From Accident To Award: Simplifying The Employees' Compensation Claim Process
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Sanjana S Trivedi, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Pune, Lavasa
INTRODUCTION
This article aims to focus on the Employees’ Compensation Act, 1923 which talks about legislative stagnation, administrative collapse, and mold it into judicial work that can only ever have positive impact. The article further talks about a generous no-fault scheme has to offer in practice which are theoretically substantial yet practically unenforceable and manifestly inadequate in 2025 implications. An unrevised table rooted in 1931 census, the stubborn persistence of wage in many States long after Parliament abolished them in 2017 which resulted into the breakdown of many recovery mechanisms, exclusion towards contract and platform workers who came together and ensured that statutory compensation remains a moral gesture rather than genuine redress for most families. Unless Parliament and the executive body undertake reform, and these provisions to Chapter VII of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 which are seen as century-old failures in contemporary legislative working plans.
It was an ordinary Tuesday in 2024 when Rajesh Kumar, thirty-two years old man and the sole billpayer for a wife and his three young children, climbed the structure of a half-built tower in Gurugram. When the moment’s loss of balance, and he slipped from the eight floors to the concrete on the ground. The autopsy report stated that he had multiple fractures, crushed thorax, massive internal bleeding in his body. Death had been inevitable.
Eighteen months later his widow stood outside the Commissioner for Employees’ Compensation in Faridabad office. The hearing of this matter had been adjourned seven times. When the order finally came and court awarded ₹21,84,000: a sum reached by considering Rajesh had earned only the statutory minimum of ₹15,000 for a month, multiplying it by the relevant factor of 227.49, and adding it by ₹15,000 for funeral expenses. The contractor was paid only after the Commissioner threatened to look into his bank accounts but his family received “previous advances” which had been deducted and ₹18 lakh remained in the account. Rajesh had actually taken home ₹38,000 every month. The compensation which was awarded, however, replaced less than two years of his real income.
