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.