By Advocate Aman Chawla | The Matrimonial Lawyers, New Delhi | Published: August 2026

This is one of the most urgent calls we receive — not “my marriage is ending,” but “she’s planning to leave the country with our child, and I don’t know how much time I have.” The anxiety is justified. Once a child leaves India, particularly to a country that isn’t a party to international child-recovery treaties India recognises, getting them back becomes exponentially harder, slower, and more expensive. The good news is that Indian courts have real, fast-acting tools for exactly this situation — but only if you use them before the child leaves, not after.

Why Speed Matters More Than Almost Anything Else Here

India is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. That single fact is the reason lawyers treat this situation as urgent rather than routine. It means there’s no automatic, treaty-backed mechanism forcing a foreign country to return a child taken from India. Once a child is settled abroad — enrolled in school, established in a new home, months or years into a new routine — courts on both sides become far more reluctant to disturb that settled life, even where the original removal was wrongful. The entire legal strategy here is built around preventing departure, because reversing it afterward is a different order of difficulty.

Step 1: File for an Injunction Restraining Removal

If your wife has expressed intent to relocate the child abroad — through messages, statements to family, job offers, or visa applications — you can move for an injunction before the Family Court restraining her from removing the child from India without your consent or the court’s permission. Under Section 26 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, if matrimonial proceedings are already pending, the court has wide power to pass interim orders concerning the child’s custody, maintenance, and — critically — restraint on relocation.

Where the risk appears immediate — travel bookings already made, visa applications in progress, a resignation already tendered abroad — courts can and do pass ex-parte interim orders on the very first day of filing, without waiting for your wife to be served or appear.

Step 2: Get the Child’s Passport Impounded

A child cannot travel internationally without a passport, which makes passport control one of the most effective preventive tools available. You can apply to the court for an order directing the Passport Authority to impound the child’s existing passport, or to refuse issuance of a fresh one, where there is a genuine risk of relocation without consent.

If the child holds dual citizenship or a foreign passport — common in NRI marriages — this step becomes more complex, since a foreign passport isn’t within the same domestic impounding framework. In that situation, the court order needs to be paired with the next step.

Step 3: File for a Look Out Circular (LOC)

A Look Out Circular is a direction to immigration authorities at every port of exit — airports, land borders, seaports — to prevent a specific person from leaving India. In child custody matters, an LOC filed through the court instructs the Bureau of Immigration to stop the child (and often the accompanying parent) from departing, regardless of what passport they’re travelling on.

This isn’t a theoretical remedy. In a matter that reached the Supreme Court in 2026, the bench directed the Centre to issue an LOC against a Russian mother mid-custody-dispute, after the father raised concern that she and their child could not be located. The Court went further, directing the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of External Affairs to communicate the order to every international airport and port in India, ensuring the immigration authorities be intimated to ensure that neither the mother nor the child were permitted to leave the country. That’s the level of coordinated urgency these applications can trigger when the risk is real and clearly presented to the court.

Step 4: Secure Interim Custody Before, Not After

An injunction stops removal; it doesn’t establish where the child lives day to day. Filing for interim custody alongside your injunction application gives you a stronger, more defensible position — both because it clarifies the immediate arrangement and because courts are generally reluctant to disturb a settled interim custody order later. This can be filed under the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, and in matrimonial matters, alongside your main custody or divorce proceedings.

What Not to Do

• Don’t take matters into your own hands — physically preventing your wife from leaving, confiscating her personal passport, or making threats will damage your position in court far more than it protects your child.
• Don’t wait for a “final” decision to file — by the time a case is fully decided, the opportunity to prevent departure may already be gone. Interim relief exists precisely because urgency can’t wait for a final hearing.
• Don’t assume informal assurances are enough — a verbal promise not to relocate carries no legal weight. If relocation risk is real, only a court order creates an enforceable restraint.

If the Child Has Already Left India

If the child has already been taken abroad, the legal path shifts substantially, and speed still matters, just differently:

• File a habeas corpus petition before the relevant High Court seeking the child’s production, alongside the custody matter.
• Simultaneously pursue an LOC if there’s any chance the child is being moved onward or could return and depart again.
• Understand that Indian courts assess the child’s welfare independently rather than automatically returning the child to a foreign jurisdiction — this cuts both ways, and is one of the more complex, fact-specific areas of Indian family law where experienced counsel makes a real difference.

A Realistic Example

A father learns his wife has accepted a job offer abroad and has quietly begun the visa process for herself and their six-year-old, without discussing it with him. He doesn’t wait for her to book flights. His lawyer files an injunction application the same week, along with a request for passport impounding and interim custody, laying out the visa correspondence as evidence of an active, credible relocation plan — not speculation. The court grants an ex-parte restraining order within days, and a full hearing on custody follows with the child still in India, where the father retains a genuine ability to be heard.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can my wife legally take our child abroad without my consent?

Not if there’s a court order restraining it, and not without your consent if you both hold equal legal guardianship and no custody order yet exists — though in practice, absent an order, this becomes a fact-specific dispute. The safest path if you fear relocation is to seek a restraining order before it happens, not to rely on the law resolving the question after the fact.

2. How quickly can I get an injunction or passport impounding order?

Where the risk is credible and immediate — travel plans, visa applications, resignation already tendered — courts can pass ex-parte interim orders within days, sometimes on the day of filing. The strength and specificity of your evidence of intent to relocate matters enormously here.

3. What if my wife and child are NRIs or hold foreign passports?

This adds complexity but doesn’t remove your options. A Look Out Circular can restrain departure regardless of which passport is used, since it operates at the immigration checkpoint rather than through the passport document itself.

4. What happens if she takes the child abroad before I can file anything?

You can still pursue habeas corpus proceedings and custody relief, but the process becomes significantly harder, slower, and outcome depends heavily on the receiving country’s own courts and India’s lack of Hague Convention membership. This is exactly why acting on early warning signs — rather than waiting for certainty — matters so much.

5. Does filing for divorce automatically stop my wife from taking the child abroad?

No. Filing for divorce alone doesn’t create a restraint. You need a specific injunction or interim custody order addressing relocation — this is usually filed alongside or within the matrimonial proceedings, not assumed as an automatic consequence of them.

6. Is this different if we’re both Indian citizens living in India versus an NRI marriage?

The core remedies — injunction, passport impounding, LOC, interim custody — apply in both situations. NRI cases add layers around foreign passports, dual citizenship, and cross-border enforcement, which is where specialised handling matters more, not where the fundamental tools change.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. As per the Rules of the Bar Council of India, advocates are not permitted to advertise or solicit work, and nothing in this article should be construed as advertising, solicitation, or an invitation to engage this firm. Every case is fact-specific — consult a qualified advocate regarding your specific circumstances before taking any legal action.

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