Motor accident claims in Delhi — the compensation is a calculation, not a plea, and since 2019 you have only six months to ask

The six months — the change nobody was told about

Start here, because everything else on this page is worth less than this paragraph.

For a long period, a motor accident claim had no limitation period. A provision limiting it had been removed years earlier, and the settled position was that a claim could be brought late. A great many families, and a good many people who advise them informally, still believe that.

The 2019 amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 changed it. Section 166(3) now provides that no application for compensation shall be entertained unless it is made within six months of the occurrence of the accident.

If you are reading this and an accident in your family is recent, stop and note the date of the accident somewhere you will see it. Then speak to an advocate this week. Not after the treatment finishes, not after the charge sheet, not after the insurance company replies. This week.

Your claim and the police case are two different things

The most expensive misunderstanding after the limitation point. When a serious accident happens, a criminal case is registered. The family watches that case, attends when called, and waits for it to conclude, in the belief that compensation comes at the end of it.

It does not. The criminal case belongs to the State and it is about punishing the driver. The claim belongs to you and it is about money to replace what the family has lost. They run in different places, on different material, to different standards, and neither waits for the other. An acquittal in the criminal case does not by itself defeat the claim.

What the criminal case does give you is documents, and they are central — which is the next section. Treat it as a source of evidence for your claim, not as a substitute for it. What happens on the criminal side, and the clocks that run there, are set out on our Rohini page.

The police file is the backbone

Almost every fact the tribunal needs about the accident itself comes from the police record, and the family that collects it early is in a completely different position from the one that starts asking for it in year two.

If no FIR was lodged because everybody was at the hospital, deal with it now rather than accepting it — our FIR guidance and police complaint drafting pages set out how. A claim with no police record is not impossible, but it is uphill from the first day.

The report the police send to the tribunal

A provision that helps you, and that almost nobody knows about. Section 159 requires the police to forward a report of the accident to the Claims Tribunal, and Section 166(4) provides that the Tribunal shall treat such a report as an application for compensation.

That is genuinely useful. It means the machinery can start moving without the family having done anything, and it was put there precisely because families in this situation are not in a state to file applications.

What it is not is your case. The police report contains what the police recorded about the accident. It contains nothing about the deceased’s income, the number of dependants, the medical expenditure, the loan that is still running or the child who was in school. Those are the figures the award is built from, and they come from you. Treat the report as a door that has been opened, and walk through it with a proper file.

Two routes, and the choice between them

This is the structural decision, and it should be made with advice rather than by default.

As Section 164 stands, the sums it provides are five lakh rupees in the case of death and two and a half lakh rupees in the case of grievous hurt. Confirm those figures before relying on them — amounts written into statutes are revised, which is why no other number appears anywhere on this page. These two sections replaced the earlier no-fault and structured-formula provisions in the 2019 amendment.

The choice is not always either-or in the way a table suggests, and how the two interact on your facts is exactly the sort of question an advocate answers in one conversation and a web page cannot answer at all.

What “negligence” means on a road, and the two words that change a case

On the computed route, negligence has to be established, and most people picture that as proving the other driver was a bad person. It is narrower and more practical than that: was the vehicle being driven with the care that a reasonable driver owes to others on that road, in those conditions, at that time?

Two terms come up constantly and they are worth knowing before anybody uses them at you.

Contributory negligence is the allegation that the person killed or injured contributed to the accident — crossing away from a crossing, riding without a helmet, a pillion without protection, walking on a carriageway. Where it is accepted, it ordinarily reduces the award by a proportion rather than defeating the claim, and the proportion is itself argued. Families hear the word and assume everything is lost; it is not, and a claim should not be abandoned on that basis.

Composite negligence is where two or more vehicles were negligent and between them caused the harm to somebody who was not at fault at all — a pedestrian struck by a car that swerved because a truck cut in. The point that matters to a claimant is practical: they should not be made to chase two defendants and apportion blame between them before being paid. Get this right in the pleading rather than discovering it in argument.

Both are reasons to get the police file early, because the site plan, the mechanical inspection report and the statements taken at the time are what these arguments run on.

Whom to name in the claim

A claim that names the wrong parties, or leaves one out, loses time it cannot afford and occasionally loses more than time.

The ordinary array is three: the driver of the offending vehicle, the owner of it, and the insurer. Each is there for a reason. The driver because the negligence was his. The owner because liability attaches to him. The insurer because that is who actually pays, and an award against an owner with no insurer behind it is a piece of paper.

Complications arrive quickly in real life. A vehicle sold but not transferred in the records. A commercial vehicle with an owner, an operator and a contractor. A vehicle owned by a company. A state transport undertaking. More than one vehicle involved. Each of these changes who must be named, and each is settled by the documents — the registration particulars, the insurance certificate, the permit — rather than by what anybody says at the scene.

Get those particulars from the police record before drafting. Naming a party correctly at the start is cheap; adding one in year two costs a set of hearings and sometimes a limitation argument.

Pedestrians, pillion riders, passengers — the people who assume they are not covered

A recurring reason claims are never brought at all: the family believes the claim belongs only to somebody in a car with insurance.

The Act is concerned with death or bodily injury arising out of the use of a motor vehicle. The person harmed does not have to have owned anything, insured anything or been inside anything. A pedestrian struck while crossing, a cyclist, a pillion rider, a passenger in a bus or an auto, a child walking to school, a labourer at a roadside — these are the people motor accident claims exist for, and they are the ones least likely to be told so.

The same goes for a person who was breaking a rule of the road themselves. That may raise contributory negligence, which reduces; it does not, by itself, mean there is nothing to claim.

If somebody in your family was hurt or killed by a vehicle and nobody has spoken to a lawyer because “we had no insurance”, that is the misunderstanding to correct today, with the six-month point in mind.

When the person had no salary at all

A homemaker. A child. A student. A retired parent. An unpaid worker in the family business. In every one of these, somebody eventually says “but they were not earning, so what is the claim?” — and it is wrong.

The law does not treat an absence of a payslip as an absence of value. Where there is no proved income, the tribunal proceeds on a notional basis, and in the case of a homemaker the Supreme Court has been explicit that the services rendered to the household have an economic value which must be reckoned rather than written off as nothing. For a child or a student, the computation approaches the loss differently again.

What this means in practice is that these claims are real, they are computed rather than guessed, and they need material of a different kind: what the person actually did in the household, what the family now pays somebody else to do, the child’s school record and the family’s circumstances, the retired person’s pension and their role at home.

Bring that material and say what it is for. A claim in this category that is prepared as though it were an apology for having no salary slips gets an award that matches the apology.

How the computation is built

Here is the part that makes this subject different from every other page on this site. In most litigation, what you get depends on what is argued. Here it substantially depends on a structure, and the structure is public.

It was settled by the Supreme Court in Sarla Verma v. Delhi Transport Corporation (2009) and refined by a Constitution Bench in National Insurance Company v. Pranay Sethi (2017). In outline, for a death case, it works through these steps:

1. Establish the income of the deceased at the time of death.
2. Add an element for future prospects — a recognition that earnings would have risen. The percentage depends on age, and on whether the deceased was on a fixed salary or self-employed.
3. Deduct a share for personal and living expenses — what the deceased would have spent on themselves rather than on the family. The fraction depends on the number of dependants.
4. Multiply by the multiplier, a figure fixed by reference to the age of the deceased.
5. Add the conventional heads — loss of estate, loss of consortium, funeral expenses.
6. Add interest from the date fixed by the tribunal.

Notice what the list actually means. Of the six steps, exactly one is in your control, and it is the first.

Income proof — where most of the award is won or lost

Every later step is a multiplication of step one. Get the income established and the rest follows mechanically. Fail to establish it and the tribunal has no choice but to work on a notional figure, which is invariably lower, and every subsequent step then multiplies the smaller number.

Two honest notes. First, an income tax return filed after the accident, for a period before it, is looked at carefully — that is not a reason to fabricate anything and we will not assist with it, but it is a reason to produce the underlying material alongside. Second, start gathering this in the first fortnight. Employers change, businesses close, and the person who could have given a certificate moves on.

Who claims, and proving the family

A claim after a death is brought by the legal representatives, and the number of dependants is itself one of the inputs to the computation. Both facts have to be established on paper, and this is a second file running alongside the first.

You will need the death certificate, and a legal heir certificate or, where the situation calls for it, a succession certificate. Then documents establishing the relationship and the dependency: identity documents, ration card, school records for children, and anything showing that the deceased was in fact maintaining those people.

Where a minor is involved, expect the tribunal to make directions about how their share is held or invested, and treat those directions as binding rather than as a formality to be worked around later.

Injury claims, which are a different shape

A person who survives with serious injuries has a claim built from different heads, and it is frequently under-prepared because the family is focused on treatment.

• Medical expenses actually incurred, and those likely to be incurred in future — the second of which needs a doctor to say so in writing.
• Loss of earnings during the period of treatment, which needs the employer’s record of leave taken or income lost.
• Loss of future earning capacity where the disability is permanent — usually the largest head in a serious injury case.
• Attendant care, special diet, transport for treatment, and equipment such as a prosthesis or a wheelchair, including replacement over time.
• Pain, suffering and loss of amenities of life.

The item that does the heaviest lifting is the permanent disability certificate from the competent authority, because loss of earning capacity is assessed against it. Pursue it early rather than at the end — we assist with disability certificate documentation.

The medical folder, and the bills people throw away

Buy a folder on the first day. Everything goes in it, in original, and nothing is thrown away because it looks small.

Hospital bills and the discharge summary. Pharmacy receipts, with the prescriptions that explain them — a bill without its prescription is routinely disallowed, and that is the commonest way a genuine expense disappears from an award. Diagnostic reports and their bills. Ambulance receipts. Receipts for travel to follow-up appointments. Implant and equipment invoices. The doctor’s written opinion on further treatment required.

Photograph each one as it arrives, because thermal-paper receipts fade to blank within a year and a good many of these cases are still running three years later.

Where the claim is filed, and why it is a choice

Section 165 empowers the State Government to constitute Motor Accidents Claims Tribunals to adjudicate claims for compensation in respect of accidents involving the death of, or bodily injury to, persons arising out of the use of motor vehicles. In Delhi these sit within the district court complexes.

In the ordinary case the claim may be made to the Tribunal for the area in which the accident occurred, or where the claimant resides or carries on business, or where the defendant resides. That is a real choice and families default to the place of the accident without thinking, which is often the least convenient of the three for people who now have somebody in a wheelchair.

Put it to counsel. And if the accident happened on a highway outside Delhi while the family lives here, put it to counsel before anything is filed anywhere.

Hit and run, and uninsured vehicles

Two situations that look hopeless and are not.

Where the vehicle is never traced, Section 161 provides a scheme for compensation in hit-and-run motor accident cases. It is a separate route with its own procedure and its own authority, and the amounts under it are fixed by the scheme rather than computed — no figure appears here because those are revised. The point for a family is simply that the route exists.

Where the vehicle is identified but had no insurance, the liability rests with the owner. The entitlement is not in doubt; what becomes difficult is recovery, and that changes how the case should be run from the start — including what is asked for by way of attachment and security.

Both are situations to take to counsel early, because the ordinary path does not fit either of them and months are lost by people who follow it anyway.

What the insurance company will say

An insurer in a contested claim is represented by experienced counsel and takes the defences available to it. Knowing the usual ones in advance is not cynicism; it tells you which documents matter.

None of these is a reason to give up. Each is a reason to have counsel, and to have the documents that answer it in the file rather than promised for the next date.

The offer, and the pressure behind it

At some point a figure will be offered, and it will be offered at the moment the family is financially at its worst. That timing is not an accident of scheduling.

The question to answer before responding is not “is this a lot of money” but “what is the claim actually worth on the computation”. Have that number worked out first. Then an offer can be judged: money now against an award in three or four years, with an appeal possible after that, is a genuine trade-off and accepting it is sometimes the right decision for a family that cannot wait.

What is never right is accepting without knowing, because in death and serious-injury matters the gap between an opening offer and a properly computed claim is routinely very large. And ask counsel at the first meeting about interim relief, because the reason low offers get accepted is almost never that the family thought them fair.

If the accident happened at work — the choice under Section 167

A driver, a delivery rider, a van cleaner, a labourer travelling in the employer’s vehicle. When somebody is killed or injured in a motor accident during the course of their employment, two different statutes can both give the family a remedy, and this is a fork people walk past without seeing it.

Section 167 of the Motor Vehicles Act deals with it directly: where death or bodily injury gives rise to a claim for compensation both under that Act and under the workmen’s compensation legislation, the claimant may claim under either, but not under both. It is an election, and once made it is made.

The two routes behave quite differently. The employment route runs on a formula tied to wages and age and tends to be quicker and more predictable. The Claims Tribunal route is computed on actual loss and, where the facts support it, is usually worth considerably more — but it requires negligence to be established and it takes longer.

Which is better is a judgement on the wage, the age, the dependants, the strength of the negligence case and how long the family can wait. It is exactly the sort of question to put to an advocate in the first conversation, because choosing by accident — because the employer’s office filed something helpfully — forecloses the other route.

One practical warning. Where an employer or a contractor offers to “handle everything” for a bereaved family, ask what is being filed and where, and get it in writing. That offer is often genuine and occasionally it is the election being made for you.

Lok Adalat, and what it is actually good for

A very large number of these matters are settled at Lok Adalat sittings rather than decided by an award, and a claimant should understand what that means before being taken to one.

A Lok Adalat settlement is a compromise, arrived at with both sides agreeing, and once it is recorded it ends the matter — there is no appeal against it. That is its strength and its risk in the same sentence. Money arrives in months rather than years and the uncertainty disappears; the figure is generally lower than a fully computed award, and there is no second look at it afterwards.

So the preparation is the same as for any offer, and it is the preparation families skip. Know what the claim is worth on the computation before the day. Go with that number in your head. And be clear that whatever is agreed covers every claimant, including a minor whose share the tribunal will have views about.

Used this way it is a good institution. Used as a place where a tired family agrees to whatever is put in front of them, it is not.

If you were driving, and you were the one hurt

A question asked constantly and answered badly by the internet. A third-party claim before the Claims Tribunal is a claim against somebody else’s negligence. Where you were driving your own vehicle and no other vehicle was at fault, that route is not the one.

What may exist instead sits inside your own insurance: damage to the vehicle under the own-damage cover, and, separately, a personal accident cover for the owner-driver where the policy carries one. Those are contractual claims against your own insurer, made under the policy and within the time the policy requires, and they are a different exercise from a tribunal claim entirely.

Where another vehicle was involved and at fault, you are an ordinary claimant like anybody else, whatever you happened to be driving. And if your own insurer has refused a claim on the policy, that refusal has its own routes — the grievance ladder, the ombudsman, and the consumer commissions — none of which is the Claims Tribunal.

The award, and reading it properly

When the award comes, read the operative portion itself rather than a summary. What amount, under which heads, against which party, with interest from which date, payable within what time, and with what direction about how it is to be held or invested.

Those directions matter, particularly where a minor or a person with a disability is a claimant, and they are made for a reason that becomes obvious about two years later. Obtain certified copies for the file, because you will need them whether the award is satisfied or appealed.

Getting the money, and the appeal that may come first

An award is a direction. Where it is not complied with, it has to be enforced, and that is a separate proceeding — we prepare execution petition papers. Families who have waited three years for an award are frequently unprepared to learn there is another step, and it is better to know now.

Appeals in these matters are common, and both sides can bring one. An insurer may appeal against the quantum; a claimant who considers the award inadequate is equally entitled to challenge it. Each has its own period, so the day the award is pronounced is the day to ask counsel whether to appeal and by when. We draw appeal papers and the applications that accompany them; where an appeal goes up, how that court approaches it is described on our Delhi High Court page.

The other side of it — when it was your vehicle

Not everybody reading this is a claimant. If a member of your family was driving and somebody else was killed or injured, there are two things to do and an order to do them in.

Tell the insurer immediately and in writing, keeping proof of the intimation, because delay in intimation is itself used to dispute cover. We handle third-party insurance claim documentation.

And take advice in your own capacity. The criminal proceeding and the compensation claim both involve your family, positions taken in one are produced in the other, and a statement given casually in the first week is read back for years. Do not give any account of the accident to anybody — including an investigator who arrives pleasantly — before speaking to an advocate. Why that matters, in general, is set out on our Rouse Avenue page.

How long it takes, and what actually shortens it

Longer than you are told at the beginning. This page gives no figure, because the variation is wide enough that any number would be misleading, and a family planning around a wrong number is worse off than one planning around uncertainty.

What is within your control is real, though. A claim filed complete — police record, income proof, medical file, heirship documents all in it at the time of filing — moves at a different speed from one filed with gaps that are then filled one hearing at a time, each gap costing a date. Attendance at every hearing. Documents filed when directed rather than on the next occasion. That is most of it.

Money while the case runs

The hardest part of these matters is not legal. A family that has lost its earning member, or is caring for somebody who cannot work, runs out of money long before an award exists, and that pressure is what produces the acceptance of inadequate offers.

So ask about it at the first meeting rather than the last: what interim relief is available, what has to be filed to ask for it, and what else exists — the insurer’s own settlement mechanism, any employer benefit, any scheme the family may be eligible for. Treat the cash-flow question as part of the case strategy, because in practice it decides the outcome as often as the merits do.

Where these tribunals sit in Delhi

The Claims Tribunals are constituted under Section 165 and in Delhi they sit within the district court complexes rather than in a building of their own. Which complex your matter is at follows from where the claim was filed.

No room numbers, no timings and no allocation chart appear here, for the same reason they appear nowhere else on this site: they are administrative and they change. Confirm from your own notice or from the cause list. How to find your way around a complex on a hearing morning is set out on our Tis Hazari page, and it applies here unchanged.

The hearing day itself

Allow separately for travel and for security screening. Carry government photo identity, and carry your own full set of papers even where everything has been filed, because being able to produce a document while standing there saves a date.

If the claimant is injured and travel is genuinely difficult, say so to your advocate in advance rather than on the morning — there are usually ways of dealing with it, but not at short notice.

Free legal services, and why they belong on this page

The Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 sets out who is entitled to free legal services, a woman qualifies whatever her income, and there is a legal services desk inside Delhi’s court complexes. The helplines are 1516 within Delhi and 15100 nationally.

It belongs on this page more than on most, because the families who need this claim most are frequently the ones whose income has just stopped. If cost is the reason nobody has filed anything, that is the wrong reason and there is a desk in the building that exists for it.

One file from the first week

Start it in the first week, when nobody feels like starting anything, because reconstructing it in month eight is how details get lost.

Four sections in one folder. The accident — FIR, site plan, charge sheet, vehicle and insurance particulars. The person — identity and heirship documents, proof of dependency. The money — income proof in every form that exists. The medical — bills with prescriptions, reports, discharge summary, disability certificate. At the front, a one-line running sheet: date, what happened, what was filed, what is next.

The mistakes that cost families the most

The list to assemble now

FIR and the police documents. Death certificate, or the MLC and hospital records. Legal heir or succession documents. Identity and address proof of every claimant. Proof of relationship and of dependency. Income proof in every form that exists, for as long a period as exists. The complete medical folder with prescriptions. The disability certificate where the injury is permanent. Particulars of the offending vehicle and its insurer. Your own dated note of what happened.

Add translations of anything not in the language of the proceeding, prepared in advance, and affidavits sworn before an oath commissioner in the form required. Use one spelling of every name throughout, because in a claim with several claimants and several documents, a mismatch is a question that costs a hearing.

The part of this we can honestly do

Documentation and filing support, and nothing beyond it. Nobody here is an advocate and nobody appears before a tribunal. On a matter like this our half is the claim documentation, the petition and applications typed to counsel’s instructions, the affidavits and their swearing, the income bundle and the medical bundle indexed and paginated so a tribunal can follow them, the heirship papers, the translations, and the certified copies when orders come.

What is argued, and the computation itself, belongs to counsel. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. And of every page on this site, this is the one where we would say most firmly: get an advocate. The directory costs nothing to open or to write through, the order is alphabetical, and no listing on it was bought.

Where we stop on a claim like this

Our charges, said before anything begins

Each document has its own figure and it is printed on that document’s service page, where you can read it before ordering. Anything payable to a tribunal, a hospital for records, or an office issuing a certificate is shown separately from ours, because it is paid to them.

The total is stated before the work starts and nothing is payable in advance. One thing we will say on the call without being asked: if the six months under Section 166(3) are running, the urgent thing is not our paperwork but a conversation with an advocate, and pointing you at the directory costs nothing at all.