Raj Kumar v. Ajay Kumar & Anr. — Guidelines for securing and weighing expert medical evidence in disability compensation

Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.

The facts

This case arose out of a non-fatal motor accident that left the claimant with a partial permanent disability, and concerned the compensation payable for loss of future earnings under Sections 163-A, 166, 168 and 169 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.

The Supreme Court laid down principles, with illustrations, for computing such compensation, and specifically addressed how expert medical evidence on the claimant’s disability should be secured and used in assessing loss of future earning capacity.

In order to do complete justice on the facts of the case, the Court itself reassessed the claimant’s permanent functional disability and consequent loss of future earning capacity, along with his monthly income, and recalculated the compensation accordingly.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Although a civil compensation matter rather than a criminal case, this judgment’s guidance on how expert medical evidence of disability should be obtained and evaluated is directly relevant to anyone assessing medical evidence in a forensic or claims context.

Case details

Read the full judgment (PDF), sourced from the Indian Supreme Court Judgments open dataset (AWS Open Data Registry, CC-BY-4.0).

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