How unable should a wife be to maintain herself in order to entitled her to claim maintenance under S.125 Cr.P.C? This is the crucial question that arises for consideration in this revision petition.

2. The petitioner herein challenges an order passed under S.125 Cr.P.C directing him to pay maintenance to his wife/claimant @ Rs.2,000/- per mensem. Marriage is admitted. Separate residence of the spouses consequent to strain in matrimony is not disputed. That the petitioner/husband is a business man having spent about two decades working abroad is also not seriously disputed, though there is a contention that his present business is not lucrative. The, claimant/wife, aged about 39 years when she staked the claim is educationally qualified. She is a post graduate holding master's degree in arts. She is professionally qualified and is a law graduate. When they lived in matrimony, the claimant/wife was a house wife and had not pursued any career. She did not have the B.Ed. Degree which she asserted was necessary to enable her to secure employment as a teacher now. Though she admittedly held the professional qualification to practise as a lawyer, she had admittedly not enrolled herself and had never practised as a lawyer. She held out the reason that she is not conversant in the vernacular and that is why she did not choose to pursue a career in law. After the spouses started separate residence, admittedly she had worked in some schools as a teacher. It is her case that now, on account of the insistence on B.Ed. Degree for working as a teacher, she is not able to secure any such employment.

3. Before the learned Magistrate, the claimant/wife examined herself as PW.1. She was subjected to cross examination to be precise on her status as a woman "unable to maintain herself'. The petitioner/husband chose not to take the witness stand.

4. The learned Magistrate on an anxious consideration of all the relevant inputs came to the conclusion that the claimant/wife is unable to maintain herself and is consequently entitled to claim maintenance from the petitioner, her husband, who it was held has sufficient means.

5. Called upon to explain the nature of challenge, which the petitioner wants to mount against the impugned direct ion, the learned counsel for the petitioner has trained all his guns on the finding that the claimant/wife is unable to maintain herself. The learned counsel for the petitioner contends that a woman like the claimant/wife who is a post graduate and professionally qualified, who sits idle and does not engage herself in any income earning ventures cannot be held to be a woman unable to maintain herself, who alone is entitled to the compassion of law under S.125 Cr.P.C.

6. The learned counsel for the respondent claimant/wife on the other hand contends that while interpreting the provision of a welfare legislation like 125 Cr.P.C, the Court cannot afford to be unrealistic and rigid. The social ethos, the practices prevailing in the community and the concern and compassion in the Constitution for the less privileged female half of humanity in India cannot be ignored or lost sight of. Counsel for the claimant/wife first of all wants this Court to be reminded of the passages in Bai Tahira v. Ali Hussain Fidaolli Chothia ((1979) 2 SCC 316). Para. 1 & 7 appear to me to be crucial where Justice Krishna Iyer hat spoken about the need for commitment of the law in favour of-the under privileged for whose benefit an ameliorative provision like S.125 Cr.P.C. has been enacted, I extract the same below:

Para.1: "In this appeal, by special leave, we are called upon to interpret a benign provision enacted to ameliorate, the, economic condition of neglected wives and discarded divorcees, namely, S.125, Cr.P.C. Welfare laws mast be so read as to be effective delivery, systems of the salutary objects sought to be served by the Legislature and when the, beneficiaries are the weaker sections, like destitute women the spirit of Art. 15(3