Unhappy over a girl child, the father abandoned the duo soon after the child's birth.
Chennai: The fight of a single mother and her daughter to get her biological father’s name removed from the recently issued passport is gaining momentum with their efforts taken to change.org, the web’s leading platform for social change. Unhappy over a girl child, the father abandoned the duo soon after the child’s birth. The trouble started when the mother applied for a passport for her daughter without her father’s name, last year.
Priyanka Gupta, a 45-year-old resident of Janakpuri in Delhi told this newspaper that she applied for a passport at Bhikaji Kama Place regional passport office, for her now 20-year-old daughter, an architecture student, to go abroad on an educational trip.
“Our request to avoid his name (daughter’s father) who left us when she was born and never looked back, and did not even care whether we are dead or alive, was denied,” says Gupta. When writing letters to the passport officer, talking to senior officials and submitting the required documents which carried only the mother’s name did not help, they were forced to include his name.
She sent to the passport officer a recent Delhi High Court verdict that a biological father’s name was not mandatory in the passport, while pleading for a new passport for the daughter. The response from the Ministry of Home Affairs was: “The decision is taken on a case to case basis and can’t be applied universally”.
