Person’s income can’t be inferred from bank passbook alone: Court

BENGALURU: A bank passbook cannot be considered sufficient basis for ascertaining a person’s income, the high court ruled in a recent order.
Partly allowing an appeal filed by National Insurance Company Limited, Justice HB Prabhakara Sastry directed the insurer to pay a reduced compensation of Rs 21 lakh — as against the earlier order for a compensation of Rs 22,03,000 — to the family members of AS Ganesh, who was killed in a road accident.The judge said that going by the materials and evidence placed before the court, the deceased had also contributed 20% towards the accident, owing to his negligence while riding a motorcycle.
Ganesh, a 47-year-old cloth merchant, died on the spot on March 27, 2016, when his motorcycle was hit by a speeding maxicab registered in Mangaluru. The accident occurred near Rangababu cross along Palamaner-Chittoor Main Road, in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh.
His wife and two children then moved the motor accident claims tribunal in Bengaluru, seeking Rs 50 lakh in compensation from the owner of the maxicab. According to them, Ganesh was earning Rs 50,000 a month from his cloth business. The claimants, while admitting that they weren’t eyewitnesses to the accident, argued that though Ganesh was riding the motorcycle with care and caution, the accident occurred due to rash and negligent driving by the cab driver. The tribunal, after going through the evidences, awarded Rs 22,03,000 in compensation to the claimants.
However, challenging the verdict, the insurance company argued that the accident did not take place in the manner in which it was presented before the tribunal by the claimants.
Justice Sastry observed that the claimants did not produce any income tax returns of the deceased. Instead, two bank passbooks were presented before the court. Admittedly, those two passbooks are not of any business account and don’t contain business transactions, the judge said while passing the order, adding that they were not profit-and-loss statements.