telegraph India

Ananya Sengupta

New Delhi, July 15: Maneka Gandhi today wrote to foreign minister Sushma Swaraj requesting children of single mothers be allowed to exclude their father's name from their passports, a day after a divorced mother launched an online petition with the demand.

Sources in Maneka's women and child development ministry said her letter had been spurred by Priyanka Gupta's change.org petition, addressed to her ministry as well as the foreign and home offices, which had collected 25,000 signatures by this evening.

"Have received petitions where #mother/#child have insisted that name of the father should not be mentioned in #passport," Maneka tweeted today, tagging Sushma.

"The petitions involved cases in which the father had abandoned the mother and the court had granted custody of the child to the mother."

She added: "The current guidelines for #passports warrant the name of the father as a mandatory requirement. I have requested Smt @SushmaSwaraj ji to look into the matter & get necessary modifications done in the rules for issuance of #passports."

In her letter, Maneka has cited a Delhi High Court judgment that said earlier this year that in the case of single mothers, her name alone would suffice for her child to apply for a passport.

When the government had argued that the passport office software didn't accept a single parent's application for her child, the court said that this did not make it a legal requirement.

It also cited how, on two previous occasions in 2005 and 2011, passports had been issued without the father's name, which "makes it evident that the said requirement is not a legal necessity but only a procedural formality".

After the verdict, the government gave the relief to the daughter of the petitioner, a single mother, but did not change the rules for others, prompting Gupta's petition.

"My husband abandoned my daughter and me when she was born just because she was a girl. He never looked back and doesn't even care whether we're dead or alive," Gupta's petition says.

"Recently, I applied for the passport of my daughter. My daughter doesn't want her father's name on the document. Our application was denied and we were told that both names are required."

Gupta says the passport office's logic was that her husband's name occurs in her daughter Garima's birth certificate ---- although the college-going teen's Aadhaar card, voter ID card and bank account only carry a single parent's name: her mother's.

She told The Telegraph the passport office demands the father's name wherever it's possible to identify a father, making an exception only for the children of single adoptive mothers. "Why should a divorced woman suffer?" she asked.

Gupta said she had applied for her daughter's passport in 2014, when Garima was a minor.

"She got the passport only when I relented and put in her father's name. She hates me for it. My humble request is for the Prime Minister and the home ministry to look into this matter and help single parents, both fathers and mothers."

Garima says she doesn't want her father's name on her passport.

"I need my passport, it's a necessity, but I don't want it with the name of a man who abandoned us because of me being a girl. To him, I am dead and honestly, I don't care about him either," she has said in a comment attached to her mother's petition.

"I have my voter's identity card, Aadhaar card, my 10th and 12th pass certificates --- all in my name and my mom's, then why not my passport?"