Wipro staff's wife won't give up case

Kanpur: A Wipro employee’s wife has dropped the names of company chief Azim Premji and a senior executive from a domestic violence suit she has filed her against husband but says she is suing them for ruining her marriage.

Tripti Nigam's lawyer Nandlal Jaiswal said she would file a separate case against Premji and Wipro for allegedly providing a ‘dating allowance’ to her husband Gaurav Nigam. Wipro has denied that it pays any such allowance to its employees.

Tripti had created a flutter by naming Premji and Wipro Vice President Pratik Kumar in her case, in which she had alleged Gaurav had abandoned her because the firm paid him a ‘dating allowance’.

Jaiswal said since the names of direct relations alone could be included in a case under the new domestic violence law, the names of Premji and Kumar were withdrawn on technical grounds. But Gaurav's name still remained in the complaint.

Gaurav’s wife Tripti submitted an application to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, asking him to permit her to withdraw the names of Premji and Kumar from the case. This was accepted by the court. The court fixed December 13 as the next date for hearing the matter. Gaurav was present in the court and sought copies of the papers filed by Tripti.

Jaiswal said a separate case about Wipro allegedly providing a ‘dating allowance’ to Gaurav would be filed against Premji and Kumar in another court.

In the wake of Tripti's allegations, software major Wipro had said on Friday, "We would like to categorically state we don't have a dating allowance in any form and hence cannot elaborate on this alleged issue."

Gaurav, a software engineer with the Bangalore-based IT giant, had on Saturday rejected Tripti’s allegations at a press conference. ''I was never paid any dating allowance. In fact, my wife Tripti used to beat me a lot. She would pressurise me to transfer the ownership of the house and the car into her name and when I would refuse, she would beat me," he said.

He alleged that on one such occasion, Tripti had left him and gone back to her parents house from where she filed a dowry complaint against him, after which his parents were arrested and sent to jail for three days 'for no fault of theirs'.