The Supreme Court settled a long-inconsistent question of motor accident law — which years' Income Tax Returns fix a deceased's annual income under Section 166 — by bifurcating the rule for salaried and self-employed claimants.
In an amputee's claim under the Motor Vehicles Act, the Supreme Court held that compensation for loss of earning capacity turns on functional disability — the real reduction in earning power in the claimant's vocation — not the percentage of physical disability certified by a medical board. It also reaffirmed that income-tax returns are cogent proof of pre-accident income and cannot be brushed aside on surmises.
The Supreme Court held that there is no bar on a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal or appellate court awarding compensation greater than the sum claimed. The statutory duty under Section 168 of the Motor Vehicles Act is to award just compensation, subject only to the claimant paying court fee on the enhanced amount.
The Supreme Court used a fatal bus-accident claim to bring order to motor-accident compensation, fixing an age-based multiplier table and standard slabs for deducting the deceased's personal and living expenses. The framework became the bedrock of MACT computation, later affirmed by the Constitution Bench in Pranay Sethi.
The Supreme Court creates a distinct 'Loss of Domestic Care' head of motor-accident compensation and values a homemaker's monthly contribution at ₹30,000.
The May-June 2026 cycle in Indian insurance law has produced three threads running in parallel — the Supreme Court's collateral-source recalibration in Dolly Satish Gandhi alongside the Santhosh anti-double-counting discipline and the Sayona Colors fraud-vitiates-all line; the operational implementation of the Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Act 2025 with 100 per cent FDI and SEBI-style disgorgement powers for the IRDAI, alongside the Bima Sugam commercial launch and the continued delay of the Bima Vistaar composite product; and the IRDAI's substantive regulatory recalibration through the Information and Cyber Security Guidelines 2026, the KMP remuneration amendment tying half of the performance assessment to policyholder-outcome metrics, and the Karnataka HC and Supreme Court interventions on MACT jurisdiction over PA cover and on the personal liability of insurer top brass.
On 31 October 2017, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously settled the methodology for computing 'just compensation' under the Motor Vehicles Act 1988. Authored by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, the judgment fixed the future-prospects framework on bright-line age and employment-status tiers, affirmed the Sarla Verma multiplier line, standardised the conventional heads with a built-in 10 per cent revision every three years, and brought a long period of MACT inconsistency to a close.
On 5 January 2004, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court (V.N. Khare CJI, S.B. Sinha J. authoring, and S.H. Kapadia J.) settled the 'pay and recover' doctrine for motor accident claims involving a driver without a valid licence. The bench held that third-party statutory liability under Section 149 of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988 persists even where the driver had no licence at the time of the accident; that the insurer must pay the third party first and may then recover from the insured under the breach-of-policy condition; that the burden lies on the insurer to prove deliberate breach as a precondition to recovery; and that the owner's contractual liability to the insurer is analytically separate from the insurer's statutory liability to the third party. The judgment installed the victim-protection architecture that runs through every subsequent motor accident decision.