Author Topic: Brides abandoned by NRI Grooms on Rise in Punjab!! (Read 3349 times)

Kudrat Kaur · « **on:** March 12, 2011, 10:50:26 PM »

Today, across India, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young women live to regret marriages that have left them alone, miserable and consumed with shame.

According to Balwant Singh Ramoowalia of the the Lok Bhalai party, a small political organisation in Punjab, over 22,000 abandoned brides have registered criminal cases against their NRI (Non-Resident Indian) grooms in Punjab alone.

The South Asian Post and its sister papers were among the first newspapers in Canada to highlight and investigate this social menace five years ago.

A 2007 report by the Punjab University stated that about 25,000 abandoned women in Punjab alone faced an uphill battle against a legal system which provides little hope of justice.

It suggested the Indian government should stamp the marital status of NRIs in their passports and bring in new laws to protect vulnerable women.

With an estimated 30,000 brides being abandoned every year, usually by husbands living overseas, India’s Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs also recommends that families hire private detectives to vet suitors and avoid being conned into giving away dowries, which are officially outlawed but are still common among the wealthy.

The ministry estimates that hundreds of thousands of brides are lied to or misled each year.
While arranged marriages between Indo-Canadians and Indian nationals have a time-honoured and successful history, police in the state of Punjab, from which 75 per cent of B.C.’s Indo-Canadian population originates, say half of these marriages today are frauds.

Jalandhar, where the crackdown has begun is in Punjab’s Doaba region where this phenomenon–some have likened to organized crime – occurs at an alarming rate. Of the nearly 30,000 women deserted by NRI husbands and roughly 15,000 of them belong to the Doaba region.

Jalandhar Passport officer Parneet Singh told reporters that the passports of those grooms were impounded who did not respond to the show-cause notices sent to them within 15 days.

In a concerted effort to stop a social scourge that has left over 30,000 women desperate and looking for their husbands, a government team in the town of Jalandhar, Punjab has begun impounding the passports of the so-called Non-Resident Indian (NRI) runaway bridegrooms.

and example of one successful implementation of these efforts ..

In one case, an NRI man’s passport was impounded even before the show-cause notice was issued because he was set to fly abroad when the complaint against him was received. Complainant Parveen Bhatti, talking to The Indian Express, revealed that her husband Pradeep Singh had deserted her just after her marriage in 2008 and he was about to fly abroad after showing himself as unmarried, but she made a complaint to the passport officer, who acted immediately and impounded Pradeep’s passport just a few hours before the flight on February 22.

Author Topic: Brides abandoned by NRI Grooms on Rise in Punjab!! (Read 3349 times)

Kudrat Kaur

Brides abandoned by NRI Grooms on Rise in Punjab!!

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