Letting a man ride on the apple boxes was itself the negligence: an acquittal is reversed after nineteen years

Justice Rakesh Kainthla holds that the proximate cause was permitting a passenger to sit on the load and failing to take care while negotiating a curve, that whether the bus was moving or parked is immaterial, and that the trial court completely misread the evidence.

On a late October morning in 2007, a pick-up loaded with bags of vegetables and boxes of apples came round a curve above Fagu on the Shimla–Reckong Peo road. A man named Raju was riding on top of the load. The pick-up swerved; he lost his balance, struck the windshield of a bus, fell, and died of a head injury. In 2011 the Judicial Magistrate at Theog acquitted the driver. On 9 October 2026 Justice Rakesh Kainthla set that acquittal aside and convicted him under Sections 279 and 304A of the Penal Code — holding that the negligence lay not in any disputed detail of the collision but in letting a man sit on the cargo at all.

A curve above Fagu

The informant, a bus driver, was taking bus HP-07-5058 from Shimla to Reckong Peo on 31 October 2007. The bus reached a curve ahead of Fagu at about 9 a.m. A pick-up, HP-63-1447, came from the opposite side. Bags of vegetables and boxes of apples were loaded on it, and one person was sitting on the bags and boxes. The pick-up suddenly swerved; the man sitting on the load lost control, hit the front windshield of the bus and fell. He was identified as Raju and succumbed to his injuries.

The police recorded a daily diary entry, and an Assistant Sub-Inspector investigated: he visited the spot, recorded the informant's statement, had the FIR registered, prepared the site plan, took photographs, held the inquest and applied for a postmortem. The medical officer who conducted the postmortem found the cause of death to be head injury leading to cardiopulmonary arrest. Both vehicles were seized and mechanically examined, and the examining officer found no defect in either which could have caused the accident. A challan was filed against the driver of the pick-up under Sections 279 and 304A.

The trial court acquitted him on 12 October 2011. The State appealed in 2012; the appeal was reserved on 22 September 2026 and decided on 9 October.

Where the negligence was located

The High Court's reasoning does something useful: it moves the question away from the mechanics of the impact.

It is undisputed that the accident took place on a curve. The witnesses' statements that the accused swerved the pick-up while negotiating the curve, and that Raju lost balance and hit the glass of the bus, were accepted as correct. From there the finding of negligence follows in two steps. The accused had permitted a person to sit on the vegetable bags and apple boxes; and he had failed to take care of the possible injury to a person sitting there while negotiating a curve. “He should have been careful to ensure that no person falls while driving the Pick-up, and he failed to adhere to this duty, which led to the accident.”

That framing disposed of the discrepancy the defence relied on. It had been submitted that the witnesses differed on whether the bus was moving or stopped. The Court held the difference made none, “because the proximate cause of the accident was permitting Raju to sit on the vegetable bag and not taking care while negotiating the curve”. The movement of the bus was immaterial in those circumstances.

It also supplied an independent reason to prefer the prosecution's account that the bus was parked: Raju was not crushed under the tyres of the bus, “which would have been the case had the bus been moving”.

On the cause of death, the Court noted that the doctor who conducted the postmortem was not cross-examined at all, “which means that his version was accepted as correct by the defence”, and that even the statements of the defence witnesses showed that Raju had died in a motor vehicle accident.

Two further strands of the evidence are recorded as having gone unchallenged. Both vehicles were mechanically examined after the accident and no defect was found in either which could have led to it — so the cause had to lie in how the pick-up was driven and loaded, not in its condition. And the defence's own witnesses spoke of Raju having died in a motor vehicle accident, which left the fact of the accident itself beyond dispute and narrowed the appeal to the question of negligence.

Order

The conclusion is stated flatly: the trial court “had completely misread the evidence while acquitting the accused”, and its judgment could not be sustained.

The appeal was allowed, the judgment of the trial court set aside, and the accused convicted of the offences punishable under Sections 279 and 304A of the Penal Code. He was directed to be heard on the quantum of sentence on 28 October 2026.

Nineteen years separate the morning on the curve from the conviction, and fifteen of them were spent waiting on an appeal against an acquittal. The driver now returns to the same court to be sentenced for a death that occurred when the man he was carrying had nowhere to sit but on the apples.