He needs full day care and a special diet, so the Court awards an attendant — but not by multiplier
Nine per cent by one assessment, a hundred per cent functionally, then AIIMS. A Delhi judgment on crash compensation shows how a disability figure turns into money, and where the Tribunal had it wrong.
Cross-appeals from a motor accident award — one by the claimant seeking more, one by the company seeking less — were decided together by Justice Anish Dayal on 23 September 2026. The judgment is a worked example of the hardest problem in this jurisdiction: turning a medical percentage into a sum of money.
Which disability figure
The claimant’s injuries included an intestinal injury, and he had undergone surgeries. The assessments did not agree with each other.
One disability assessment put him at nine per cent in relation to both lower limbs. Despite that, functional disability was taken at one hundred per cent by the Tribunal. Given the gap, and with the consent of the parties, the Court referred him to AIIMS for an assessment of permanent disability, which returned a locomotor disability of 29.33 per cent as temporary, with reassessment advised after a year.
Three numbers for one man. The reason they differ is that they measure different things — an anatomical loss, the practical effect on earning capacity, and a specialist’s locomotor assessment — and the choice between them drives everything downstream, because loss of future earnings is the disability percentage applied to income and multiplier.
The Tribunal had resolved it by taking functional disability at one hundred per cent while the anatomical assessment stood at nine — a leap the cross-appeals were always going to test from both sides.
An attendant, without the multiplier
The claimant’s counsel placed before the Court the position on the ground, supported by affidavit. The claimant requires full day care and a special diet. Roughly Rs 23,00,000 including interest had already been released to him, and expenditure of about Rs 25,00,000 had been incurred, with details given. His father had borrowed money and taken loans, the claimant not having worked since the accident.
On that material the Court held there was no reason why compensation should not be awarded for an attendant.
How it awarded it is the point of principle. Attendant charges are ordinarily capitalised — a monthly cost multiplied by the appropriate multiplier for the claimant’s age, producing a lifetime figure. The Court declined that method here and awarded a lump sum of Rs 10,00,000 instead, expressly because this is not a case of one hundred per cent disability as it had assessed it.
That reasoning is worth isolating. The multiplier method assumes a permanent, full-time need for the rest of a normal life span. Where the disability is real but partial, and where the medical assessment is itself marked temporary and subject to reassessment, a capitalised lifetime figure over-compensates. A lump sum acknowledges the need without pretending to a certainty the evidence does not support.
A lump sum also avoids a second difficulty. If the claimant's condition improves on reassessment, a capitalised award computed on today's needs would over-provide; if it worsens, no method fixed now would have anticipated it.
The non-pecuniary heads
On the conventional heads the Court made two adjustments in opposite directions.
Loss of marriage prospects had been awarded at Rs 10,00,000 and loss of amenities at Rs 1,50,000. The Court held these should sufficiently compensate the claimant on those aspects and treated them as one common component under loss of amenities — consolidating rather than increasing.
Pain and suffering had been awarded at Rs 1,50,000. Considering the nature of the surgeries the claimant had undergone, the Court held that figure ought to be enhanced, and raised it to Rs 5,00,000.
A revised computation was then set out head by head, comparing what the Tribunal awarded with what the Court awarded.
Where the money has been, and where it goes
The disbursement history in the judgment is a reminder that an award is not the end of a claim.
By an order of December 2017 the owner was directed to deposit fifty per cent of the originally awarded amount before the Registrar General, and the balance by an order of February 2018, with Rs 5,00,000 released to the claimant. A further Rs 5,00,000 was released in July 2018. In August 2018 the Registrar General was directed to keep the remainder in an interest-bearing fixed deposit. Another Rs 5,00,000 was released in May 2023 to meet medical expenses.
Going forward, a portion is to be held in fixed deposit receipts of Rs 25,000 each for staggered periods, with interest credited to the claimant’s designated savings account and the receipts released on maturity after verification. The remaining amount with accrued interest is to be disbursed as the Tribunal directs.
The appeals were disposed of on those terms, pending applications rendered infructuous, and any statutory deposit to be refunded to the owner only if the order of deposit was complied with. The judgment was directed to be uploaded on the Court's website.
The structure of that disbursement is itself deliberate. Staggering a large award into fixed deposits maturing at intervals, with only the interest flowing monthly, is the standard protection where a claimant is young, seriously injured, and dependent on others to manage money — the risk being not that the compensation is too small but that it is spent long before the need it was meant to cover has ended.