The Application for Compensation

In one line

Section 166 says who may apply, to which Tribunal, and by when; and since 1 April 2022 the police report of the accident is itself treated as an application.

Who may apply: section 166(1)

• (a) the person who has sustained the injury;
• (b) the owner of the property;
• (c) where death has resulted, all or any of the legal representatives of the deceased;
• (d) any agent duly authorised by the injured person or by all or any of the legal representatives.

First proviso. Where all the legal representatives have not joined, the application shall be made on behalf of or for the benefit of all of them, and those who have not joined shall be impleaded as respondents.

So a claim by one heir is not a claim for that heir alone. The Act keeps the whole family before the Tribunal even when only one of them has come to it.

"Legal representatives" is read widely

Facts. Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation v. Ramanbhai Prabhatbhai, AIR 1987 SC 1690, decided on 11 May 1987. A boy was knocked down and killed by a bus of the Corporation. His brothers applied to the Tribunal as his heirs and legal representatives. The Corporation argued that only the wife, husband, parent and child named in the Fatal Accidents Act 1855 could claim, and that the Motor Vehicles Act provisions were merely procedural.

Held. The brother of a person who dies in a motor accident may maintain a claim petition if he is a legal representative; every legal representative who suffers on account of the death should have a remedy; and the Tribunal's task is to determine what compensation appears to it to be just and to specify the persons to whom it is payable.

Why it matters here. It settles that the class of claimants under section 166 is not the class in the Act of 1855. The point is worked out in chapter [Death and the Fatal Accidents Act 1855].

And a legal representative who is not a dependant. In Manjuri Bera v. Oriental Insurance Co. Ltd, (2007) 10 SCC 643, a married daughter claimed the fixed no-fault amount for her father's death and was met with the objection that she was not dependent on him. The Court held that a legal representative who is not a dependant may still be a beneficiary, because the statutory liability is for a fixed and crystallised amount which forms part of the estate, and that "legal representative", undefined in the Act, is to be given a wide meaning.

The second proviso: accepting section 164 ends the petition

Inserted by section 53 of the amending Act, in force from 1 April 2022: