-PTI
A person applying for a passport is bound to disclose the names of his/her biological parents and not those of the adoptive ones if the adoption has not been legally mandated, Delhi High Court has ruled.
In a ruling, Justice Vipin Sanghi said: “A passport is not only a travel document, but is also an identity document. The identity of a person is determined, inter alia, by his parentage. Therefore, unless there is a legal adoption of the applicant, he/she is bound to give the name of his/her natural parents… in his/her application form.”
The court order came on a plea by a 16-year-old girl’s mother challenging the regional passport office’s (RPO) decision to reject her daughter’s application.
The girl’s mother had in 1997 sought divorce from her husband and had subsequently executed an adoption deed in favour of her second husband, whose name she had given in the passport application as the girl’s father.
When the RPO rejected the application, she moved the court on behalf of her daughter.
The court, however, pointed out that both parents of a child, if alive, had equal rights to give the child in adoption and that one cannot exercise this right unilaterally without the other’s consent.
“The law is very clear that such rights cannot be exercised by either of the parents of the child save with the consent of the other, unless one of them has deliberately and finally renounced the world or has ceased to be a Hindu or has been declared by a court of competent jurisdiction to be of unsound mind,” the court said.
While rejecting the woman’s plea, the court gave her the liberty to re-submit the application afresh with the name of the girl’s biological father.