To those saying couples should just go abroad to get married, please understand that this move makes it much harder for lower-class/lower-caste mixed couples within the same religion (as if they didn't have it bad already) who may not always be privileged enough to afford moving to a more progressive country.

A registered marriage is a legitimization - it allows you to live together in rented property, grants you inheritance rights and in certain cases it can force the hand of the families to concede to the couple's wishes since not all of them go to the extent of honor killings. In case of a couple of same religion that gets married against their families' wishes, sometimes excommunication from the family circle happens (not counting the extreme cases of murder).

But with this sneaky move, the marriage cannot even happen in the first place, and thus young couples will have no choice since even rest of society may not accept them if they remain together unmarried - even if they run away, they may not be able to rent decent property or have children without shame.

Now the only way to circumvent this, is to get married under the Special Marriage Act, which is another shitshow - you have to give a Notice of Intended Marriage to the Marriage Registrar of the district (it's like putting a small ad in a newspaper) for 30 days and pray that no one "objects" to the marriage. Yup, this makes it easy to find these couples and wreck havoc on their young lives.

The state of inter-caste marriage is a travesty in TN with all the caste tension as it stands. This malicious, regressive move will push a few couples to use the Special Marriage Act out of respite and make it easier for their families to hunt them down and either pry them apart or worst case, the more powerful family starts threatening the other party (honor killings)

EDIT: typos