The insurer appealed to cut the award, and left court owing four lakh more than when it started
A toddy tapper knocked down in 2017 was valued by the Tribunal at Rs 5,000 a month. On an oral cross-objection with no appeal of their own, his family walk away with Rs 11.43 lakh.
The insurance company brought this appeal to reduce a motor accident award. On 23 September 2026 Justice Prashant Kumar increased it, from Rs 7,20,000 to Rs 11,43,565, both with interest at seven per cent.
The claim
The deceased was killed in an accident in November 2017. His family — wife, son and daughter — claimed Rs 49,70,000 before the Motor Accidents Claims Tribunal, stating he was fifty at the time.
The Tribunal found the death was caused by the accident, held the insurer liable, and assessed compensation having regard to his age and earning capacity. It fixed his notional income at Rs 5,000 a month and awarded Rs 7,20,000.
The insurer’s case, and why the Aadhaar card did not help it
The insurer challenged liability, and separately attacked the age on which the multiplier depended. Its case was that the Aadhaar card showed the deceased as fifty-one at the time of the accident, which would alter both the multiplier and the addition for future prospects.
That argument ran into the claimants’ answer and into authority. The family register maintained by the Secretary of the Village Panchayat recorded his birth in 1967. And the Supreme Court has held, in a 2024 decision, that an Aadhaar card is proof of identity and not valid proof of date of birth or age in motor accident compensation.
On liability, the claimants pointed to the mirror of the offending vehicle, which showed that it had struck the deceased. The Tribunal's finding that the vehicle was insured with the appellant at the time was not displaced.
An oral cross-objection, and whether it could be made at all
The claimants had not filed an appeal of their own seeking enhancement. What they did was raise an oral cross-objection when the insurer’s appeal was heard, and the insurer opposed it on exactly that ground — that having filed no appeal, they could not raise the quantum at this stage.
The Court entertained it, and the substance of the cross-objection is what produced the increase.
That is a point worth pausing on. A cross-objection of this kind costs nothing to raise and requires no separate appeal to be filed within limitation. Where an insurer appeals, the claimant who was content with the award can still ask the appellate court to look at whether it was correctly computed — and here the answer was that it was not.
Three corrections to the arithmetic
The first concerned notional income. The deceased was not an unemployed man of no proved earnings: he was an authorised licensee engaged in extracting toddy from palm trees. At the very least, the claimants argued, the minimum wages applicable at the time should have been used. A notification of January 2018 issued by the Office of the Labour Commissioner, Uttar Pradesh at Kanpur prescribed Rs 7,400.46 a month for unskilled labour — half as much again as the Rs 5,000 the Tribunal had assumed.
The second concerned the conventional heads. National Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Pranay Sethi (2017) fixed the amounts payable for loss of estate, funeral expenses and consortium, and directed that they rise by ten per cent every three years. The award here was passed in January 2024 — more than six years after Pranay Sethi — so two such increases were due and had not been applied.
The third concerned who gets consortium. There were three claimants: the widow, a son and a daughter. The Tribunal awarded loss of consortium to one of them. That is contrary to Magma General Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Nanu Ram alias Chuhru Ram (2018) 18 SCC 130, under which spousal, parental and filial consortium are separately payable to the dependants who suffer them.
The recomputation
None of these is a discretionary uplift. Each corrects the application of a binding formula: the wage notification sets the floor, Pranay Sethi sets the conventional amounts and their escalation, and Nanu Ram sets who may claim consortium. A Tribunal that misapplies any of them produces an award that is wrong as a matter of computation rather than judgment.
Applying Pranay Sethi, Nanu Ram and Somwati, the Court recomputed the award at Rs 11,43,565, against the Tribunal’s Rs 7,20,000, with interest at seven per cent in both cases.
The Tribunal was directed to adjust any amount already paid when disbursing under the judgment, and the lower court record to be returned immediately with a certified copy. The appeal was disposed of with that modification.
For insurers the practical lesson is about the risk of appealing a low award. The claimants here had accepted Rs 7.2 lakh to the extent of not appealing it; the insurer’s own appeal is what put the quantum back in issue and allowed an oral cross-objection that added more than four lakh rupees. For claimants, the lesson is narrower and more useful: where a deceased had a licensed occupation, the applicable minimum wage notification is the floor for notional income, and the conventional heads under Pranay Sethi escalate with time rather than staying frozen at their 2017 figures.