Dismayed over genuine motor accident victims in the State waiting many years to receive compensation in a system clogged with numerous bogus claims, the Madras High Cout has embarked on an exercise to put in place a completely transparent system for expeditious payment of compensation without the interference of touts and “harassment” at the hands of various authorities.
Justice S.M. Subramaniam has appointed advocate M.B. Raghavan as an Amicus Curiae to assist the court in deciding the issue and invited all interested members of the Bar to offer their suggestions and opinions to the court on Monday. “In order to minimise such bogus claims and unethical practices, certain stringent measures are required to ensure genuine accident victims are protected,” he said.
In his interim orders, the judge said India had been recording the highest number of road accidents in the world with more than 1 lakh people dying in road accidents every year. The average number of deaths per day was more than 300 which meant that over 10 people die every hour. The number of accidents in cities like Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai was very high and most of the victims were poor pedestrians or two-wheeler riders.
“Insurance companies wait for a case to be filed before motor accident claims tribunals and even after receipt of summons, no steps are taken to resolve the case and the trial goes on for years. This is a matter of serious concern,” the judge said.
Failure to serve summons promptly on the driver or owner of the offending vehicle; their non-appearance even after receipt of summons; non production of statutory documents such as driving license, insurance policy, registration certificate, permit and fitness certificate and avoidance of liability by the insurance company on the ground of non-production of documents were some of the reasons that end up delaying genuine claims, he said.
Added to these problems was the menace of touts and bogus claims, the judge said and pointed out that even the present litigation before him was a case of bogus claim. Now that the police had begun to upload Accident Information Reports (AIRs) on its website www.tnpolice.gov.in and made them accessible free of cost to the tribunals, a system should be put in place for the latter to treat such AIRs itself as claim petitions, he added.
Justice Subramaniam said Section 166(4) of the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988 empowers tribunals to treat AIRs as claim petitions and award compensation since poor and helpless victims of road accidents might be ignorant of their rights. “All the motor accident claims tribunals have to set up the aforesaid system for compliance of Section 166(4),” he said and observed that compensation should be awarded within a reasonable period of time.
