Though a software engineer was not earning salary as he was not employed at the time of his death in a road accident in February 2015, the Karnataka High Court has enhanced compensation payable to his family members to ₹3.2 crore for “loss of dependency”. The sum was arrived at by considering the salary he was drawing in a company he was employed in earlier, his qualifications, merit, and potential to seek new employment.
Ethendranath N.B., 40, had the “potential to earn a salary higher than what he received when he was relieved at Yahoo Software Development India Pvt. Ltd.,” the court said while observing that “his potential to earn an income and sustain himself cannot be ignored having regard to his merit and qualification”.
A Division Bench comprising Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice K. Natarajan delivered the verdict recently while disposing of the appeals filed by Ethendranath’s wife, minor child, and dependant father, mother, and sister, who sought enhancement of compensation of ₹1.68 crore by the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal in November 2017, and the appeal filed by Future Generali India Insurance Co., Ltd., questioning compensation awarded by the tribunal.
The court noted that Ethendranath, a native of Shivamogga, had secured 6th rank in II PU, 3rd rank in CET-Karnataka, 77th rank in All India IIT-JEE, and 76th rank in XII standard National Level Science Talent Search Examination of 1992. He had a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from IIT-Madras with distinction, and had studied M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, on a merit scholarship. He had worked in several reputed software companies in the U.S. earlier, and later in Bengaluru. Ethendranath had a patent registered in his name for inventing a method for streaming multimedia information over public networks and the patent was registered in the U.S., and he was a recipient of the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Medal in the U.S.
“The tribunal has lost sight of and has been unable to appreciate the potential of Ethendranath to earn a handsome and sizeable income although on the date of the accident he was not holding a job,” the court observed while noticing that he was not relieved from Yahoo in November 2015 due to any negative remark, but as he did not accept the offer of placement in the U.S. by his employer, Yahoo, which shifted its office to the U.S. from Bengaluru. While the tribunal had considered his notional salary as ₹12 lakh annual to calculate quantum of amount for loss of dependency, the court took into consideration notional salary as ₹22.6 lakh by deducting around ₹10 lakh of income tax paid by him annually from his last annual salary of ₹30.6 lakh drawn from Yahoo.
The court directed the insurance company to distribute the total compensation amount amongst his wife, minor son, father, mother, and sister, while awarding 60% of the total compensation to wife and son (30% each), and 15% each to father and mother, and 10% to the sister, along with riders like depositing certain portion of compensation in fixed deposit for a certain period.
