The Supreme Court has reaffirmed that when a bachelor dies in a road accident, the multiplier used to calculate motor accident compensation must be pegged to the deceased's own age — not the age of the parents or other dependents who bring the claim.
The ruling came in Reliance General Insurance Company Limited v. Priyanka Das and Others (2026 INSC 950), delivered on September 5, 2026 by a bench of Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and N.V. Anjaria.
The case arose after a 33-year-old manager died when a truck struck his motorcycle. The Motor Accident Claims Tribunal had applied a multiplier of 16 — corresponding to the deceased's age bracket of 31–35 under the standardised matrix — and awarded compensation of ₹82,56,152. It rejected a claim by a woman asserting she was the deceased's widow, treating her instead as a dependent and apportioning her ₹5 lakh of the award; the Punjab and Haryana High Court later raised her share to ₹7.5 lakh while leaving the rest of the award undisturbed.
Both the insurer and the claimant appealed to the Supreme Court — the insurer contesting quantum, the claimant pressing again for recognition as the deceased's wife and, with it, a multiplier keyed to a dependent's own circumstances rather than the deceased's age.
Dismissing both appeals, the Court held:
"The multiplier must be determined by the age of the deceased, not by the age of the dependents."It found the Tribunal's multiplier of 16 correctly applied and traced the principle back through Sarla Verma, National Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Pranay Sethi, Munna Lal Jain and Sube Singh — the same line of authority that underpins the 'just compensation' formula practitioners already rely on in MACT matters.
For claims practice, the judgment closes off a recurring argument in bachelor-death cases: that an older dependent's age, rather than the victim's, should drive the multiplier upward or downward. The Court's answer is now unambiguous.