Opinion | Gurugram Techie Suicide: Why Does A Woman Asking For Alimony Enrage Us So?

A man dies and, before the facts are even established, a woman is put on trial. This is the strange new morality play India seems to have perfected.

A tragic death becomes a referendum on women. A complicated marriage becomes a story about "greedy wives". An alimony dispute becomes "proof" that feminism has gone too far. And social media, with its spectacular disregard for facts, turns one man's tragedy into an indictment of half the population. The recent death of 28-year-old software engineer Sambhav Jain has become precisely that.

Reports say Jain was dealing with financial difficulties, debt, marital problems, and substantial medical expenses relating to his prematurely born son. There was a reported settlement of around Rs 15 lakh, of which approximately Rs 7- 8 lakh had reportedly already been paid. The much-circulated claim that he had been ordered to pay Rs 3 crore has been reported as false.

That distinction matters.

Because if we are going to talk about alimony, let's talk about actual alimony law rather than an imaginary India in which every woman walks out of a marriage and walks into a fortune.

Who Really Gets The Alimony?

Here is something rarely discussed in the current outrage: we don't even have good national data showing how many women actually receive maintenance or alimony, how much they receive, how long they wait for it, or how many court-ordered payments are actually recovered.

What we do have is something considerably more revealing. The Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged that maintenance proceedings are plagued by delay. In Rajnesh v. Neha, the Court noted that, despite prescribed timelines, interim-maintenance applications in a vast majority of cases were not being disposed of within those timelines. The Court specifically issued guidelines to bring greater consistency and speed to the process.

And the problem doesn't necessarily end when a woman wins.

The Supreme Court has described enforcement of maintenance orders as one of the most challenging issues, noting that execution proceedings can remain pending for months or even years, effectively defeating the purpose of maintenance itself.

So, perhaps we should stop asking "How much alimony are women getting?" and start asking "How many women are actually receiving the money they have been legally awarded - and when?"

Because almost every single mother I know, including myself, who has been through a bitter separation, tells me some version of the same story. The father has money for restaurants. Money for exorbitant rent. Money for holidays. Money for new cars. Money for expensive dates. Money for a new life. But suddenly there is no money for school fees. No money for medical expenses. No money for the children's activities. No money for the child whose childhood he is still legally and morally responsible for. It is never about the paucity of money but almost always about the paucity of intent.

And the mother? She pays. She pays for the school. She pays for the food. She pays for the rent. She pays for the doctor. She pays the electricity bill. And, she pays the lawyer. She pays with her savings. She pays with her exhaustion. She pays with her sleep. She pays with her tears. She pays with her anguish. And sometimes she pays with years of her life spent sitting in courtrooms asking for money that the law already says her children are entitled to.

Laws vs Reality

This is not an argument against men. It is an argument against pretending that a legal entitlement is the same thing as money in a woman's bank account.

Maintenance exists precisely because economic dependence can be created inside marriage. A woman may have left the workforce to raise children. She may have moved cities for her husband's career. She may have taken responsibility for the home while he accumulated income, professional experience, and assets. She may have sacrificed earning power precisely because the family structure required somebody to do unpaid care work.

When the marriage ends, that economic asymmetry doesn't magically disappear. And this isn't some feminist conspiracy. It is the legal recognition of an economic reality.

So then, why does asking for maintenance in India provoke such extraordinary cultural outrage? Why is a woman asking for economic support from the man who fathered her children treated as though she has committed a moral crime? Why is alimony described as greed while dowry is still treated, in many communities, as tradition? That juxtaposition should make us uncomfortable.

In 2023, India recorded 6,156 dowry deaths - more than 6,000 women whose deaths were officially classified as dowry deaths. That's approximately one every 85 minutes. And those are reported cases. Nobody seriously believes every instance of dowry harassment, coercion, or violence reaches a police station. Yet, somehow, the cultural conversation around dowry remains remarkably different from the conversation around alimony. A woman enters a marriage carrying jewellery, cash, cars, property, or "gifts" from her family, and nobody asks whether she is being greedy. But when the same woman leaves a marriage and asks for financial support to survive - or to support the children she is raising - suddenly she is a 'gold-digger'.

Why? Perhaps because dowry preserves the illusion of patriarchy. Alimony challenges it. Dowry says: A woman must bring something into the marriage. Maintenance says: Her economic contribution inside that marriage had value too. And that is a much more uncomfortable idea.

The Question Of 'Misuse' Is Valid, But Not Absolute

Of course, there are women who misuse laws. There are men who are genuinely financially destroyed by litigation. There are false claims. There are inflated demands. There are bad-faith litigants of both sexes.

The Supreme Court has already laid down principles for handling precisely this. The problem is implementation. A 2025 High Court judgment noted that in many family courts, there appeared to be a systemic failure to award interim maintenance promptly, despite repeated constitutional-court directions.

That should be the scandal. Not that women are supposedly getting too much. But that children and financially vulnerable spouses can wait too long to get anything at all. Because childhood does not wait for a court date. School fee doesn't wait. Rent doesn't wait. Medicine doesn't wait. Food doesn't wait.

A six-year-old does not understand why her mother has filed another application. A nine-year-old doesn't care which lawyer requested the adjournment. A teenager cannot put her emotional life on hold until her parents finally resolve their financial dispute. And the mother cannot tell her child, "Don't worry. Your school fees will come when the judge hears our matter next month, and the next, and then next."

That is not how childhood works.

The Garb Of Morality

So let's stop manufacturing a national morality tale in which every divorced woman is a villain and every divorced man a victim. One man's tragedy does not establish that millions of women are abusing the law. And a woman receiving maintenance is not evidence that feminism has destroyed marriage.

That's why, perhaps before we ask why women are demanding alimony, we should ask why so many women have to spend years in court demanding money that was meant to support their children in the first place, and why children are losing their childhood because the system exonerates men who should be held culpable to begin with.

Because the real scandal is not that a woman can ask a man for maintenance. It is that in a country where more than 6,000 women were officially recorded as dying in dowry deaths in a single year, a woman asking for financial security after leaving a marriage can still be treated as the greater social offence.

(Meghna Pant is an award-winning author, journalist, and speaker whose books have been widely acclaimed and are being adapted for the screen)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author