The Madras High Court’s Registrar General (RG) has issued a circular to all motor accidents claims tribunals in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to comply with a direction issued by the court on March 10, 2016, to dispose of claim petitions within a year.
Extracting the relevant portion of the order passed by a Division Bench of Justices R. Sudhakar (now a judge of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court) and S. Vaidyanathan, the RG R. Sakthivel instructed the tribunals to follow the directives scrupulously.
The Bench had issued the directive while dismissing an appeal preferred by an insurance company in 2014 challenging ₹15.60 lakh awarded by a tribunal at Dharmapuri in 2013 for the death of an advocate in a road accident involving his van and a truck in 2002.
‘Appalling delay’
Appalled at the delay of over a decade in awarding compensation to the family of the deceased, the Division Bench had ordered that motor accident claim petitions should be disposed of within a year from the date of numbering of those petitions.
It was also ordered that once the petitions were taken up for hearing, they should not be adjourned beyond three working days at any point of time so that the cases could be heard at length and disposed of in accordance with law within the stipulated time. Authoring the judgment for the Bench, Mr. Justice Vaidyanathan had said: “Pendency of motor accident cases for years together will cause prejudice to the injured claimants/dependants of the deceased, and it is certainly more painful than the injuries sustained by the claimant.
“Equally, it is also to be noted that the insurance company shall not be asked to pay compensation to the claimants through their nose as in many cases the interest alone runs to several lakhs on account of pendency of matters for years together before the trial court/High Court.”
