Maintainence case filed by wife

DEFENCES FOR HUSBAND TO DENY OR REDUCE
If your wife has asked for maintenance under CrPC 125, here's your chance to learn everything about how to fight and deny or reduce maintenance under CrPC 125
1. Husband’s EMI towards house to be considered in CrPC 125 Maintenance to wife – SC Judgment
This is somewhat old judgment of Supreme Court, and it brings an important consideration which was overlooked by lower courts: Which was neglecting to consider monthly EMI paid by husband towards housing loan.
The order reduced maintenance amount from Rs 10,000 to Rs 5,000 p.m. While this may cause cheers to readers, it should be noted that the in-hand salary of husband is Rs 9,000 p.m, so effectively he has to now survive on Rs 4,000 p.m. Somehow the facts of the case don’t add up for me. There must be more to it than the numbers mentioned in the judgment.
The logic of going for an EMI of 21K on a salary of 35K itself seems questionable. Surely reducing maintenance might be considered a sacred goal by many husbands, but taking such huge loan thereby living on the edge is probably not for everyone. Also, from facts of the case, husband has already accumulated huge arrears of maintenance, probably hoping that one day a higher court will reduce his maintenance to some very low amount. While an optimistic view is good in life, one should assess risk vs reward in these matters. Accumulating arrears in maintenance is a high risk thing, because there is no guarantee the higher courts may reduce the maintenance drastically. Further, one has to live with that uncertainty for a long time running around in courts, so best strategy should be to reduce interim maintenance right from the start, at trial court level.
2. MP HC denies maintenance to wife on her CrPC 125 appeal

We have this very recent judgment of Madhya Pradesh High Court which denied maintenance to wife under CrPC 125 on her appeal to HC since the court agreed with trial court’s observations that according to evidence led by husband and also wife’s own admissions, it was the wife who was not staying with him out of her own freewill.
The judgment is actually not very significant, since both evidence by way of letters of husband and wife’s own admissions proved that there was no maltreatment, and in practical cases such evidence, and wife’s own admissions are very rarely seen. Also the wife didn’t appear in HC at all for her own appeal. If any husband is lucky enough to have this kind of evidence (and a wife who admits in court to her faults ) , of course they can make full use of it! This was how usage of CrPC 125 was intended to be, but after passing of laws like DV Act combined with the so-called ‘women empowerment’ trend, most of the time interim maintenance is granted based merely on allegations and the fact that wife is not staying with husband.
3. Qualified wife can’t sit idle and claim maintenance: Mumbai family court
Important part of judgment below: