The Madras High Court on Friday held that family members of policemen should be paid full insurance amount of ₹10 lakh if the men in uniform suffer even a natural death on duty. The court said the government officials were not right in claiming that the money could be paid only in case of accidental deaths.
A Division Bench of Justices K.K. Sasidharan and R. Subramanian held so while dismissing a writ appeal preferred by the government in 2014 challenging a single judge’s order to pay the insurance amount to the widow of a police officer S. Nithiyanandam, who had died because of heart attack while on duty on May 29, 2008.
Empathising with N. Bhuvaneswari, who had been made to wait for over a decade to receive the insurance money, the judges ordered that the money should be paid within a month along with interest at the rate of 9% per annum from the date on which she had filed a writ petition before the single judge of the High Court in 2009.
The Bench said: “The police department is adopting a too technical approach by giving a restrictive meaning to the inclusive definition ‘accidental death or permanently incapacitated or partially disabled’. However, such inclusive definition would not take away the right given to the nominee to claim compensation on account of natural death while on duty.”
