M J Antony: It just doesn't add up

A statutory formula that calculates damages for road accidents defies all the rules of mathematics

It could be that the legal draftsmen of the ready reckoner crafted to compute compensation in the Motor Vehicles Act didn't do their maths homework while in school. Or they have bad typists. The result is that the formula has remained riddled with arithmetic howlers and unworkable for two decades. Judges wring their fingers, victims of road accidents (17 deaths an hour) suffer a triple whammy - first when the vehicle hits them, the second when the law batters them and the last when the ambulance chasers take their "contingency" fees. The insurance men look aside with a smirk on their face.

The Supreme Court has been repeatedly asking the lawmakers to correct the figures in the chart, with little response. So last month the judges made some corrections on their own; call it legislation by judges, if you will. (Puttamma vs K L Narayana).

The arithmetic errors have been pointed out by generations of judges in various judgments. In one leading case, UP Transport Corporation vs Trilok Chandra, the court pointed out that 3,000 x 15 is 45,000 for the rest of the world, but for the legislative draftsmen it is 60,000. Similarly, 9,000 x 16 = 1,44,000 according to primary school children, but the law says it is 1,71,000. "The table abounds in such mistakes. Neither the accident claims tribunals nor the courts can go by the ready reckoner," the judges stated in 1996.

In a later judgment, the court said: "From the quantum of compensation specified in the table, it is possible to infer that a clerical error has crept in the schedule and the 'multiplier' figures got wrongly typed as 15, 16, 17, 18, 17, 16, 15, 13, 11, 8, 5 & 5 instead of 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6 and 5." (Sarla Verma vs DTC).

It gave an illustration of the anomalies in the chart and commented: "the compensation will be higher in cases where the deceased was idle and not having any income, than in cases where the deceased was honestly earning an income ranging between Rs 3,000 and Rs 12,000 per annum." The judges then set out an alternative formula. This has only added to the confusion prevailing in the field. Over the years, the court has suggested many amputations, sutures and implants to the Act of 1988. The pile-up of suggestions has only gathered dust.

Last month, in the Puttamma case, the court found that decades have passed by and the land that bequeathed zero to the world is still carrying on with such colossal mathematical blunders. The judges wrote that the schedule has now become "redundant, irrational and unworkable due to changed scenario, including the present cost of living and current rate of inflation and increased life expectancy."

How much the formula is against the claimants and in favour of the insurance companies can be made out from the skewed arguments avidly put forward by the Oriental Insurance Company in the Puttamma case, that the schedule was "just and proper, consistent and uniform and it is a sound method of assessing compensation."

Evaluating human life in terms of money for calculating compensation is a tricky task. The court has to take into account many imponderables such as the life expectancy of the deceased and the dependents, the amount that the deceased would have earned during the remainder of his life, the amount that he would have contributed to the dependents during that period, the chances that the deceased may not have lived or the dependents may not live up to the estimated remaining period of their life expectancy, the chances that the deceased might have got better employment or income or might have lost his employment and income altogether. Loss of consortium and hedonistic pleasures extra.

Only two major laws attempt to quantify the monetary loss. The Workmen Compensation Act and the Motor Vehicles Act. Both need revision. A Bill to update the latter was passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2012 and has not reached the Lok Sabha's infamous well. With the house about to be dissolved after breaking a record for non-productive sessions, the Bill will go into cold storage.

In this scenario, the court took out some clauses in the proposed law and directed the government to implement them till Parliament passes the Bill in its own sweet time. The lawmakers should not oppose it as trespassing into their pastures since judicial legislation in a more drastic field like the Vishakha judgment (sexual harassment) has come to stay.

If and when the flawed schedule is revised, it should be done with more reverence to numbers. It should not look as if the keyboard of the calculator in the law ministry was played around with by one of those simian stragglers teeming in the central secretariat complex during lunch break.