The Delhi High Court has ruled that a father cannot treat money saved in a Public Provident Fund (PPF) account for his daughter as a substitute for his legal obligation to provide her maintenance.
Justice Neena Bansal Krishna upheld an order directing a father, Sudhir Kawatra, to return more than ₹8 lakh withdrawn from a PPF account that had been opened for his daughter, Shamli Kawatra, along with 8% interest.
The account was opened in 1999 when Shamli was a child. According to her, when she approached the bank after the account matured in 2017, she discovered that the entire balance had already been withdrawn by her father in 2016.
Shamli said her father had given the bank an undertaking stating that the money was being withdrawn for her education and welfare. She later approached the court for recovery of the amount, maintaining that the funds had not actually been spent on her education.
The district court ruled in her favour and ordered her father to return the entire corpus with interest. The father challenged that decision before the High Court.
During the proceedings, Shamli pointed out that she was pursuing college studies and was facing difficulty in meeting her educational expenses. She also said that her parents had separated following marital discord and that she was living with her mother.
Her father, however, argued that a substantial portion of the withdrawn money had effectively been used for Shamli’s benefit. He said that, under a family court order, he had paid around ₹6 lakh towards her maintenance. He further contended that he was paying additional maintenance to his wife pursuant to an order of the Uttarakhand High Court and that those funds were also being used for Shamli.
The High Court rejected that reasoning.
The Court drew a clear line between a parent’s continuing duty to maintain a child and money separately accumulated for the child’s future. Maintenance, it said, is an independent legal obligation and cannot be treated as an expense to be deducted from the child’s own savings.
The Court observed that the PPF corpus represented an investment created for Shamli’s future, whereas maintenance covers the day-to-day expenses involved in raising a child. Using the daughter’s savings to meet that obligation would effectively amount to using the child’s own money to discharge the father’s responsibility.
The Court also rejected the argument that maintenance paid to the wife could justify withdrawal of the daughter’s PPF funds, noting that the wife’s entitlement to maintenance is itself an independent right.
Although the PPF account had been opened and operated by the father, the Court found that it had been created for the benefit of his daughter. Once Shamli attained majority, she became entitled to the money accumulated for her benefit.
The Court therefore upheld the district court’s direction requiring the father to restore the entire PPF corpus to Shamli, together with 8% interest.
The ruling makes one principle clear: a child’s savings cannot be repurposed by a parent to satisfy obligations that the law independently places on that parent.
