Editorial and Review Policy

1. Why a marriage-law site needs an editorial policy at all

Search for 'court marriage fees in Delhi' and you will get figures ranging from Rs 150 to Rs 10,000, all described as government fees. They cannot all be right. Most of them are a service's own charge, quietly relabelled.

The same pattern runs through the rest of the subject. Pages promise a one-day court marriage that section 46 of the Special Marriage Act makes an offence for the officer to perform. Jurisdiction sections still list sub-divisions that ceased to exist on 1 January 2026. The three-month lapse under section 14 - which quietly destroys couples' notices when they travel - appears almost nowhere.

None of that is malice. It is what happens when pages are written by copying the page that ranked above them. This policy exists so you can check whether we are doing the same thing, and hold us to it if we are.

2. Where our facts come from

In order of preference, and we go down the list only when the one above has nothing to say:

• The bare Act. The Special Marriage Act, 1954; the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955; the Foreign Marriage Act, 1969; the Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872; the Advocates Act, 1961; the Consumer Protection Act, 2019; the Information Technology Act, 2000. We cite the section, not a paraphrase of it.
• Gazette notifications and government orders. The Delhi (Compulsory Registration of Marriage) Order, 2014; the 2025 notification reorganising Delhi's districts and sub-divisions with effect from 1 January 2026; departmental circulars.
• Government departmental pages. The Delhi Revenue Department's own published procedure and fee pages; the e-District portal; the Integrated Government Online Directory for the current district and sub-division map.
• Reported judgments. Orders of the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court, cited by name and citation so you can pull them up.
• Observed office practice. What SDM offices actually ask for, which differs between sub-divisions. We use this, and we label it as practice rather than law every time.

What we do not use: another firm's website as a source of fact, content-farm articles, or an AI summary treated as authority. If a claim exists only on commercial pages and in no statute, notification or judgment, we either leave it out or we say plainly that it is unverified.

3. How a page gets written

A page starts with the question a real caller asked, not with a keyword. Somebody rings and says 'my divorce came through in March, can we marry next week' - that becomes a page about the appeal window, not a page about court marriage in general.

We then read the primary sources for that question and write the answer, in order, with the awkward parts included rather than skipped. Then we add what the office will actually ask for on the day. Then we check the claim count: every number, date, section reference and fee on the page is traced back to its source, and anything that cannot be traced is removed rather than softened.

Finally the page is read once for a person rather than a search engine: does it answer the question in the first screen; does a frightened reader get the reassurance in plain words before the statutory detail; and is there anything on it we would be embarrassed to defend at a counter.

4. Dates, and why ours move less than everyone else's

Many websites re-stamp every page with today's date on every rebuild, hoping freshness helps them rank. It is dishonest to the reader - it says something was reviewed today when nothing was looked at - and search engines have long since learnt to discount it.

Our build works differently. Each page's content is hashed, and its last-reviewed date changes only when that hash changes. A page that has not been edited keeps the date it was actually last edited, sometimes for months. If you see a date move on this site, something on that page genuinely changed.

The corollary is that an old date here is not a warning sign. It means the law on that page has not moved.

5. What triggers a rewrite

Four things, and we act on them as soon as we can verify the change from a primary source:

A change in statute. An amendment, a new Act, a repeal.

A change in administration. The clearest recent example: Delhi's reorganisation from 11 districts and 33 sub-divisions to 13 districts and 39 sub-divisions with effect from 1 January 2026. That change made the jurisdiction section of most pages on the internet wrong overnight. We rewrote every sub-division page and every jurisdiction table against the current official directory rather than assuming the old map still held.

A change in office practice. A new document being asked for at the counter, a portal step that changed, an appointment system that moved. These reach us from our own files first, and we mark them as practice.

A reader telling us we are wrong. Which brings us to the next section.

6. Corrections

If you find an error, write to care@tatkalcourtmarriage.com with the page and what you believe is wrong. You do not need to be a lawyer and you do not need to prove it - pointing at it is enough, and we will do the checking.

We verify against the primary source, not against other websites. If you are right, the page is corrected and its last-reviewed date moves that day. If we think the page is right, we will write back and tell you why, with the section or source, rather than ignoring the message.

We do not remove a page because someone dislikes what it says about the market. A statement that no service can shorten a statutory notice period is going to stay up.

7. Independence

There are no paid placements on this site, no sponsored links, no affiliate commissions and no advertising. Nothing on any page is here because someone paid for it to be here.

Where we name an institution, an office or a portal, it is because that is where your file actually goes. Where we describe another service's claim critically - the same-day promise, the inflated 'government fee' - we do it by reference to the statute or the published figure, not by naming and attacking a competitor.

And where our own service is the weaker option for you, we say so. Not every couple needs us. Some routes you can do yourself in an afternoon, and the pages that say so are among the most-read on this site.