Sowmiya Rajendrakumar
Published on: 12th August, 2022 at 18:48 IST
Karnataka High Court has held that married daughters are entitled to compensation from insurance companies for the loss of their parents in accidents. The high court said the Supreme Court had held that married sons are also entitled to compensation in such cases.
“This court also cannot make any discrimination whether they are married sons or married daughters and hence, the very contention that married daughters of the deceased are not entitled to compensation cannot be accepted,” the high court said.
The single-judge bench of Justice H.P. Sandesh heard an appeal filed by an insurance company challenging the award of compensation to the married daughters of Renuka, 57, who was killed in an accident on April 12, 2012, near Yamanur, Hubballi, in north Karnataka.
Renuka’s husband, three daughters and a son had sought compensation. The Motor Accident Claims Tribunal had awarded a compensation of Rs 5, 91,600 with 6% annual interest to the family members.
The insurance company had challenged this in the high court, contending that married daughters could not claim compensation, and also that they were not dependents. Therefore, awarding compensation under the head of “loss of dependency” was wrong, the company had said. The insurer also claimed that compensation was to be awarded only under “loss of estate”.
The court said dependency does not only mean financial dependency.Even if dependency is a relevant criterion to claim compensation for loss of dependency, “it does not mean financial dependency is the ‘ark of the covenant’,” the court said.
Dependency includes gratuitous service dependency, physical dependency, emotional dependency and psychological dependency, which can never be equated in terms of money, it said.
Other contentions of the insurance company including doubts about the age of the deceased and her income were also rejected by the court. A warranty card for a sewing machine purchased by the deceased came in handy for the tribunal to calculate her income at Rs 4,500 per month.
The court rejected the contention of the insurer that exorbitant compensation had been awarded by the tribunal and dismissed its appeal.