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CHANDIGARH: Pension must be treated as income while calculating compensation in motor accident cases, Punjab and Haryana HC ruled, calling it a “deferred fruit of hard work”.Justice Varinder Aggarwal raised the compensation for Manjit Kaur and her son from Rs 7.9 lakh to Rs 31 lakh, noting the tribunal wrongly ignored her late husband Dharam Singh’s two pensions totalling Rs 32,754 a month.Singh, 57, a retired Army serviceman later employed with Defence Security Corps, died in April 2018 after a car hit his bicycle in Jalandhar.“To disregard the pension while determining compensation would be to ignore both its economic reality and its social purpose,” the HC said, adding that pension is “often the sole means of sustenance and livelihood” and cannot be excluded when computing loss of dependency.
