She grew up with grandma, but court says it’s time to go home

When 17-year-old Ananyia (name changed) stood before the court, her choice was simple. She wanted to stay with the woman who had tucked her into bed, paid her school fees and raised her from infancy—her maternal grandmother.

The Jharkhand High Court, however, had a far more difficult choice to make. It had to decide not what the child wanted today, but what would serve her tomorrow.

In doing so, the High Court stepped beyond a narrow legal exercise and into the uncomfortable role every parent dreads—making a decision a child may not immediately understand but one believed to be in her best interest.

Upholding the Family Court’s order, a Division Bench of Justices Sujit Narayan Prasad and Pradeep Kumar Srivastava dismissed the maternal grandmother’s appeal and directed that custody of the minor girl remain with her biological father, holding that the child’s long-term welfare must prevail over her present preference.

“The court has not only to look at the issue on a legalistic basis but has to take into consideration the human angles as well,” the bench observed, while reiterating that the welfare of the child is the paramount consideration in custody disputes.

Ananyia’s story is one of fractured relationships. Born in 2009, she was barely a year old when her parents drifted apart. Her father was later jailed in a dowry harassment case. During that period, he alleged, his wife remarried and started a new family, leaving their daughter with her ageing parents.

That grandmother became everything a child could ask for—a caregiver, guardian and constant companion. School records showed Ananyia attended classes regularly. She told the court she had hardly seen her father and wanted to continue living with her grandmother.

Ordinarily, a child’s wishes carry weight in custody disputes. But the High Court said they cannot become the sole deciding factor.

The judges observed that a child who has spent years in one household is naturally influenced by the people around her. They also noted that the mother, despite repeated notices, never appeared before the Family Court to seek custody of her daughter. Documentary evidence, the court found, established that she had contracted a second marriage, while the grandmother—now over 70 and without an independent source of income—could not realistically shoulder the girl’s future indefinitely.

The father, on the other hand, had not remarried, possessed sufficient means to educate and maintain his daughter and remained her natural guardian under law.

In the end, the court chose the future over familiarity.

For Ananyia, it meant leaving the only home she had ever known. For her grandmother, it meant parting with the granddaughter she had raised as her own.

And for the High Court, it meant delivering a judgment that acknowledged a painful truth: sometimes, protecting a child means deciding against the child’s own wish because the law expects judges to think not as spectators to a family dispute, but as guardians of the child’s future.

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