Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
JUSTICE M S Jawalkar of Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court quashed a judgment of Railway Claims Tribunal, Nagpur Bench and ordered to South East Central Railway (SECR) to pay Rs eight lakh compensation to dependents of a passenger who died while travelling in a passenger train from Gondia to Wadsa.
Mina Punamchand Shahare (45), a resident of Ghoti village in Goregaon tehsil of Gondia district had filed the claim application on account of death of her father Suraj Ganvir in an accident on April 14, 2011.
The counsel of the applicants told the court that he was travelling from Gondia to Wadsa by a passenger train by purchasing a valid ticket. As there was heavy rush of the passengers in the train and the deceased was standing near the door of the coach, when the train reached in between Hirdamali to Pindkepar, the deceased fell down, sustained injuries and died on the spot.
SECR had resisted the claim application by filing a written statement that it was not an untoward incident and the deceased was not a bonafide passenger of the train.
The Railway tribunal observed that the deceased was not a bonafide passenger as no ticket was found with him and held that the claimant had made a false claim and railway was not responsible for the incident.
The appellant moved the High Court contending that the burden lies on the railway to prove that the deceased was a ticketless passenger. Referring to the judgement in the ‘Union of India Vs. Rina Devi’, Justice Jawalkar stated that even if there was no ticket found on the person of deceased that cannot be the ground for denial of compensation.
The HC directed SECR to pay Rs eight lakh compensation to the appellant within three months.
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