A group of divorced men, estranged from their children by law, celebrating Father’s Day at the Jawahar Bal Bhawan on Sunday, sought reforms in the laws pertaining to divorce and dowry. They demanded that children should be provided their basic right of seeing and spending time with their fathers. The denial of this is a great injustice, they said.
All those participated were propagating the concept of shared parenting, which seeks to allow separated parents of a child the equal period of custody. This is not the current practice, with courts allowing only a few visitation hours to fathers. A man divorced for six years, requesting anonymity, said, “Indian courts need to give at least three days of visitation in a week for fathers to spend time with their children. In the West, each parent gets 3.5 days with their children.”
He himself gets a miserly one hour a week with his daughter, while most others were better off with two hours a week. Even these few hours are not granted most of the time, with the mothers taking the kids away within half the prescribed time. Many others, said this has an adverse effect on the child’s mental and physical health. “When a child is given only a few hours a week, he waits the whole week to meet his parent undergoing undue mental stress,” said Ali Ahmed, another estranged father.
A drawing competition was organised for children on Sunday at the Jawahar Bal Bhawan as part of the celebration. The organisers said they have observed that children of divorcees lacked in confidence.