Overriding charge on estate prevents maintenance payment from forming taxable income of the assessee.

A maintenance obligation created by a decree charging the assessee's estate was treated as an overriding charge that diverted the amount before it could become his income. The payment was therefore not a mere post-receipt application of income, but a sum that never accrued to or was received by the assessee as taxable income. On that characterisation, the maintenance amount fell outside the assessee's assessable income under the Indian Income-tax Act, 1922, and was to be excluded from assessment.

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Issues: Whether maintenance payments made by the assessee under a decree charging his estate were part of his taxable income, or whether they were diverted before reaching him as income.

Analysis: The payment was not a mere application of income after receipt. The decree fastened a charge on the assessee's resources and required payment to the step-mother before the amounts could be treated as his income. What was diverted by an overriding charge never formed part of the sum that reached him as income. The statutory scheme taxed only income that accrued to or was received by the assessee, and the maintenance burden did not fall within any exemption or allowance because the true question was one of characterisation of the amount itself, not of deduction after accrual.

Conclusion: The maintenance amount was not taxable income of the assessee, and the sum of Rs. 9,900 was rightly to be excluded from the assessment.

Ratio Decidendi: Where a pre-existing charge diverts a sum from the assessee's resources before it reaches him as income, that sum is not taxable as his income under the Indian Income-tax Act, 1922.

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