The Madras High Court has ordered initiation of departmental proceedings against the presiding officer of a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) for awarding an amount of Rs 35 lakh as compensation under the head “loss of love and affection” in a motor accident case.
Terming it as “unbelievable”, High Court Justices MM Sundaresh and Krishnan Ramasamy said that an error was noted on the part of the Tribunal that had passed the said order.
“… an unbelievable amount of Rs.35,00,000/- has been awarded by the Tribunal towards the loss of love and affection without any basis or rationale. We do not wish to state much on the way in which the loss of income of the deceased is arrived at, only for this reason, we are remanding the issue for fresh consideration though the award cannot be obviously sustained,” the court said.
“We are quite convinced that awarding of the said amount can neither be termed as inadvertence nor oversight. It does shock our judicial conscience,” it added.
“This is not the first award of this tribunal which we are adjudicating upon… We do feel that it is not an innocent error and there is something more to it,” the bench said.
“After seeing a series of such orders, we directed the Registry to place one of them in the Annual Confidential Report (ACR) of the officer concerned. Even thereafter, we are witnessing several such orders,” the court said.
The case dates to year 2012, when a fatal motor accident that took place. The MACT awarded a total of over Rs 1.93 lakhs as compensation to the family of the man who passed away in the accident.
Also, insurance company told the High Court that the MACT had wrongly arrived at an enhanced figure of Rs 1.25 lakhs as the income of the deceased at the time of death, when the such an amount was not even mentioned in the claim petition.
However, the claimants responded saying that they had sufficient material to prove their claims.
Interestingly, the Insurance Company also challenged the grant of Rs 35 lakhs by the tribunal as compensation for loss of love and affection, contending that the grant of such an amount “unknown to the parlance of compensation law.”
After making the statement, the Court set aside the amount awarded for loss or love and affection and directed the initiation of departmental proceedings against the presiding officer of the tribunal.