Of all the civil reliefs the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 places in a Magistrate's hands, the compensation order under Section 22 is the most quietly radical. Maintenance keeps a woman alive; a residence order keeps a roof over her head; a protection order keeps the violence at bay. But Section 22 does something Indian matrimonial law had almost never done before 2005 — it treats the injury itself as compensable, directing the respondent to pay damages for the mental torture and emotional distress his violence inflicted. It is a tort remedy grafted onto a quasi-criminal statute, dispensed by a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class without the cost, delay, and pleading rigour of a civil suit. This chapter unpacks the text of Section 22, the species of harm it reaches, how courts fix quantum, its relationship with maintenance under Section 20, and the body of Supreme Court authority — from Juveria Abdul Majid Patni to Saraswathy v. Babu — that has given the provision real teeth.
The text of Section 22 and where it sits in the scheme
Section 22 of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 is a single, deceptively compact sentence: "In addition to other reliefs as may be granted under this Act, the Magistrate may on an application being made by the aggrieved person, pass an order directing the respondent to pay compensation and damages for the injuries, including mental torture and emotional distress, caused by the acts of domestic violence committed by that respondent." Every operative limb of the provision repays close reading, and exam answers that merely paraphrase the section miss the architecture buried inside it.
First, the opening words "in addition to other reliefs" make compensation a cumulative remedy. It is not an alternative to a protection order under Section 18, a residence order under Section 19, monetary relief under Section 20, or custody under Section 21 — it stacks on top of them. A single application under Section 12 can, and routinely does, seek all five reliefs together. Second, the relief is discretionary ("may"), not mandatory, but the discretion is structured by the statutory object and must be exercised judicially. Third, it is triggered "on an application being made by the aggrieved person" — though, as we shall see, the proactive scheme of the Act and the wide power to mould relief mean courts have not treated the absence of a precisely-worded prayer as fatal. Fourth, the head of damage is expressly enlarged to "include" mental torture and emotional distress, signalling that the drafters wanted intangible, dignitary harm — not just out-of-pocket loss — to be the gravamen of the remedy. Compensation orders sit in Chapter IV of the Act alongside the other reliefs, all routed through the procedure in the wider scheme of the statute.
Compensation under Section 22 versus monetary relief under Section 20
The single most-tested distinction in this area is between Section 20 monetary relief and Section 22 compensation. They look superficially alike — both order the respondent to pay the aggrieved person money — but they answer entirely different questions and rest on different juridical foundations.
Section 20 is restitutionary and forward-looking. It reimburses expenses incurred and losses suffered: loss of earnings, medical expenses, loss caused by destruction or removal of property, and maintenance for the aggrieved person and her children (which, under Section 20(1)(d), may run alongside or in addition to a Section 125 CrPC order). Its lodestar is the standard of living to which the woman is accustomed. Section 22, by contrast, is compensatory and backward-looking in the tortious sense — it values the wrong done, the injury to body, mind, and dignity, the mental torture and emotional distress. The standard-of-living yardstick that governs maintenance is not the test for Section 22 damages.
Because the two reliefs measure different things, awarding both is not double recovery. The phrase "in addition to other reliefs" in Section 22 settles the point: a woman may simultaneously receive monthly maintenance under Section 20 and a lump-sum compensation award under Section 22 for the trauma of the abuse, and the respondent cannot complain of duplication. In Shalu Ojha v. Prashant Ojha (2015) 2 SCC 99 the Magistrate had in fact granted interim maintenance at Rs 2,50,000 per month and compensation at Rs 1,00,000, and the Supreme Court's intervention concerned the unjustified stay of execution, not any supposed overlap between the two heads.
Mental torture and emotional distress as the gravamen of the relief
The express inclusion of "mental torture and emotional distress" within the compensable injury is the provision's conceptual heart. It directly tracks the definition of domestic violence in Section 3, which embraces physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and economic abuse. Emotional and verbal abuse — insults, ridicule, humiliation (particularly for not bearing a male child), and repeated threats — are themselves acts of domestic violence under the Explanation to Section 3, and Section 22 closes the loop by making the distress those acts cause a head of damage in its own right.
This matters because Indian courts have historically been reluctant to monetise purely psychological harm in matrimonial settings. Section 22 reverses that reticence by statute. The drafters borrowed the conceptual vocabulary of tort — damages for mental distress and loss of dignity — and made it available to an aggrieved woman without requiring her to file a civil suit, prove special damage with mathematical precision, or surmount the cost barriers that keep tort remedies out of reach for most litigants. The result is a hybrid: a tortious measure of damages administered through a summary, welfare-oriented, magistrate-driven procedure.
Saraswathy v. Babu: compensation for the continuing wrong
The leading Supreme Court authority squarely on a Section 22 award is Saraswathy v. Babu (2014) 3 SCC 712, decided on 25 November 2013. The appellant-wife had been driven from her matrimonial home and her husband persisted in refusing her residence in the shared household. The Madras High Court had reversed her relief on the footing that conduct predating the Act's commencement could not be considered. The Supreme Court set that aside.
The Court held that the husband's continuing refusal to let his wife reside in the shared household was itself a continuing act of domestic violence within the wide language of Section 3, so the cause of action subsisted on and after the Act came into force. Crucially for our purposes, having found the wife to be an aggrieved person subjected to domestic violence, the Court went on to hold she was "entitled to compensation and damages for the injuries, including mental torture and emotional distress, caused by the acts of domestic violence," and directed the respondent-husband to pay Rs 5,00,000 as compensation and damages. Saraswathy is therefore the clearest illustration of the apex court itself quantifying a Section 22 award, and it ties the remedy firmly to the continuing-offence reasoning that recurs throughout DV jurisprudence.
Juveria Abdul Majid Patni: the relief survives divorce
A respondent's favourite defence is that a subsequent divorce extinguishes the wife's claims under the Act. Juveria Abdul Majid Patni v. Atif Iqbal Mansoori (2014) 10 SCC 736, decided 18 September 2014, demolished that argument in terms that expressly name Section 22. The wife alleged domestic violence committed before a customary khula divorce; the Bombay High Court had thought the petition unsustainable after dissolution of the marriage.
The Supreme Court reversed, laying down the durable proposition that once an act of domestic violence has been committed, a subsequent decree of divorce will not absolve the respondent of liability or deny the aggrieved person the benefits to which she is entitled under the Act — including monetary relief under Section 20, custody under Section 21, compensation under Section 22, and interim or ex parte orders under Section 23. The Court reasoned that the relevant question is whether a domestic relationship existed and whether domestic violence occurred during it; the later legal severance of the marriage does not retrospectively erase a wrong already done. For Section 22 specifically, this means a woman may pursue compensation for trauma inflicted during the marriage even after she is no longer the respondent's wife.
Pre-Act conduct and the retrospectivity question
Because Section 22 compensates injuries caused by acts of domestic violence, the temporal reach of those "acts" governs the reach of the remedy. The Act commenced on 26 October 2006, and respondents routinely argue that violence predating that date is beyond its grasp. V.D. Bhanot v. Savita Bhanot (2012) 3 SCC 183 settled the principle. The wife had been compelled to leave the matrimonial home in 1990, long before the Act existed.
The Supreme Court, affirming the Delhi High Court, held that the conduct of the parties even prior to the coming into force of the Act could be taken into consideration while passing orders under Sections 18, 19, and 20, provided the parties had lived together in a domestic relationship and the effects of the violence continued. The Act, the Court reasoned, is not strictly retrospective in the offending sense but remedial — it furnishes a present remedy for a domestic relationship that existed and whose harmful consequences persist. Saraswathy v. Babu, discussed above, applied the same logic to defeat the High Court's contrary view. For Section 22, the upshot is that a compensation award may rest on a course of abusive conduct that began before October 2006, so long as the relationship and its harm bridge the commencement date.
Continuing offence, limitation, and the timing of a Section 22 claim
Closely linked is the question of limitation. A great deal of conduct compensable under Section 22 — denial of residence, economic deprivation, ongoing humiliation — is not a single discrete event but a state of affairs. Krishna Bhattacharjee v. Sarathi Choudhury (2016) 2 SCC 705 is the governing authority. There a judicially separated wife sought recovery of her stridhan, and the courts below had thrown the application out as time-barred.
The Supreme Court held that the retention of a woman's stridhan amounts to a continuing offence: the wrong subsists from day to day so long as the deprivation continues, and the limitation clock therefore does not start ticking from a single past moment. The Court expressly noted that deprivation of stridhan, the shared household, maintenance, access to assets and bank lockers, and prevention from entering one's place of employment all fall within the continuing-offence concept under Section 3. It also clarified that judicial separation does not strip a woman of her status as an "aggrieved person." The practical lesson for a Section 22 claim is that where the underlying abuse is continuing in nature, an application is not defeated merely because the violence began years earlier — a point reinforced by the Bombay High Court's reasoning in Krishna Bhattacharjee's progeny on limitation.
Who can be directed to pay: the respondent after Hiral Harsora
Section 22 directs payment by "the respondent," so the contours of who qualifies as a respondent determine against whom compensation may be ordered. The definition in Section 2(q) originally restricted the respondent to an "adult male person" in a domestic relationship with the aggrieved woman, with a proviso letting an aggrieved wife or live-in partner proceed against relatives of the husband or male partner.
In Hiral P. Harsora v. Kusum Narottamdas Harsora AIR 2016 SC 4774, decided 6 October 2016, the Supreme Court struck down the words "adult male" from Section 2(q) as violative of Article 14, holding that the qualification discriminated between similarly situated persons and frustrated the Act's object. After Hiral Harsora, a complaint — and consequently a compensation order — can lie against female relatives and against non-adult relatives who are perpetrators, vastly widening the class of persons a Section 22 order can reach. Ajay Kumar v. Lata @ Sharuti (2019) 4 SCC 542 carried the logic into the monetary sphere, fastening liability for relief on the husband's elder brother who shared the joint-family household and business, confirming that relatives can be made to pay where the domestic relationship and their involvement are established.
How courts fix the quantum of compensation
The Act lays down no formula for quantum, leaving it to judicial discretion guided by the gravity of the violence, its duration, the nature and degree of the injury, and the parties' circumstances. Saraswathy v. Babu's Rs 5,00,000 award gives a sense of the scale at which the apex court has operated. At the higher end, the Bombay High Court in Kaushal Arvind Thakker v. Jyoti Kaushal Thakker 2024 SCC OnLine Bom 895 upheld a Section 22 award of Rs 3 crore, reasoning that both spouses were highly educated professionals, that the wife had lost her prospects after sustained violence over 1994–2008, that abuse by highly placed individuals inflicts especially acute harm to self-worth, and that domestic violence need not be corroborated by medical or police records because abuse during a subsisting marriage often goes unhospitalised and unreported.
That very award has thrown up the central unresolved doctrinal question: should Section 22 compensation correlate to the degree of violence and injury suffered by the victim, or to the financial status of the guilty party? The Supreme Court has been seized of the issue in the appeal arising from Kaushal Arvind Thakker, and until it rules, the prudent answer is that the injury to the victim is the primary measure — Section 22 speaks of damages "for the injuries" — with the respondent's means relevant chiefly to the recoverability and reasonableness of the sum rather than as the governing yardstick.
Moulding relief and the power to amend the application
Because the Act is a beneficial, welfare-oriented statute, courts read the procedural provisions liberally so that substantive reliefs — including Section 22 compensation — are not lost on technicalities. The power to amend the application is illustrative. In Kunapareddy @ Nookala Shanka Balaji v. Kunapareddy Swarna Kumari AIR 2016 SC 2519 the Supreme Court held that a court dealing with a complaint under the Act has the power to allow amendment of the originally filed petition, particularly where the amendment is necessitated by subsequent events or serves to avoid multiplicity of litigation.
The significance for compensation orders is direct: a woman who did not initially quantify or articulate a Section 22 claim may, with the court's leave, amend her application to add or refine it, and a respondent cannot defeat the relief simply because the original prayer was imperfectly drafted. Read with the wide power to grant relief and the proactive role assigned to the system, Kunapareddy ensures that the form of the pleading yields to the substance of the wrong — fully consistent with the protective ethos that runs through the Act's object and scheme.
Interim and ex parte compensation under Section 23
A final award of compensation can take time. Section 23 of the Act empowers the Magistrate, in any proceeding before him, to pass such interim order as he deems just and proper, and to grant ex parte relief on the basis of an affidavit where the Magistrate is satisfied that the respondent is committing, has committed, or is likely to commit domestic violence. Section 23 in terms permits interim or ex parte orders "under section 18, section 19, section 20, section 21 or, as the case may be, section 22."
This means interim and ex parte compensation are squarely contemplated — the relief is not confined to the final order. Shalu Ojha v. Prashant Ojha (2015) 2 SCC 99 illustrates interim compensation in action: the Magistrate granted Rs 1,00,000 by way of compensation alongside interim maintenance. Juveria Abdul Majid Patni, as noted, expressly listed Section 23 interim and ex parte orders among the reliefs that survive a subsequent divorce. The interim mechanism is what gives Section 22 practical bite, sparing an aggrieved woman the wait for a contested final hearing before she sees any redress for her suffering.
Enforcing a compensation order
An unenforced order is a hollow one, and the Act is alive to this. A breach of any protection order or interim protection order is a cognizable offence under Section 31, and monetary orders are enforceable in the manner prescribed for the levy of fines and through the recovery machinery the Magistrate may invoke under Section 20(6), which permits an order directing the respondent's employer or debtor to pay directly to the aggrieved person. Although Section 20(6) is framed for monetary relief, the enforcement architecture and the Magistrate's general powers under the Code of Criminal Procedure are brought to bear on compensation awards as well.
Shalu Ojha v. Prashant Ojha (2015) 2 SCC 99 is the leading word on enforcement. The Supreme Court was troubled that the Sessions Court had stayed execution of a substantial award pending appeal, leaving the wife without a rupee for years. It directed that the order be executed forthwith, within eight weeks, and that the appeal be heard only after execution — a strong signal that appellate courts should not routinely freeze DV awards and thereby reward dilatory respondents. The case underscores that the enforceability of a Section 22 compensation order is as much a part of the remedy as the award itself.
Civil character, overlap with other forums, and double-dipping
Compensation under Section 22 is civil in character, even though the proceedings are conducted by a criminal court applying the Code of Criminal Procedure. That hybrid nature raises the question of overlap with maintenance and compensation obtainable in other forums — under Section 125 CrPC, under personal law, or by a civil decree. Rajnesh v. Neha (2021) 2 SCC 324 addressed the broader problem of overlapping maintenance jurisdictions and directed that a maintenance figure already fixed in one proceeding be disclosed and adjusted in another to prevent conflicting orders and unjust enrichment. The same anti-double-recovery instinct informs the treatment of Section 22.
The key clarification is that Section 22 compensation, being damages for injury rather than maintenance for sustenance, does not overlap with a Section 125 maintenance award and need not be set off against it. Lalita Toppo v. State of Jharkhand (2019) 13 SCC 796 reinforced the Act's wide remedial reach by holding that a woman in a relationship in the nature of marriage may seek the Act's civil reliefs even where Section 125 CrPC maintenance is unavailable to her — the Act offers more, not less. For a compensation claim, this confirms that Section 22 stands on its own footing: it is neither subsumed by maintenance under any statute nor barred because some other forum has granted a different species of relief.
Exam takeaways and common traps
For judiciary and CLAT-PG candidates, a clean answer on Section 22 should fix a few points. The provision is cumulative ("in addition to other reliefs"), discretionary, and triggered by the aggrieved person's application. Its distinctive feature is that it compensates injury — including mental torture and emotional distress — and therefore differs in kind from Section 20 monetary relief, so awarding both is not double recovery (Shalu Ojha). The relief survives divorce (Juveria Abdul Majid Patni), reaches pre-Act conduct where the effects continue (V.D. Bhanot; Saraswathy v. Babu), and is not defeated by limitation where the wrong is continuing (Krishna Bhattacharjee). After Hiral P. Harsora, a compensation order can run against female and non-adult relatives, not just an adult male. Quantum follows the gravity and duration of the injury, with Saraswathy's Rs 5,00,000 and the Bombay High Court's Rs 3 crore in Kaushal Arvind Thakker bracketing the range — and with the Supreme Court yet to settle whether injury or the wrongdoer's wealth is the master test. Interim and ex parte compensation are available under Section 23, and enforcement should not be lightly stayed (Shalu Ojha). The common trap is to confuse Section 22 with Section 20; the second trap is to assume divorce, delay, or pre-2006 conduct automatically bars the claim. None of them does.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between compensation under Section 22 and monetary relief under Section 20 of the DV Act?
Section 20 reimburses expenses and losses — loss of earnings, medical bills, property damage, and maintenance — measured by the woman's standard of living. Section 22 awards damages for the injury itself, including mental torture and emotional distress, on a tortious measure. Because they value different things, both can be granted together without amounting to double recovery, as in Shalu Ojha v. Prashant Ojha, where the Magistrate ordered both maintenance and Rs 1,00,000 compensation.
Can a woman claim compensation under Section 22 after she has been divorced?
Yes. In Juveria Abdul Majid Patni v. Atif Iqbal Mansoori (2014) 10 SCC 736 the Supreme Court held that once an act of domestic violence is committed, a subsequent decree of divorce does not absolve the respondent or deny the aggrieved person relief, expressly including compensation under Section 22, monetary relief under Section 20, custody under Section 21, and interim orders under Section 23.
Can compensation be ordered for domestic violence that took place before the DV Act came into force in 2006?
Yes, where the relationship existed and the effects of the violence continue. V.D. Bhanot v. Savita Bhanot (2012) 3 SCC 183 held that conduct prior to the Act's commencement can be considered, and Saraswathy v. Babu (2014) 3 SCC 712 applied the same reasoning, treating a continuing refusal of residence as ongoing domestic violence and awarding Rs 5,00,000 in compensation.
How do courts decide the amount of compensation under Section 22?
There is no statutory formula; quantum turns on the gravity and duration of the violence, the nature of the injury, and the parties' circumstances. The Supreme Court awarded Rs 5,00,000 in Saraswathy v. Babu, while the Bombay High Court upheld Rs 3 crore in Kaushal Arvind Thakker v. Jyoti Kaushal Thakker (2024). Whether the controlling test is the injury suffered or the wrongdoer's financial status is currently pending before the Supreme Court.
Against whom can a Section 22 compensation order be passed?
Against the "respondent." After Hiral P. Harsora v. Kusum Narottamdas Harsora AIR 2016 SC 4774 struck down the words "adult male" from Section 2(q), an order can lie against female and non-adult relatives who are perpetrators, not just the husband. Ajay Kumar v. Lata (2019) 4 SCC 542 confirmed that a relative such as the husband's elder brother sharing the joint household can be made liable.
Is interim or ex parte compensation available before the case is finally decided?
Yes. Section 23 of the Act empowers the Magistrate to pass interim and ex parte orders "under section 18, section 19, section 20, section 21 or, as the case may be, section 22." Compensation is therefore not confined to the final order, and Shalu Ojha v. Prashant Ojha illustrates interim compensation being granted alongside interim maintenance.