The Railways Act 1989 is the statute most passengers never read until the day a family needs it, and the part of it that matters on that day is short enough to state in one sentence. When a passenger is killed or injured in a train accident, or in what the Act calls an untoward incident, the railway administration must pay compensation whether or not it was at fault, and the only defences open to it are five exclusions written into the statute itself. Everything else in this long Act, the zones and the boards, the fares and the freight, the offences and the rule making powers, is the frame around that single hard promise. This article explains the whole statute with the passenger at the centre of it: what the Act covers, how it organises the railway administration, what a ticket confers and what it does not, how the liability for luggage differs from the liability for life, and how a claim is actually decided. It describes the law. It does not describe any particular occurrence, and it is written for the reader who wants the structure of the scheme before anything else.

The Act rewards that order of reading, because its compensation scheme is routinely misdescribed in the places a bereaved family is most likely to look. Liability under the Act is described on many pages as if it depended on negligence, as if a claimant had to prove that the railway did something wrong. It does not. Other pages quote compensation figures that the rules have since replaced, because the amounts live in subordinate legislation and change without any amendment to the Act. Still other pages state that the Railway Claims Tribunal bars every other proceeding of any kind, which overstates the Tribunal’s jurisdiction and closes a door that the statute leaves open for complaints about service. Each of those errors is corrected in its section below, and the corrections matter more than the detail around them.

A consolidating statute that replaced a Victorian one

The Railways Act, 1989 is Act 24 of 1989. It was enacted on 3 June 1989 and brought into force on 1 July 1990 by notification S.O. 475(E) dated 12 June 1990, and it repealed and replaced the Indian Railways Act, 1890, the consolidating statute under which the railways had been run for a century. The long title describes it as an Act to consolidate and amend the law relating to railways, and consolidation is the right word for most of it: the zonal structure, the powers to build and maintain works, the carriage chapters and the offence provisions all carry forward arrangements that the 1890 Act had established, restated in modern drafting. The genuinely new law in the 1989 Act, the part that changed what a passenger’s family could demand by right, is Chapter XIII, the liability chapter, and within it the provision on untoward incidents that a 1994 amendment inserted. A reader who understands why that chapter reads as it does understands the Act.

The statute has sixteen chapters and two hundred sections. Chapter I is preliminary. Chapter II deals with railway administrations and Chapter IIA, inserted later, with the Rail Land Development Authority. Chapter III provides for Commissioners of Railway Safety. Chapter IV governs construction and maintenance of works, with Chapter IVA on land acquisition for a special railway project. Chapter V covers the opening of railways, Chapter VI the fixation of rates, and Chapter VII the tribunal that deals with rates. Chapter VIII is the carriage of passengers and Chapter IX the carriage of goods, followed by special provisions for goods booked to notified stations in Chapter X. Chapter XI states the responsibilities of railway administrations as carriers. Chapter XII deals with accidents, their notification and inquiry. Chapter XIII is the liability chapter. Chapter XIV regulates hours of work and periods of rest for railway servants. Chapter XV contains the penalties and offences, and Chapter XVI the miscellaneous provisions, including the general power to make rules and the repeal of the 1890 Act.

That map is worth holding in mind because summaries of the Act often go wrong on it, attributing the passenger provisions to the wrong chapter or merging the accidents chapter with the liability chapter. The two are distinct and the distinction is functional. Chapter XII is about finding out what happened: notice of an accident, inquiries, returns. Chapter XIII is about who pays: it assumes the event has occurred and attaches a money consequence to it without any inquiry into fault. A claim under Chapter XIII does not have to wait for a Chapter XII inquiry to conclude, and the findings of an inquiry do not decide the claim. The Tribunal decides the claim on the material placed before it, and the sections below keep the two chapters separate for the same reason the statute does.

The Act has been amended several times since 1990, including amendments in 1994, 2003, 2005 and 2008, and amendments made by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, which adjusted parts of the penalty framework. The amendment that matters for this article is the Railways (Amendment) Act, 1994, Act 28 of 1994, which took effect on 1 August 1994 and inserted both the definition of untoward incident and Section 124A, the section under which most contested claims are fought. Before 1994, the strict liability of the administration ran to accidents to trains. After 1994, it ran also to violent incidents on trains and station premises and to the accidental falling of a passenger from a train, which is the factual pattern behind a large share of the case law. The 1994 amendment is therefore not a footnote to the Act but the source of its most litigated provisions, and it is treated that way below.

The departmental model the Act assumes

The Railways Act 1989 does not create a corporation and endow it with powers. It presupposes a departmental railway, owned by the Central Government and run through railway administrations, and it distributes functions among the Central Government, the Railway Board acting through the administrations, the zonal General Managers and the Commissioners of Railway Safety. Section 2, the definitions section, carries the weight of this design. It defines a railway administration, in relation to a government railway, as the General Manager of a zonal railway, and in relation to a non-government railway as the person who is the owner or lessee of the railway or the person working it. It defines a government railway as a railway owned by the Central Government. The party that a passenger sues, the party that pays compensation and the party that answers before the Tribunal is therefore not an abstraction called the railways but the railway administration so defined, sued in practice through the Union of India and the General Manager of the zone concerned.

This is the departmental pattern that runs across the infrastructure statutes in this series, and the field, with the comparison between departmental operation and the statutory corporation and regulator models, is mapped in the guide to infrastructure laws in India. What matters here is the consequence for a claimant. There is no separate legal person standing between the passenger and the state, no insurer interposed by the statute, and no fund created by the Act out of which compensation is paid. The liability is the liability of the administration itself, and the award of the Tribunal is an award against it. The absence of any insurance architecture in the Act is a deliberate feature of the scheme and one reason the compensation amounts are fixed sums rather than assessed damages: the statute is not replicating a tort claim against an insured defendant but creating a scheduled payment obligation owed by the operator.

Section 2 also defines the words on which the compensation scheme turns, and they are taken up in detail in the liability sections below: passenger, accident and untoward incident are all defined terms, and the definitions do real work. A passenger, for the purposes of the Act, is a person other than a railway servant on duty who travels on a railway on payment of fare, and Section 124A adds an explanation of its own that widens the word for compensation purposes to take in a railway servant on duty and a person holding a valid platform ticket who becomes a victim of an untoward incident. The gap between the general definition and the compensation definition is one of several places where the Act allocates responsibility through drafting rather than through any statement of policy, and a claimant’s adviser has to read both.

Chapter II then constitutes the machinery. The Central Government may, by notification, form a railway into a zone and appoint a General Manager. The Railway Board’s powers under the separate statute governing it are preserved, and the administration’s general powers of management, including the power to execute works, to enter into contracts and to do the acts necessary for working the railway, are stated. Chapter IIA, inserted by amendment, constitutes the Rail Land Development Authority for the development of railway land for commercial use, a reminder that the Act is also a statute about a very large landholding, a point the construction sections return to. For the passenger, Chapter II matters chiefly because it identifies the counterparty. The administration that issues the ticket, fixes the fare, staffs the train and answers the claim is one legal continuum, and the Act nowhere permits it to answer a compensation claim by pointing to a contractor, a caterer or another zone.

Safety oversight at one remove: the Commissioners of Railway Safety

Chapter III provides for the appointment of a Chief Commissioner of Railway Safety and Commissioners of Railway Safety, and it contains the Act’s most interesting structural feature. The Commissioners discharge their functions under the administrative control not of the Ministry of Railways but of the ministry dealing with civil aviation. The arrangement is deliberate and longstanding, and it exists so that the officer who inspects a new line before it opens, who inquires into a serious accident and who reports on the safety of the working is not subordinate to the administration whose work he is examining. The Commissioner is deemed to be a public servant, his duties and powers are prescribed, and a railway may not be opened for the public carriage of passengers until the Commissioner has inspected it and reported that the opening can take place without danger to the public, which is the substance of Chapter V.

Who investigates when the party that must pay also runs the railway?

In part, an officer outside the railway ministry. The Commissioner of Railway Safety, who functions under a different ministry, inspects lines before opening and inquires into serious accidents, while the administration also inquires through its own machinery under Chapter XII. The Tribunal, not either inquiry, decides compensation.

The structural point deserves a fair statement from both directions, because it recurs in the argument about the Act as a whole. The claimant’s side observes that the railway administration inquires into occurrences through its own officers, compiles the record on which many claims are first assessed, and is also the party liable to pay, so the investigator and the defendant overlap. The administration’s answer is that the Commissioner’s inquiry is institutionally separate, that his reports are not the administration’s documents, and that in any event no inquiry decides a claim: the Tribunal is an independent forum, the administration must prove any exclusion it relies on, and the inquiry record is material that either side may place before the Tribunal and have tested. Both statements are accurate, and they are not in real conflict. The overlap is genuine at the fact gathering stage and is answered, so far as the statute answers it, by separating the officer charged with safety inquiry from the operating ministry and by giving the money question to a tribunal that neither inquiry controls.

Chapter IV confers the works powers: the administration may execute works across, under or over land, lay lines, build stations and carry out the acts listed in Section 11, subject to the safeguards the chapter builds in for owners and occupiers, and Chapter IVA supplies a land acquisition code for a special railway project, with its own competent authority, award and appeal arrangements. Land for a railway vests in the Union, and the acquisition of land for transport infrastructure under special statutes, with the comparison to the general land acquisition law, is a subject the highways legislation raises in a closely parallel form, a parallel drawn out in the article on the National Highways Act. For the passenger the works chapters matter only at one point: they explain why the station, the platform and the premises within which an untoward incident can occur are all within the administration’s statutory control, which is part of why the liability chapter can sensibly extend to waiting halls, cloak rooms, booking offices and platforms and not merely to trains in motion.

Carriage of passengers: what Chapter VIII actually promises

Chapter VIII, running from Section 49 onwards, is the closest the Act comes to a passenger charter, and it is a shorter and narrower charter than most passengers suppose. Its provisions are mostly addressed to the administration and framed as duties about the mechanics of travel. Section 49 requires the exhibition of timings and tables of fares at stations. Section 50 provides for the supply of tickets on payment of fare: a person desirous of travelling, on payment of the fare, is to be supplied with a ticket. Section 51 deals with the case in which a ticket is issued for a class or a train not having room for additional passengers. Section 52 governs cancellation of a ticket and refund, requiring the administration, where a ticket is returned for cancellation, to cancel it and refund the fare, subject to the rules that govern refunds and the deductions they permit. Section 53 prohibits the transfer of certain tickets: a ticket issued in the name of a person is to be used only by that person, with provisos for the mutual transfer of a seat or berth between passengers travelling by the same train and for a change of name on a reservation in the circumstances prescribed. Section 54 obliges every passenger, on demand by an authorised railway servant, to present the pass or ticket for examination during or at the end of the journey and to surrender it at the journey’s end. Section 55 contains the prohibition at the centre of the chapter: no person shall enter or remain in any carriage for the purpose of travelling as a passenger unless he has with him a proper pass or ticket, or has obtained the permission of an authorised railway servant, who will ordinarily give a certificate that the passenger has been permitted to travel on condition that he subsequently pays the fare.

The remaining provisions of the chapter are about the conditions of the carriage rather than the contract. Section 56 empowers the administration to refuse to carry a person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease of a prescribed kind, and forbids such a person to travel without permission. Section 57 requires the maximum number of passengers for each compartment to be fixed, subject to the approval of the Central Government, and exhibited. Section 58 requires the earmarking of compartments for ladies. Section 59 requires the administration to provide and maintain in every train carrying passengers means of communication between passengers and the railway servant in charge of the train. Section 60 confers the power to make rules for the chapter. What the chapter does not contain is equally instructive. It contains no statutory promise about punctuality, no entitlement to a seat merely by holding a ticket for a train that is full, no right to a particular standard of cleanliness or catering, and no remedy of its own for breach of the duties it does impose. A passenger whose complaint is about delay, about a reservation that failed, about a berth given to another or about conditions in a compartment will find no claim under Chapter VIII, and the route for such complaints, where a legal route exists at all, lies outside this Act altogether, in the consumer protection legislation, a boundary examined in the forum section below.

What does a train ticket actually confer in law?

A ticket is the administration’s authority to travel and the evidence of the contract of carriage: it entitles the holder to be carried in the class and between the places it names, it must be produced on demand, and named tickets are not transferable. It is not a guarantee of a seat on a full train or of punctual arrival.

Two consequences follow from the way the chapter is drafted, and both are frequently missed. The first is that the ticket functions in the Act primarily as a licence and as evidence. It is the condition of lawful presence in a carriage, and it is the document by which a traveller proves, if the question arises after an occurrence, that he was a passenger travelling with authority. The compensation case law on missing tickets, examined below, exists precisely because the ticket is evidence of status and evidence can be lost with the person who carried it. The second consequence is that the obligations passengers most often invoke in argument, the reservation chart, the confirmed berth, the refund slab for a cancelled ticket, the waitlist rules, are not in the Act at all. They are in rules made under it, in the commercial manuals of the administration and in the conditions published with the reservation system. Those instruments bind in their own way and refunds are in practice governed by them, but a rule is not a section, and this article keeps the two apart throughout, because promoting a refund rule or a reservation practice into a provision of the Act misstates the passenger’s legal position in both directions: it overstates what the statute guarantees and understates what the rules, properly invoked, may still give.

Excess charge, penalty and prosecution: three different consequences

The Act deals with ticketless travel at three distinct levels, and confusing them is a standard error. At the first level, Section 138 of Chapter XV provides for the levy of an excess charge and fare for travelling without a proper pass or ticket or beyond the authorised distance. A person who travels without a ticket, or past the station to which his ticket entitles him, or in a higher class than the ticket allows, is liable to pay on demand the fare for the journey performed or the excess fare, together with an excess charge at the rate the section prescribes, and if he fails to pay on demand, the amount is recoverable as if it were a fine imposed by a magistrate. The excess charge is a civil levy collected by the administration’s staff; it is not a conviction and it carries no criminal record. At the second level, Section 137 makes it an offence fraudulently to travel or attempt to travel without a proper pass or ticket, to use a transferred ticket or a ticket whose period has expired, and to forge or alter a ticket, punishable with imprisonment, fine or both, with enhanced consequences for a railway servant who connives. The dividing line between the two sections is fraud: the passenger who simply has no ticket faces the excess charge, while the passenger who deceives faces prosecution. At the third level sits Section 55 itself, the prohibition, breach of which is the foundation for removal from the carriage and for the other two consequences.

What separates an excess charge from a prosecution for ticketless travel?

Fraud. Travelling without a ticket, or beyond the distance or above the class the ticket allows, attracts the fare and an excess charge under Section 138, collected on the spot. Travelling by deceit, on a forged, altered, expired or transferred ticket, is the offence under Section 137 and is prosecuted.

Chapter XV as a whole is taken at headline level here, as the brief for this article directs, but its shape should be recorded because passengers meet it in daily friction. Section 141 punishes needlessly interfering with the means of communication provided in a train, the alarm chain provision. Section 142 penalises the transfer of tickets for gain and Section 143 the unauthorised business of procuring and supplying tickets, the touting provisions. Section 144 prohibits hawking and begging on railway premises. Section 145 covers drunkenness, nuisance and indecent conduct. Section 146 punishes obstructing a railway servant in his duties. Section 148 punishes a false statement in an application for compensation, a provision worth notice in a claims article: the strictness of the liability scheme is matched by a criminal sanction for a dishonest claim. Sections 150 and 151 punish the malicious wrecking or attempted wrecking of a train and damage to railway property, offences of an altogether different gravity that sit at the head of the chapter’s serious end, and Section 152 punishes endangering the safety of persons travelling by railway. Section 156 punishes travelling on the roof, step or footboard of a train, and Section 157 the altering or defacing of a pass or ticket. The penalty chapter thus runs from the fare defaulter to the saboteur, and its presence in the same statute as the compensation chapter is the other half of the Act’s allocation of responsibility: the passenger owes the fare, owes compliance with the conditions of carriage and owes honesty in a claim, and in exchange the administration owes compensation without proof of fault when the defined events occur.

Luggage: a deliberately narrower promise

The liability for a passenger’s luggage is stated in Section 100, in Chapter XI, and it is far narrower than the liability for the passenger’s life. The section provides that a railway administration shall not be responsible for the loss, destruction, damage, deterioration or non-delivery of any luggage unless a railway servant has booked the luggage and given a receipt for it, and, in the case of luggage which is carried by the passenger in his own charge, unless it is also proved that the loss or damage was due to the negligence or misconduct of the administration or of any of its servants. Read the two limbs separately. Booked luggage, luggage handed over, weighed, charged and receipted, ordinarily to be carried in the brake van, is carried under the goods regime of Chapter XI, under which the administration bears the responsibility of a carrier, subject to the chapter’s provisions on owner’s risk, on the monetary ceiling that applies unless value is declared and a percentage charge paid, and on the notice of claim that the chapter requires. Unbooked luggage, the suitcase on the rack above the seat and the bag under the berth, remains in the passenger’s charge, and for it the administration is responsible only where negligence or misconduct on its part or on the part of its servants is proved. Theft of a bag from a compartment by another traveller, without more, is therefore not a claim under Section 100, however the loss is framed; the passenger must bring the case within the negligence limb, by showing, for example, a failure of the administration’s own arrangements that its servants were duty bound to maintain, before the section assists at all.

The contrast with Chapter XIII is the point of principle. For death and injury, Parliament abolished the need to prove fault. For luggage, it retained fault as the gateway for everything not formally booked, and made booking the act that converts custody. The passenger who books luggage buys, with the booking charge, a transfer of responsibility; the passenger who keeps the bag in his charge keeps the risk except against the administration’s own negligence. Consumer commissions have on occasion read Section 100 more generously, treating the administration’s duty to keep reserved compartments secure as capable of founding liability for a theft from within them, and the National Commission’s reasoning in General Manager, Southern Railway v A. Shameem was invoked for that approach in later cases. That line of authority operates through the consumer legislation and through the negligence limb of the section, and it should not be mistaken for a general carrier liability for unbooked luggage, which the section’s words withhold. The section’s allocation also explains the practical advice that belongs to the rules rather than the Act and is therefore stated here only as practice: valuable articles are safer booked, declared and receipted than carried in charge, because booking is what changes the legal answer.

Chapter XI’s wider provisions on goods, Sections 93 to 112 in substance, are headline material for this article. Section 93 states the general responsibility of the administration as a carrier of goods, on the footing of a bailee’s duty of care under the Contract Act standard the section adopts. Sections that follow deal with goods carried at owner’s risk rate, with delay and detention, with the administration’s lien, with unclaimed goods and their sale, and with the requirement of notice before a claim for compensation for loss of goods is instituted. A passenger whose booked luggage is lost claims within this architecture and before the same Tribunal, and the limitation period for goods claims under the Tribunal Act is three years rather than the one year that governs compensation for death and injury, a difference the forum section records.

Chapter XII: finding out what happened

Chapter XII, Sections 113 to 122, is the Act’s machinery for learning about accidents, and it should be understood before the compensation chapter because claimants constantly confuse the two. Section 113 requires notice of a railway accident to be given: where an accident occurs in the course of working a railway that involves loss of life or grievous hurt, or serious damage to property, or is of a prescribed kind, notice must be sent without delay to the district authorities and to the Commissioner of Railway Safety, and station level reporting duties follow. The chapter then provides for inquiries at two levels. The railway administration inquires into accidents through its own officers, and the Commissioner of Railway Safety inquires into the more serious accidents himself, with the powers the chapter gives him to summon witnesses and record evidence. Powers exist to require returns of accidents and to make rules for the chapter. The design is the two track arrangement examined in the safety section above: departmental inquiry by the operator, statutory inquiry by an officer outside the operating ministry, and no provision anywhere in the chapter that either inquiry’s conclusion binds the Tribunal on a compensation claim.

That last point is the one a claimant’s family most needs from this chapter. A departmental inquiry may record a view about how a passenger came to fall, and that record may be placed before the Tribunal by either side. It is evidence to be weighed, not a determination to be obeyed. The Tribunal reaches its own conclusion on the affidavit evidence, the medical and post mortem record, the police papers and the witnesses examined before it, and appellate decisions have repeatedly treated inquiry conclusions adverse to a claimant as insufficient, without more, to bring the case within an exclusion that the administration must prove. The distinction between what an inquiry finds for safety purposes and what a tribunal finds for compensation purposes is structural to the Act, and it is the practical answer to the complaint that the railway judges its own case. It gathers the first record of its own case, as any operator must; it does not decide it.

The compensation core: Section 123 and its two definitions

Chapter XIII bears the title Liability of Railway Administration for Death and Injury to Passengers due to Accidents, and it opens, in Section 123, with definitions that apply to the chapter. Three of them decide almost every case. The first is dependant, defined to mean, in substance, the wife, husband, son or daughter of the deceased passenger, the parent where the deceased was unmarried or a minor, and certain other relatives, including a minor brother or an unmarried or widowed sister and other specified relations, where wholly or in part dependant on the passenger. The second is accident, which Section 123 defines by reference: accident means an accident of the nature described in Section 124. The third is untoward incident, defined in clause (c) of Section 123 to mean, first, the commission of a terrorist act within the meaning the clause assigns by reference to the anti terrorism legislation it names, the making of a violent attack or the commission of robbery or dacoity, or rioting, shoot out or arson, by any person in or on any train carrying passengers, or in a waiting hall, cloak room or reservation or booking office, or on any platform or in any other place within the precincts of a railway station; and, second, the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers.

Each element of the untoward incident definition repays attention, because the definition is the gateway to Section 124A and its limits are its edges. The violent acts listed must be committed by any person, which includes a fellow passenger, a robber who boards at a halt or an assailant on the platform; the victim’s own acts are dealt with not here but in the exclusions. The places listed are railway places: the train, the waiting hall, the cloak room, the reservation or booking office, the platform and any other place within the precincts of a railway station. An attack on a passenger on the road outside the station is outside the definition however closely connected with the journey it may be. The falling limb is differently framed: it speaks of the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers, with no list of places, and it is the word accidental that carries the contest, since the administration’s answer to a fall case is almost never that no fall occurred but that the fall was not accidental in the statutory sense, being self inflicted or the product of the passenger’s own criminal act. The definition and the exclusions are thus two ends of the same argument, and the case law moves between them.

The accident limb, by contrast, is about the train rather than the person. As Section 124’s language shows, an accident for this chapter is a collision between trains of which one is a train carrying passengers, or the derailment of a train or part of a train carrying passengers, or another accident to a train or part of a train carrying passengers, of the kind the scheme contemplates. An occurrence that injures a passenger without any accident to the train, a fall in a crowded compartment as the train moves normally, a stone thrown from outside that strikes a passenger at a window, is not an accident within Section 124, and if it is to be compensated at all it must be brought within the untoward incident definition, as a violent attack in the stone throwing case and as an accidental fall where the passenger falls from the train. The two gateways are therefore complementary rather than overlapping descriptions of the same events: one is organised around the train, the other around defined kinds of violence and the single defined mishap of falling.

Why does the statute keep two compensation gateways instead of one?

Because they were built at different times for different harms. The accident gateway, original to the Act, covers mishaps to the train itself, collisions and derailments. The untoward incident gateway, added in 1994, reaches violence against passengers and accidental falls, which the train centred definition had left outside.

Sections 124 and 124A: liability without proof of fault

Section 124 provides that when an accident occurs in the course of working a railway, then whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default on the part of the railway administration such as would entitle a passenger who has been injured, or the dependant of a passenger who has been killed, to maintain an action and recover damages in respect thereof, the railway administration shall, notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, be liable to pay compensation to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only for loss occasioned by the death of or injury to a passenger as a result of the accident. Section 124A repeats the identical architecture for untoward incidents. Every phrase in those two sentences was chosen and each does work that a claimant should be able to identify. The words whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default abolish the fault inquiry: the administration cannot answer that its driver was careful or its track sound, and the claimant need not prove the opposite. The words notwithstanding anything contained in any other law give the sections overriding force against inconsistent provisions elsewhere. The words to such extent as may be prescribed confine the quantum to the rules, excluding any judicial assessment of damages at large under this chapter. The words and to that extent only close the other side of the same door: the prescribed sum is both the floor of the entitlement and its ceiling, and a tribunal that sympathises with a claimant cannot award more under the Act, just as a tribunal cannot award less to a claimant who proves the statutory conditions.

This is strict liability in a pure statutory form, and its character was settled by the Supreme Court in Union of India v Prabhakaran Vijaya Kumar, which held that Section 124A lays down strict liability or no fault liability in case of railway accidents, that where the principle of strict liability applies proof of negligence is not required, and that the expression accidental falling of a passenger from a train carrying passengers includes a passenger trying to board or alight as well as a passenger who falls in the course of the journey. The Court reasoned from the nature of the legislation as a beneficial provision for the victims of occurrences on a mass transport system, and it read the definition liberally to that end. The same approach was reiterated in Jameela v Union of India, where a passenger who had been standing at an open doorway fell from the train: the Court treated the conduct, at its highest, as negligence, held that negligence of that character is not a criminal act within the exclusions, and allowed compensation. Between them, the two decisions establish the working rule of the chapter: the claimant proves the event and his status as a passenger, and nothing about fault, his own or the railway’s, is in issue unless the administration affirmatively brings the case within one of the five exclusions.

Section 125 provides for the application for compensation to be made to the Claims Tribunal, and Section 126 for interim relief by the railway administration. Section 128, headed Saving as to certain rights, preserves the right of a person entitled to compensation under the chapter to claim compensation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 or any other law for the time being in force, but forbids recovery under both: a claimant may pursue the other route, and must elect, since the same death cannot be compensated twice. The saving matters for railway servants and for workmen whose families may have a claim under the employment legislation, and it also marks the boundary between the scheduled no fault payment and the general law: a claimant who declines the chapter’s fixed sum and sues in tort for negligence based damages gives up the chapter’s certainty for the general law’s higher but unproven measure, and the Tribunal route and the civil route cannot be accumulated.

The small phrases that carry the scheme

Three short phrases in Sections 124 and 124A do more work than the rest of the chapter combined, and each has been fought over. The first is the opening condition, that the event occur in the course of working a railway. The phrase ties liability to the operation of the railway as a going concern and excludes the case of the trespasser on a disused formation or the person injured by rolling stock in circumstances unconnected with the working, while comfortably including the passenger on a moving train, the passenger on the platform awaiting it and the passenger in the booking hall, since the working of a railway includes the reception and dispatch of the passengers it carries. The second phrase is the extent formula, to such extent as may be prescribed and to that extent only, examined in the amounts section below. Its function is to convert what would otherwise be a damages claim into a scheduled entitlement, and tribunals that have awarded sums beyond the Schedule out of sympathy have been corrected on appeal for ignoring the second half of the formula. The third is the non obstante clause, notwithstanding anything contained in any other law, which secures the chapter against arguments drawn from other statutes that might qualify the entitlement, and which is part of why the administration cannot answer a Chapter XIII claim by pointing to a condition printed on a ticket or in a manual.

The explanation appended to Section 124A deserves the same close reading, because it quietly reverses what the general definition of passenger would otherwise produce. The general definition in Section 2 is built around travel on payment of fare and excludes a railway servant on duty from the picture of the fare paying traveller. The explanation states that for the purposes of Section 124A, passenger includes a railway servant on duty, and includes a person who has purchased a valid ticket for travelling by a train carrying passengers on any date, or a valid platform ticket, and becomes a victim of an untoward incident. Two features of that drafting matter in litigation. The words on any date accommodate the season ticket holder, the pass holder and the passenger whose ticket was bought for a journey spanning the occurrence, and they defeat the argument that the ticket must have been bought for that very train on that very day. The reference to a valid platform ticket brings within the section the relative seeing off a family, the porter like bystander is not included, since the explanation requires the purchase of the ticket, and the person lawfully on the platform without one, a railway servant apart, is outside the explanation and must find his case, if he has one, in the general law. The definition is thus generous at the centre and hard edged at the margin, and the margin cases, the person who entered the platform without a platform ticket and was injured in a stampede or an attack, recur in the reports precisely because the drafting draws the line where it does.

A further textual point governs the relationship between the two gateways. Section 124’s accident is defined by the event’s effect on the train, and Section 123 directs the reader to Section 124 for its content, while the untoward incident is defined without reference to the train’s condition at all. A single occurrence can satisfy both: a collision that derails a train is an accident, and a robber who exploits the confusion to attack passengers in the wreckage commits an act within the untoward incident definition, and a passenger injured by the impact claims under the first gateway while a passenger injured by the attack claims under the second, each for the same scheduled sum and neither needing the other’s gateway. The overlap is harmless because the entitlement is identical either way, and Section 128 prevents any accumulation. What the drafting will not bear is the reverse operation, treating the untoward incident definition as if it were a general accidents clause: an occurrence that is neither an accident to the train nor within the two limbs of clause (c) is outside Chapter XIII altogether, however deserving the victim, and the honest answer in such a case is that the Act gives no claim and the remedy, if any exists, lies in the general law of negligence against whoever’s fault can be proved.

The five exclusions, stated precisely

The proviso to Section 124A provides that no compensation shall be payable under the section by the railway administration if the passenger dies or suffers injury due to, first, suicide or attempted suicide by him; second, self inflicted injury; third, his own criminal act; fourth, any act committed by him in a state of intoxication or insanity; or, fifth, any natural cause or disease or medical or surgical treatment unless such treatment becomes necessary due to injury caused by the untoward incident. There is no corresponding proviso in Section 124: the exclusions are attached to the untoward incident gateway, and their placement is itself informative, because the events they contemplate, a deliberate leap, a self inflicted wound, an injury in the course of the passenger’s own crime, arise in the individual incident cases and not in collisions and derailments. The exclusions are exhaustive. An administration that cannot fit the facts into one of the five clauses has no residual defence based on the passenger’s carelessness, imprudence or misjudgment, and tribunals err when they refuse claims on a general impression that the passenger was to blame, without identifying the clause and proving its ingredients.

Take the clauses in turn. Suicide requires an intention to end life, proved as a fact; a body found on the track is not, without evidence of intention, a suicide, and appellate courts have set aside refusals built on inference piled on the bare circumstance of death beside the line. Self inflicted injury, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Union of India v Rina Devi, delivered on 9 May 2018, requires intention to inflict the injury: the Court held that the concept of self inflicted injury would require intention to inflict such injury and not mere negligence of any particular degree, since to read negligence into the clause would import contributory negligence into a liability founded on the no fault theory, which the scheme excludes. The passenger’s own criminal act requires an act that is criminal, not merely careless or forbidden by a byelaw in some loose sense; travelling on the footboard is an offence under Section 156 and administrations have argued that a fall from a footboard is therefore a fall in the course of a criminal act, an argument the courts have not accepted as a general answer, since it would convert a minor penal provision into a forfeiture of the compensation the chapter exists to give, though the precise facts of a given case, as in the case of a passenger who attempts to board a moving train in a manner the courts have described as totally imprudent and unmindful of consequences, may still be held self inflicted on the Rina Devi standard where intention in the relevant sense is made out. Intoxication and insanity require the act to have been committed in that state, which is a matter of evidence, ordinarily medical or eyewitness, and not of assertion. The natural cause clause covers the passenger who dies of a cardiac arrest on a train or whose condition is a disease unconnected with any incident, with its own internal exception: treatment that becomes necessary because of an injury caused by the incident is not within the exclusion, so a death in surgery performed for injuries sustained in a fall remains a death as a result of the incident.

The burden of proof on the exclusions lies on the railway administration. That proposition follows from the structure of the proviso, which is a defence carved out of a liability otherwise established, and it has been stated repeatedly by the High Courts and applied by the Supreme Court: the exclusions must be established by the railway rather than presumed against the claimant. Its companion proposition concerns the claimant’s own burden at the threshold. The claimant must establish that the deceased or injured person was a bona fide passenger and that the death or injury resulted from an accident or an untoward incident. In Rina Devi the Supreme Court resolved the conflict of authority on how that burden is discharged where a body is found on railway premises and no ticket is recovered: the initial burden lies on the claimant, but it can be discharged by filing an affidavit stating the relevant facts, whereupon the burden shifts to the railway administration to disprove the case so set up, the administration being the party with special knowledge of whether a ticket was issued and of the records of the journey. A claim does not fail merely because the ticket is not found on the body, a situation that the facts of travel make common, and the later decision in Doli Rani Saha v Union of India applied the same approach, treating the affidavit, the police record and the post mortem findings together as capable of establishing bona fide travel where the administration produced nothing to displace them.

The decision table: accident, untoward incident, neither

The table below is the working instrument of this article. It starts from what occurred and routes the case through the questions the statute asks, in the order a tribunal asks them: was there an accident to the train, does the event fall within the untoward incident definition, does an exclusion apply, and was the person a passenger. At each branch it gives the liability position, the forum and what the claimant must produce.

What occurred	Train accident under Section 124?	Untoward incident under Section 123(c)?	Exclusion in the proviso to Section 124A?	Liability position, forum, and what the claimant must produce
Passenger killed when two passenger trains collide	Yes	Not needed	No proviso applies to Section 124	Liable without proof of fault. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce proof of passenger status, the death record and proof of dependant status
Passenger injured in a derailment of the train carrying him	Yes	Not needed	No proviso applies to Section 124	Liable without proof of fault. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce ticket or other proof of travel, medical records and the accident particulars
Passenger robbed and injured by attackers inside a train	No	Yes, violent attack or robbery in a train carrying passengers	No, unless the passenger’s own act caused the injury	Liable under Section 124A. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce proof of travel, the police report and medical records
Passenger assaulted in a waiting hall or on a platform within station precincts	No	Yes, the definition covers station premises expressly	No, unless an exclusion is proved	Liable under Section 124A. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce ticket or platform ticket, police report and medical records
Passenger falls accidentally from a moving train	No	Yes, accidental falling of a passenger from a train carrying passengers	Only if the administration proves suicide, self inflicted injury, own criminal act, intoxication or insanity, or natural cause	Liable under Section 124A unless an exclusion is proved by the administration. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce affidavit of facts, proof of travel where available, inquest and post mortem records
Passenger falls while boarding or alighting and the administration pleads carelessness	No	Yes, boarding and alighting falls are within the definition	No, negligence alone is not self inflicted injury after Rina Devi	Liable under Section 124A. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce proof of travel and medical or death records; the administration must prove intention for the exclusion
Passenger dies of a heart attack during an uneventful journey	No	No	Fifth exclusion would also apply if framed as an incident	No liability under Chapter XIII. No compensation forum under the Act; any claim lies, if at all, under another law
Passenger takes his own life on the track	No	The event is within the chapter’s field but the first exclusion applies	Yes, suicide	No compensation under Section 124A. The administration must prove the suicidal act; the family may test that proof before the Tribunal
Person without a ticket is injured by a fall and no ticket is recovered	No	Yes, if the fall is accidental and from a train carrying passengers	No exclusion arises from the missing ticket itself	Claim maintainable if bona fide travel is established on the material, including affidavit evidence; the burden then shifts to the administration. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal
Platform ticket holder is injured in a violent incident at the station	No	Yes, and the explanation to Section 124A includes a platform ticket holder as a passenger	No, unless an exclusion is proved	Liable under Section 124A. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce the platform ticket, police report and medical records
Booked luggage is lost from the brake van	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable	Carrier liability under Chapter XI, not Chapter XIII. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal. Produce the booking receipt and proof of value, with the notice the goods provisions require
Unbooked luggage kept in the passenger’s charge is stolen	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable	No liability under Section 100 unless negligence or misconduct of the administration or its servants is proved. Forum: Railway Claims Tribunal, or a consumer commission on a deficiency in service case
Passenger’s complaint is about delay, a failed reservation or conditions of travel	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable	No claim under this Act. The remedy, if any, lies under the consumer protection legislation as a complaint of deficiency in service

The forum: the Railway Claims Tribunal

Claims for compensation under Chapter XIII are not made to a civil court. The Railway Claims Tribunal Act, 1987, Act 54 of 1987, constituted the Railway Claims Tribunal and, by Section 13 of that Act, vested it with jurisdiction over claims for compensation for loss, destruction, damage, deterioration or non-delivery of goods entrusted to a railway administration, over claims for compensation payable under Section 82A of the old Act and Sections 124 and 124A of the 1989 Act in respect of death or injury in an accident or an untoward incident, and over claims for refund of fares and freight. Section 15 of the Tribunal Act bars any court or other authority from exercising jurisdiction over the matters Section 13 assigns to the Tribunal, and proceedings pending elsewhere on the appointed day stood transferred. The Tribunal sits in benches, follows the principles of natural justice rather than the full procedure of the civil courts, has the powers of a civil court for summoning witnesses, discovery and production, and its awards are executed as decrees, with Section 23 of the Tribunal Act giving an appeal to the High Court within ninety days of the order appealed against, from every order that is not interlocutory and not passed with the consent of the parties. No fee is payable on an application for compensation for death or injury, a detail of the Tribunal Act’s procedure section that matters to the families the scheme serves.

Limitation is prescribed by Section 17 of the Tribunal Act and differs by class of claim. An application for compensation in respect of an accident or untoward incident must be made within one year of the occurrence of the accident, and an application for compensation for goods within three years of the entrustment of the goods, with a three year period also for fare and freight refunds. Section 17(2) empowers the Tribunal to entertain an application after the period where the applicant satisfies it that there was sufficient cause for not applying in time, so the one year period for a death claim is a real discipline but not an absolute wall, and a family that learns of the scheme late should plead its cause rather than assume the claim is dead. Applicants before the Tribunal are not required to appear through a lawyer, and claimants who need representation and cannot afford it may approach the legal services institutions for aid, the statutory framework for which, with the district and state authorities it constitutes, is set out in the article on the Legal Services Authorities Act 1987.

The Tribunal is also where the evidence question is decided, and the evidentiary position deserves a paragraph of its own because it is where claims are won and lost in practice. The claimant’s case ordinarily rests on the affidavit of a dependant or of the injured passenger, the journey ticket where it survives, the police record of the occurrence, including the first information report and the inquest papers, the post mortem report in a death case, and the treatment records in an injury case. The administration’s case ordinarily rests on the records of the train and the station, the report of its own inquiry and any material said to establish an exclusion. A piece of paper discipline governs outcomes out of proportion to its glamour: the ticket or reservation record, the police papers, the post mortem and medical records and the identity documents of the claimants are the file on which the Tribunal acts, and keeping that file complete and legible, using an office file viewer for opening the Excel, Word and presentation files in the claim record where the papers have been scanned or tabulated, is the unglamorous work on which a meritorious claim depends. The Tribunal may also award interest, and appellate courts have directed interest where payment of an established entitlement was delayed, so that the time value of a sum fixed by rule is not wholly lost to the claimant by the pace of the proceedings.

The consumer forum boundary

The proposition that the Tribunal’s jurisdiction bars every complaint against the railways is wrong, and the error has a precise source. Section 15 of the Tribunal Act bars other courts and authorities from the matters referred to in Section 13, and only those matters: goods claims, compensation for death and injury under the two sections, and fare and freight refunds. A complaint that does not fall within those heads is not touched by the bar. A passenger’s complaint about a delay that caused a missed connection and a proved loss, about a reservation that the administration’s system failed to honour, about the condition of a compartment, about catering or about the conduct of staff is a complaint of deficiency in service under the consumer protection legislation, and consumer commissions have entertained such complaints on the reasoning that the service was hired for consideration and the grievance is not one of the matters assigned to the Tribunal. The two jurisdictions are therefore allocated by subject matter rather than by defendant: the same administration answers before the Tribunal for the statutory compensation and goods and refund claims, and before a consumer commission for the quality of the service it sold. The general treatment of how sectoral tribunals and consumer fora divide a field, in a context where the same boundary question recurs, is taken up in the comparison of forum choices for homebuyers, and the reasoning there about assigned jurisdiction and residual consumer jurisdiction applies with equal force here.

Two qualifications keep that statement accurate. First, a claimant cannot reframe a death or injury claim as a service complaint to escape the Tribunal or the prescribed amounts: where the substance of the grievance is compensation for death or injury in an accident or untoward incident, Section 13 assigns it to the Tribunal and Section 15 bars the commission. Second, the consumer route gives no access to the Chapter XIII sums and creates no strict liability; it compensates a proved deficiency with a proved loss, which is a different and usually smaller inquiry. Used properly, the boundary is a benefit to passengers rather than a trap, since the complaints passengers most commonly have about rail travel are service complaints that the Act itself nowhere remedies, and the consumer legislation is the only statutory instrument that reaches them.

The amounts: fixed by rule, revised by notification

The Act prescribes no figure. Sections 124 and 124A make the administration liable to such extent as may be prescribed, and the prescription is in the Railway Accidents and Untoward Incidents (Compensation) Rules, 1990. Rule 3 of those Rules adopts a Schedule. Part I of the Schedule fixes the amount for death at rupees eight lakhs. Part II fixes rupees eight lakhs for the gravest injuries the Schedule enumerates, including the loss of both hands or amputation at higher sites, the loss of a hand and a foot, double amputation through leg or thigh, loss of sight to an extent that renders the claimant unable to perform any work for which eyesight is essential, very severe facial disfigurement and absolute deafness. Part III fixes graduated amounts for other specified injuries, descending through the schedule of amputations and losses of members and digits, from rupees seven lakhs twenty thousand down to the smallest scheduled sums. Rule 3 also provides that an injury not specified in Part II or Part III which, in the opinion of the Tribunal, deprives a person of all capacity to do any work carries rupees eight lakhs, and that compensation for an injury resulting in pain and suffering, not otherwise specified, is such amount as the Tribunal determines to be reasonable on the medical evidence and the circumstances, subject to the rule that where more than one such injury is caused by the same occurrence the total for them shall not exceed rupees one lakh sixty thousand. Rule 4 imposes the overall limit: the total compensation payable under Rule 3 shall in no case exceed rupees eight lakhs in respect of any one person. Rule 3 further provides that where compensation has been paid for an injury and the injured person subsequently dies as a result of the injury, a further compensation equal to the difference between the amount payable for death and the amount already paid becomes payable.

The history of the figures is part of their meaning. The sum for death stood at rupees four lakhs for many years and was doubled to rupees eight lakhs by the Railway Accidents and Untoward Incidents (Compensation) Amendment Rules, 2016, notified as G.S.R. 1165(E) on 22 December 2016 and in force from 1 January 2017, which doubled the amounts across the Schedule. Before that revision the death figure had been raised in earlier revisions of the same Rules, each time by notification rather than by amendment of the Act. The location of the amounts in rules has two consequences that the brief for this article directs attention to and that readers consistently miss. The first is that any figure quoted in a book, a judgment summary or a website is a figure as at a date, and a claimant is entitled to the amount prescribed for the claim at the relevant time, so the Rules and not any secondary source must be checked. The second concerns which revision governs where the occurrence and the decision fall on different sides of a revision. In Rina Devi the Supreme Court addressed the position and held that the claimant is entitled to the benefit of the higher amount where the rules have been revised upward between the occurrence and the award, so that a family is not confined to a superseded figure merely because the proceedings outlasted the revision. Both consequences follow from the same design choice, and the design choice is defensible on its own terms: a legislature that fixes a sum in a statute must return to the floor to change it, while a sum in rules can be revised by the government of the day, though the defence of the design has to concede that revisions have in fact been infrequent and long separated.

Separate from the Rules stands ex gratia payment, and confusing the two is a further standard error. Ex gratia is an administrative payment made by the railway administration on announcement, without admission of liability and without any application to the Tribunal, ordinarily in the immediate aftermath of a major occurrence, in amounts fixed by the announcement for the class of case. It is not compensation under Chapter XIII, it is not governed by the Schedule, it creates no precedent and it does not depend on the exclusions. A family may receive an ex gratia payment and still pursue the statutory claim, and the statutory claim is neither enlarged nor reduced by the announcement, though an administration may in practice seek to adjust a payment it has already made. The distinction matters because public reporting of a major occurrence habitually leads with the ex gratia figure, and a reader who mistakes that figure for the legal entitlement misunderstands both the amount and the route by which the balance, where a balance exists, is recovered.

Why are the compensation amounts found in rules rather than in the Act itself?

Because Parliament fixed the liability and delegated the price. Sections 124 and 124A create the obligation and cap it at the prescribed extent, and the Compensation Rules of 1990 carry the Schedule, so a revision of the sums needs a notification rather than an amending Act, as the doubling of 2016 shows.

Two transport statutes, two measures of a life

The obvious comparison for the railway scheme is the motor accident scheme, and it is drawn at the comparison the brief directs, in the article on the Motor Vehicles Act 1988. The two schemes share the no fault idea and differ in almost everything else. Under the motor vehicles legislation, a claimant may proceed on the structured formula of the Second Schedule tradition and its successors, in which compensation is computed from the victim’s income, age and a multiplier, with conventional additions, so that the death of a high earning professional is compensated at a multiple of the death of a daily wage worker, and sums in contested cases run far beyond eight lakhs. Under the railway scheme, the amount is a flat scheduled figure that is the same for every passenger who dies, whatever the passenger earned, whatever the passenger’s age and whatever the dependants have lost. The railway passenger’s family trades the possibility of a large assessed award for certainty, speed and freedom from any inquiry into fault or into the deceased’s income. The motor claimant keeps the possibility and bears the inquiry.

Each side of that trade deserves its strongest statement. For the flat figure, the argument is equality of treatment at the point of catastrophe and administrative simplicity: the Tribunal can decide a railway claim on status, event and exclusion alone, without actuarial evidence, and a poor family receives the same sum on the same proof as a rich one, which in a system carrying the population the railways carry is a defensible conception of what a no fault state payment is for. Against it, the argument is that eight lakhs is a modest sum for the loss of a family’s earner, that it has been revised rarely, that it takes no account of the number or ages of dependants, and that the comparison with the road regime, where the state also stands behind a no fault idea for a smaller class of cases at a fixed sum and behind fault based assessment beyond it, exposes the railway figure as a payment of consolation rather than of compensation in any full sense. The claimant who wants the fuller measure has the election preserved by Section 128 and the general law of negligence, but electing means proving fault against the administration and losing the chapter’s certainty, which most families, rationally, will not do. The verdict this article reaches is that the flat figure is coherent as welfare and inadequate as damages, and that the infrequency of revision, rather than the choice of a schedule, is the feature of the scheme hardest to defend, since a figure fixed in rules can be revisited by notification whenever the government chooses and for long periods no government has chosen.

The administration’s case, stated fairly

The counter reading the brief requires to be addressed is the operator’s, and it is not a weak case. A railway that carries an extremely large number of passengers daily, in conditions of crowding that no timetable abolishes, is made liable without fault for every accidental fall from a train, including falls whose causes no inquiry can reconstruct. The exposure is therefore not calibrated to any failure of the operator: a passenger who misjudges a moving train, who leans from a doorway, who attempts to board in the crush at an unmanned halt, generates the same entitlement as a passenger injured by an equipment failure, and the only instrument the statute gives the administration for separating the genuinely self caused case from the system’s case is the proviso’s five exclusions, each of which it must prove against a sympathetic claimant before a tribunal conscious of the legislation’s beneficial purpose. On the administration’s account, the exclusions are not technicalities for escaping liability but the entire moral content of the scheme, and an interpretation that reads intention into self inflicted injury so strictly that almost no fall can ever be self inflicted converts strict liability into absolute liability and reads the proviso close to vanishing point.

The claimant’s case, stated with equal force, is that the passenger who buys a ticket is entitled to arrive, that the bargain of carriage includes being carried safely in a system whose risks, crowding, open doorways on much of the stock, and stops of seconds at minor stations, are created by the operator and not by the passenger. The causes of a fall at speed, at night, from a crowded doorway are rarely provable by the family that survives it: the witnesses are strangers, the body is found by the line, and the records are the operator’s. To place the burden of reconstructing the fall on the bereaved would empty the chapter of content, which is why the courts place the threshold burden modestly, dischargeable by affidavit, and the burden on the exclusions squarely on the administration. The exclusions have at times been invoked on thin material, on the circumstance of the body beside the track and on inference from the absence of a ticket, and the appellate correction of those refusals is the case law working as the scheme intends. The series thesis this article belongs to is visible in the shape of the litigation: where liability is strict, the argument migrates to the exceptions, and the railway chapter is the clearest instance in Indian transport law of a body of case law that looks technical, all definitions and provisos, until the structure is seen, after which it reads as a sustained negotiation over five clauses between a state operator exposed without fault and families claiming without proof. On the evidence of the decided cases, the negotiation has settled in the claimant’s favour on the meaning of the clauses and in the administration’s favour on the amount, and a reader who grasps that settlement grasps the Act.

The falling cases: how the second limb grew

The accidental falling limb of the untoward incident definition has generated the largest body of case law under the Act, and its development explains the shape of the modern claim. The starting point is the text inserted in 1994: the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers. Read narrowly, the words might have been confined to the passenger who slips from a moving train in mid journey. Read in the light of the legislation’s purpose, they reach the passenger who falls while getting on or getting off, who is the passenger most at risk on a system where trains halt briefly and platforms are crowded. The Andhra Pradesh High Court took the wider view early, in Union of India v Kurukundu Balakrishnaiah, holding that accidental falling would include a passenger trying to alight from a train, board a train, or any other like action. The Supreme Court adopted and generalised that reading in Prabhakaran Vijaya Kumar, where the passenger had fallen while trying to board, and where the Court held that a restrictive meaning would deprive a large number of railway passengers of compensation and that the expression must be read to cover the fall in the course of boarding and alighting as much as the fall in the course of the journey. The reasoning is expressly populist in the technical sense: the Court observed that in a country where very large numbers travel by train because they cannot afford any other mode, a narrow construction would defeat the provision for precisely the class it was enacted to protect.

The second stage of the development concerned not the fall but the answer made to it. Administrations resisted fall claims by characterising the passenger’s conduct: the fall was self inflicted because the passenger was careless, or the death was suicidal because the body was found by the track, or the act was criminal because the passenger was travelling on the footboard. The High Courts divided on the first of those answers. The Kerala High Court in Joseph PT held that since self inflicted injury is a concept distinct from attempted suicide, intention is not required for it, and that injury suffered through the passenger’s own negligence could amount to self inflicted injury. The Bombay High Court in Pushpa took a similar course in the case of a hawker who died boarding a train. The Delhi High Court in Shayam Narayan reasoned along comparable lines. Against that line stood decisions treating the proviso as requiring something closer to a deliberate act, and the conflict was bound for the Supreme Court because the two readings produced opposite results on the commonest facts in the jurisdiction, the crowded boarding fall.

Rina Devi resolved the conflict on 9 May 2018, and its propositions organise the whole field. The Court held that the concept of self inflicted injury requires intention to inflict the injury and not mere negligence of any particular degree, because the contrary reading would invoke the principle of contributory negligence in a liability based on the no fault theory, a principle the scheme excludes, as the corresponding motor vehicles jurisprudence on no fault claims had already established. It followed that death or injury in the course of boarding or deboarding a train is an untoward incident entitling the victim to compensation and does not fall under the proviso merely on the plea that the victim was negligent. The Court did not hold that every self caused fall is compensated: the judgment preserves the proviso for the case whose facts show a deliberate act, and the earlier decision it discussed, in which a passenger’s conduct was found to have been undertaken with full knowledge of the imminent possibility of endangering life or limb in a manner described as totally imprudent, irrational and unmindful of consequences, marks the territory on the far side of the line. Between negligence, which never excludes, and that extreme case, which may, lies a narrow band in which tribunals must characterise facts, and it is in that band that contested fall litigation is concentrated.

The third stage concerned proof of status rather than proof of the fall, and it is treated separately below. Taken together, the three stages explain why the modern railway claim has the forensic shape it has. The event is rarely in dispute, since the fall, the attack or the collision is recorded by the police and the administration alike. Fault is not in dispute, since the statute excludes it. The contest is over characterisation, whether the case can be brought within an exclusion, and over status, whether the person was a bona fide passenger. A body of law that appears from outside to be about accidents is in substance about a proviso and a definition, which is the series pattern for strict liability schemes: the legislature settles the liability, and the litigation migrates to the exceptions and the gateways.

Passenger status: the ticket, the affidavit and the burden

The requirement that the victim be a passenger sounds elementary and generates a disproportionate share of refused claims, because the paradigm case is the one in which the proof is hardest: a body found beside the track or on the platform, no ticket recovered, the family learning of the death from the police. Three questions recur. Was the deceased travelling at all, or present on railway premises for another purpose? If travelling, was the travel authorised, by a ticket, a pass or permission under Section 55? And who must prove what, where the administration holds the records of ticket issue and the claimant holds only the family’s knowledge of the journey planned?

The older authority under the predecessor statute, Raj Kumari, approached the burden from the administration’s side: since travelling without a ticket was punishable and the administration has special knowledge of whether a ticket was issued, the burden of proving that the deceased was not a bona fide passenger rested on the administration, an approach that led some courts toward presuming bona fide status for any person found dead or injured on railway premises. The Delhi High Court in Gurcharan Singh took the other starting point, that the initial onus to prove that the death or injury was to a bona fide passenger lies always on the claimant, while accepting that the onus can shift to the railways where the claimant files an affidavit of the relevant facts, since a negative onus cannot be placed on the administration at the threshold. Rina Devi adopted the second structure and made it general. The initial burden is the claimant’s. It is discharged by an affidavit stating the facts relied on, the journey undertaken, the ticket purchased, the circumstances in which the deceased came to be on the train. On that affidavit the burden shifts to the administration to disprove the case, and the administration’s superior access to its own records, reservation charts, issue registers and the reports of its staff is the justification for placing the displaced burden there. A claim therefore does not fail for the single reason that no ticket was found on the body, a point the Supreme Court applied again in Doli Rani Saha v Union of India, where the affidavit, the investigating officer’s findings and the post mortem report indicating death from head injuries caused by blunt force were together held sufficient to establish bona fide travel in the face of a minor discrepancy in the estimated time of death, the Court observing that a margin of error of about half a day in such an estimate is not disproportionate where the remaining evidence is corroborated.

That settlement has a discipline for claimants as well as a protection. The affidavit is not a formality: it must state facts, and a claim supported by nothing beyond assertion, with no account of the journey and no corroborating paper, may fail at the threshold because the initial burden was never discharged. The prudent claimant’s file therefore assembles the journey’s traces wherever they exist, the reservation record or the counterfoil, a fellow passenger’s account, the record of a telephone call or a message fixing the plan to travel, the police papers and the medical record, and presents them as a coherent account rather than as isolated documents. For the administration, the settlement means that a refusal must be built on material: evidence that no ticket was issued for the journey claimed, that the deceased was not on the train, or that an exclusion applies, and not on the mere absence of a ticket from the effects returned to the family. Tribunals and appellate courts have been consistent in treating the second kind of refusal as unsustainable, and the consistency is itself a product of the statutory design, since a scheme that made the lost ticket fatal would deny compensation in the class of case, the lone traveller killed outright, where the need the chapter addresses is at its maximum.

One more status question deserves record, because it arises from the platform rather than the train. The explanation to Section 124A brings in the platform ticket holder for untoward incidents, and the definition of untoward incident includes violence in the waiting hall, the cloak room, the booking office and on the platform. The two provisions together mean that the bystander at the station is protected against the violent limb but not against mishaps unconnected with violence: the platform ticket holder who trips on the platform surface has no claim under the chapter, since a fall from a train is impossible for him and a fall on the platform is within neither limb, and his remedy, if the surface was defective through the administration’s negligence, lies in the general law. The line is arbitrary at its edge, as lines in scheduled schemes tend to be, and it is drawn by the text rather than by any tribunal’s preference.

The carrier chapters in depth: goods, notice and the measure of responsibility

Chapter XI rewards a fuller account than the headline treatment given earlier, because booked luggage and parcels travel under it and because its architecture shows how differently the Act treats property from persons. Section 93 states the general responsibility of a railway administration as carrier of goods: the administration is responsible for loss, destruction, damage, deterioration or non-delivery of a consignment arising from any cause, subject to the chapter’s exceptions, on a standard modelled on the responsibility of a bailee, the duty being to take as much care of the goods as a person of ordinary prudence takes of his own goods of the same bulk, quality and value. The exceptions that follow qualify that responsibility in defined cases, including act of God, act of war, arrest or restraint by government, and defects inherent in the goods themselves. Section 97 deals with goods carried at owner’s risk rate, under which the administration’s responsibility is reduced and the burden of proving negligence shifts in the manner the section states. Section 99 governs responsibility after termination of transit, treating the administration’s position for a defined period as that of a warehouseman and thereafter excluding responsibility in the circumstances stated. Section 106 requires notice of a claim for compensation for loss of a consignment, and for refund of an overcharge, to be served on the administration within six months of the entrustment of the goods or the payment of the overcharge, a condition precedent that has defeated more goods claims than any question of liability, and which has no counterpart for the death and injury claims under Chapter XIII, where the discipline is the Tribunal Act’s limitation period instead.

The monetary structure of the goods regime also differs from the passenger regime in a way that illustrates the Act’s two philosophies. For goods, liability is measured by value, and the Act supplies machinery for the consignor who wants the full value protected: where the consignment consists of articles of the scheduled valuable kind, or where the consignor declares the value and pays the percentage charge the Act prescribes, the ceiling that otherwise limits compensation by reference to weight or to a fixed sum per consignment is displaced and the declared value governs. For the passenger, no corresponding election exists: a passenger cannot declare his own value, pay a percentage charge and enlarge the eight lakhs. The contrast is not an oversight. Goods vary in value by orders of magnitude and their owners can price the risk; lives, in the legislature’s scheduled scheme, are compensated at a uniform figure that no fare supplement varies. A passenger who books luggage should still use the goods machinery as it is designed to be used, by booking, by obtaining the receipt and, for articles of significant value, by declaring the value and paying the charge, because each of those acts changes the legal answer if the consignment is lost, while the unbooked bag in the passenger’s charge remains, under Section 100, the passenger’s own risk except against proved negligence.

The claims practice under Chapter XI also runs on a different clock, and the difference traps the unwary. The notice under Section 106 must be given within six months, while the application to the Tribunal for a goods claim may be made within three years of entrustment under Section 17 of the Tribunal Act, and the Tribunal Act adds that no goods application shall be preferred until three months have expired after the intimation of the claim to the administration, giving the administration a statutory window to settle without proceedings. The sequence, notice within six months, a three month wait, an application within three years, is a procedural code in miniature, and it has no application to the bereaved family claiming under Section 124A, for whom the only clock is the one year under the Tribunal Act with the condonation power behind it. Articles and advice columns that merge the two regimes, quoting the six month notice as if it governed death claims or the one year period as if it governed goods, mislead both audiences, and the separation maintained in this article between the carriage chapters and the liability chapter follows the statute’s own.

Rates, rest and the working chapters

For completeness of the pillar, the chapters this article has treated at headline level should be placed on the record with their functions stated, since a statute pillar that omits them misrepresents the Act’s centre of gravity, which lies as much in the economics of a state carrier as in the rights of its passengers. Chapter VI governs the fixation of rates. The Central Government holds the power to fix, by order, the rates for the carriage of passengers and goods and the charges for other services, and to classify commodities for that purpose, and the chapter establishes the machinery, including the tribunal dealt with in Chapter VII, for complaints that a rate charged is unreasonable. The Rates Tribunal, as the Chapter VII body is known, is a standing tribunal distinct from the Railway Claims Tribunal, with an advisory and adjudicatory role on the reasonableness of rates and charges, and its existence records a deliberate separation in the Act between the commercial disputes of traders about what the railway charges and the compensation disputes of passengers about what the railway pays. The two tribunals are habitually confused in commentary, and the confusion matters because their jurisdictions do not overlap: a freight dispute does not go to the Claims Tribunal except insofar as it is a refund claim within Section 13 of the Tribunal Act, and a death claim does not go to the Rates Tribunal at all.

Chapter V, on the opening of railways, has been noticed in the safety section: a railway may not be opened for the public carriage of passengers without the Commissioner’s inspection and report that the opening involves no danger to the public using it, and the chapter arms the Central Government to prohibit the use of rolling stock and to close a line that has become unsafe. Chapter XIV regulates the hours of work and periods of rest of railway servants, classifying employments and prescribing the limits and rest intervals the administration must observe, a labour welfare code embedded in the operating statute, whose presence reflects the Act’s origin as the single statute of a departmental employer. Chapter X contains special provisions for goods booked to notified stations, enabling the administration to require, for congested stations notified under the chapter, that consignments be removed within the time allowed and dealing with the consequences of failure. Chapter XVI then gathers the miscellaneous provisions on which the whole rests: the protection of action taken in good faith, the rule that railway servants are public servants for specified purposes, the restriction on execution against railway property, so that an award is satisfied through the administration’s budgetary process rather than by attachment of the instruments of the service, the representation of the administration in proceedings, the general power of the Central Government to make rules for carrying out the purposes of the Act, the requirement that rules be laid before Parliament, and the repeal of the 1890 Act with savings for things done under it.

The rule making power is the hinge between the Act and the passenger’s daily experience, and it is where the boundary this article has maintained throughout becomes concrete. Under Section 198 and the chapter specific powers, the government makes the rules that govern refunds on cancelled tickets, the conditions of reservation, the charges for cloak rooms and retiring rooms, the diseases that engage Section 56, the returns of accidents and a hundred other matters that passengers experience as the railway’s law. Those rules are subordinate legislation, valid within the Act’s four corners, amendable by notification, and enforceable according to their terms. They are not provisions of the Act, and a passenger’s entitlement that rests on them rests on a different and more changeable foundation than the entitlement to compensation, which Parliament enacted in the statute itself and which no rule can reduce. That is the precise sense of the distinction insisted on at the start: the Act’s promise to the passenger is narrow, hard and statutory, and almost everything else the passenger deals with is rule, manual or practice, valuable in its place and misdescribed when dressed as the Act.

Amendment and after: how the scheme reached its present shape

The scheme described in this article is the product of three legislative moments, and placing them in sequence clarifies what kind of statute the Railways Act is. The first is the consolidation of 1989 itself, Act 24 of 1989, in force from 1 July 1990, which carried the accident liability of the predecessor statute into Chapter XIII in the Section 124 form: liability without fault for death and injury in an accident to a train, at amounts prescribed by rule, claimed before the Tribunal that the Act of 1987 had created in place of the older Claims Commissioner machinery, whose jurisdiction under Section 82A of the 1890 Act the Tribunal Act’s Section 13 expressly carried forward. The second moment is the amendment of 1994, Act 28 of 1994, effective from 1 August 1994, which inserted the definition of untoward incident and Section 124A and amended the Tribunal Act in parallel so that the new claims fell within Section 13. The 1994 choices are the scheme’s moral core: the extension to violence recognises that a passenger murdered or robbed on a train is as much a casualty of the system that confined him in it as the passenger injured by its machinery, and the extension to accidental falls recognises where, in practice, passengers die. The third moment is not an amendment of the Act at all but the revision of the Compensation Rules, culminating in the doubling of 2016, which shows the scheme’s quantum being adjusted through the delegated channel Parliament designed for it.

Later amendments have touched the Act at its edges rather than its centre: the amendments of 2003, 2005 and 2008 adjusted the works, land and authority provisions, including the constitution of the Rail Land Development Authority and the special railway project acquisition code in Chapter IVA, and the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 amended the penalty framework in the direction of decriminalising minor defaults in favour of monetary consequences, a direction consistent with the Act’s own longstanding distinction between the excess charge collected administratively and the prosecution reserved for fraud. The compensation chapter has needed no later amendment because its content was completed in 1994 and its price is set elsewhere. Reform discussion about the passenger’s position therefore tends to aim at the wrong target when it proposes amending the Act: the live questions are the adequacy and revision of the scheduled amounts, which are matters of rule, the speed and accessibility of the Tribunal, which are matters of administration and of the Tribunal Act, and the proof practices at the threshold of the claim, which are matters of case law. The statute itself, a consolidation with one great amendment, has been stable for three decades, and its stability is part of what a pillar article should record: the rights a passenger’s family will invoke in a crisis were settled in their structure by 1994 and have been elaborated since by judges and rule makers rather than by Parliament. A researcher approaching the Act for the first time should therefore read it in its layers and in their order: the enacted text of 1989 for the frame, the amendment of 1994 for the liability that dominates its modern use, the Compensation Rules in their latest revision for the price of every outcome, and the Supreme Court’s decisions for the meaning of the proviso and the burden, since each layer answers a question the layer beneath it leaves open, and no single layer, read alone, states the passenger’s true position.

Dependants and the death sum: who receives, and how the Tribunal handles a family

The death claim is a family claim, and Section 123’s definition of dependant is the gate through which the family must pass. The definition is a list, not a test of actual dependency in the first instance: the wife, the husband, the son and the daughter of the deceased passenger are within it, as is the parent where the deceased passenger was unmarried or a minor, and the definition extends to specified relations beyond the nuclear family, including a minor brother, an unmarried sister, a widowed sister where the conditions the clause states are met, a widowed daughter in law and a minor child of a predeceased son or daughter, in the cases where those relations were wholly dependant on the deceased or, for the extended list, dependant in the measure the definition requires. A claimant outside the list has no standing under the chapter whatever the emotional or economic reality, and a claimant inside it claims by status. The design mirrors the corresponding definition in the fatal accidents and workmen’s compensation tradition from which the chapter descends, and it embodies a legislative judgment that the class of persons a scheduled payment is for should be fixed by relationship and stated in advance, rather than reconstructed in every case from the household’s arrangements.

The sum itself is a single sum for the death, not a sum per dependant, and the Tribunal’s task where several dependants claim is to receive the entitlement for the family and to direct its payment among them. The Tribunal has the powers necessary to that task, including the power to protect the shares of minors by directing deposit and staged release, and appellate practice under the Tribunal scheme has approved arrangements under which an award is held and disbursed through structured deposits so that a lump sum paid for a death is not dissipated before the children it must support are grown. Those arrangements are matters of the Tribunal’s procedure and of the directions in the individual award rather than of the Railways Act itself, and they are noticed here for a practical reason: a family that understands the award as a single scheduled sum, to be apportioned by the Tribunal among the dependants the definition admits, will not be misled by the expectation, common in the aftermath of a widely reported occurrence, that each member of the family carries a separate entitlement of eight lakhs. The Rule 4 ceiling, rupees eight lakhs in respect of any one person, refers to the deceased person whose death is compensated, and one death generates one Part I sum.

The injury claim is structurally different and the difference is worth stating beside it. The injured passenger claims for himself, the Schedule prices his injury by its anatomical and functional description in Parts II and III, and the Tribunal’s medical evidence inquiry, the assessment of whether the loss falls within a scheduled description or within the residuary provision for injuries that deprive a person of all capacity to work, takes the place of the status inquiry that dominates the death claim. Pain and suffering beyond the scheduled descriptions is compensated, if at all, through the residuary route with its own ceiling, and not by enlarging the scheduled figure. A passenger who survives with injuries therefore faces a genuinely forensic exercise in matching medical fact to scheduled language, while a family claiming for a death faces an inquiry into status and event. The same Tribunal conducts both, under the same two sections, and the contrast between the two exercises is a further illustration of the scheme’s character: it prices outcomes by schedule, and all of its litigation is about which schedule entry, if any, the proved facts engage.

The exclusion case in practice: how a refusal is built and tested

Because the exclusions decide most contested claims, the way an exclusion case is constructed and dismantled deserves a section of its own. The administration’s material is assembled from the machinery the earlier sections described: the report of the occurrence from the station and the train crew, the record of the Government Railway Police, the inquest proceedings, the post mortem report, the findings of the departmental inquiry and, where one was held, material from the Commissioner’s inquiry. From that record the administration selects the clause of the proviso it says the facts satisfy and pleads it in its reply before the Tribunal. A suicide plea is built on evidence of intention: a note, a witnessed act, a history placed in evidence, or circumstances said to admit of no other explanation, and it fails where the record shows only that the deceased was found dead by the line, since that circumstance is as consistent with a fall as with a leap and the administration must do more than point to it. A self inflicted injury plea, after Rina Devi, must be built on evidence from which intention to inflict the injury can be found, and administrations that plead it on the footing that the passenger was careless, boarded a moving train or stood at a doorway plead a case the Supreme Court has held is not the clause’s case. An intoxication plea requires evidence of the state, ordinarily medical, and a plea that rests on assertion or on the smell of liquor reported by an interested witness without medical support is vulnerable in cross examination and on appeal. A criminal act plea requires the act to be identified and its criminal character established, and the courts’ reluctance to let minor travelling offences forfeit compensation has confined its successful use to cases where the passenger’s own unlawful conduct was the direct engine of the harm.

The claimant’s answer is built symmetrically. The affidavit sets up the journey and the event. The medical and post mortem record is read for what it actually shows about the mechanism of death or injury, and inconsistencies between the administration’s inquiry narrative and the medical findings are exposed. Witnesses to the journey, fellow passengers, the person who saw the deceased board, are examined where available. Above all, the claimant holds the administration to the discipline of the proviso: identify the clause, prove its ingredients, and accept that an unproved exclusion leaves the strict liability intact. Appeals to the High Court under Section 23 of the Tribunal Act are the mechanism by which errors in that discipline are corrected, and the appellate reports show a pattern that any practitioner in the field will recognise: refusals reversed because the Tribunal accepted an exclusion on inference rather than proof, because it treated negligence as self infliction before Rina Devi settled the point or persisted in doing so after, because it demanded the ticket as a condition of the claim, or because it assessed the claimant’s threshold burden as if the affidavit route did not exist. The converse pattern exists as well, awards reversed where the event itself was not proved to be within either gateway, and the two patterns together mark the true boundaries of the scheme more accurately than any summary, including this one, can do.

Two features of this forensic landscape connect back to the article’s opening distinction between statute, rule and practice. The first is the false statement offence in Section 148 of the Act, which punishes a false statement in an application for compensation: the scheme that asks almost nothing of the claimant by way of proof of fault asks everything by way of honesty, and a fabricated journey or an invented dependency is a criminal matter and not merely a failed claim. The second is the interim relief provision in Section 126, under which the administration may grant relief in advance of the Tribunal’s determination in the circumstances the scheme contemplates, a provision whose function is to put money in a family’s hands at the point of maximum need without prejudging the claim. Interim relief and ex gratia payment are cousins in purpose and strangers in source, the one statutory and the other administrative, and a family’s adviser should pursue the statutory claim undeterred by either, since neither diminishes the scheduled entitlement the Tribunal will award.

From Claims Commissioners to a Tribunal: the forum’s own history

The Tribunal that decides the modern claim has a history that explains its design, and the history begins under the predecessor statute. Under the Indian Railways Act, 1890, compensation for death and injury in accidents was governed by Section 82A, and claims under it were inquired into by Claims Commissioners appointed for the purpose, an arrangement under which the forum for the money question sat closer to the administrative world of the railways than the modern scheme permits. The Railway Claims Tribunal Act, 1987, Act 54 of 1987, was Parliament’s answer to that arrangement and to the delays of the ordinary courts: it constituted a specialised Railway Claims Tribunal, vested it by Section 13 with the jurisdictions described in the forum section above, including expressly the compensation jurisdiction under Section 82A of the old Act, and provided by Section 24 for the transfer to the Tribunal of the suits, claims and proceedings pending before courts, Claims Commissioners and other authorities on the appointed day whose causes of action would have fallen within the Tribunal’s jurisdiction had they arisen after it. When the 1989 Act replaced the 1890 Act, the compensation sections changed their numbers, from Section 82A to Sections 124 and, in 1994, 124A, and the Tribunal Act was amended in parallel, so that the forum’s jurisdiction followed the liability from statute to statute without a gap. The 1994 amendment of the Tribunal Act, made by the same Act 28 of 1994 that inserted Section 124A, extended Section 13 to the new untoward incident claims from the same effective date, 1 August 1994, a piece of legislative housekeeping without which the new entitlement would have had no forum.

The Tribunal’s composition reflects its function. It sits in benches distributed across the country, each bench combining judicial and technical membership, the judicial member drawn from the world of the higher judiciary and the technical member from the world of railway administration and accounts, so that the forum that decides whether a fall was accidental and what a consignment was worth has both legal discipline and operational knowledge within it. It is not bound by the procedure laid down by the Code of Civil Procedure and is guided instead by the principles of natural justice, with statutory powers to regulate its own procedure and the civil court’s powers for summoning and enforcing the attendance of witnesses, requiring discovery and production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit and issuing commissions. The informality is purposeful and it is bounded: the Tribunal must hear both sides, must decide on material placed before it and must give an order from which the Section 23 appeal can be taken, and appellate courts correct it when informality hardens into a refusal to follow the settled burden structure or the Schedule’s limits. For the claimant the design delivers what the 1987 Parliament intended, a forum near the place of the occurrence, proceeding without a filing fee on the claims that matter most, and capable of deciding a documented claim without the apparatus of a civil trial. For the scheme as a whole, the forum’s history carries the same lesson as the liability’s history: the passenger’s position under the modern Act is the product of deliberate institutional choices made in 1987, 1989 and 1994, each of which moved a question, the forum, the liability and the quantum respectively, out of the general law and into a dedicated statutory settlement.

What Chapter XIII does not cover: the honest negative

A pillar article owes the reader the negative space of its scheme, and Chapter XIII has more of it than its reputation suggests. The chapter does not compensate a passenger for mental suffering, shock or grief standing alone: the entitlement is for death and for injury, and the scheduled sums answer those outcomes and no others, so the passenger who survives an occurrence physically unharmed and the relative who suffers by witnessing it are outside the chapter, whatever the general law might say to a claim framed differently against a negligent defendant. The chapter does not compensate the passenger whose property is stolen by a fellow passenger or a thief, for property is the province of Section 100 and the goods chapters, with their booking gateway and their negligence limb. It does not compensate the passenger who is injured on the way to the station, on premises outside the station’s precincts, or in a vehicle the railway does not work, for the definition of untoward incident ends at the precincts and the working of the railway. It does not compensate the person who, without a ticket or platform ticket or the status of a railway servant on duty, is present on the platform and injured by violence, for the explanation to Section 124A draws the covered class by purchase and status. It does not compensate for an accident to a goods train in which no passenger is involved, or for injury to a person at a level crossing who is travelling by road, a class of case that the motor vehicles regime and the general law must carry. And it does not compensate delay, cancellation, misconnection or discomfort, which are service failures and not accidents or untoward incidents on any reading of the definitions.

That catalogue is not a complaint about the Act. Every scheduled scheme is a set of lines, and the lines of Chapter XIII are drawn where the 1989 Parliament and the 1994 amendment placed them: around the train, around the station, around the ticket holding and duty travelling classes, and around death and physical injury as the compensable outcomes. The grievances that fall outside are not thereby declared worthless; they are assigned, by the statute’s silence, to the instruments that do reach them, the consumer legislation for service, the goods chapters for property, the general law of negligence for the rest, each with its own burdens of proof that the chapter’s beneficiaries are spared. Understanding the Act means holding both halves of that position at once: within its lines, one of the most claimant favourable liability regimes in Indian law, strict, scheduled and procedurally accessible; outside them, no promise at all, and a family or a passenger who mistakes the boundary in either direction misunderstands the statute that this article set out to explain.

The penalty chapter mapped

Chapter XV runs from Section 137 to Section 182 and is the Act’s penal code in miniature, and since the passenger meets it at the ticket barrier and the claimant meets it in Section 148, its full shape belongs in a pillar article. Its provisions fall into families. The revenue family protects the fare: Section 137 punishes fraudulent travel and the fraudulent use of tickets, Section 138 levies the excess charge examined earlier, Section 142 punishes the transfer of tickets, Section 143 the unauthorised business of procuring and supplying tickets, and Section 157 the altering or defacing of a pass or ticket. The order family protects the working of the service: Section 141 punishes needless interference with the means of communication in a train, Section 144 prohibits hawking and begging in carriages and on premises, Section 145 punishes drunkenness, nuisance and the use of obscene or abusive language, Section 146 punishes obstructing a railway servant in his duties, Section 155 punishes entering a reserved compartment or resisting entry into a compartment not reserved, and Section 156 punishes travelling on the roof, step or footboard of a train or on an engine. The safety family protects life and the integrity of the line: Section 150 punishes maliciously wrecking or attempting to wreck a train with the chapter’s gravest consequences, Section 151 punishes damage to or destruction of railway property, Section 152 punishes maliciously endangering the safety of persons travelling by railway, Section 153 punishes endangering safety by rash or negligent act or omission, Section 154 addresses the same field from the side of the person who suffers the act to be done, and Section 160 punishes opening or breaking a level crossing gate. Around those families sit the staff and process provisions: Section 148, the false statement in a compensation application, which this article has noticed; provisions punishing a railway servant who endangers safety through drunkenness or disobedience of rules; and the procedural sections on arrest without warrant for specified offences, on the trial of offences by magistrates and on the place of trial.

The grading inside the chapter is its jurisprudential interest. At the bottom stand defaults that the Act itself treats as matters of money, the excess charge collected without any court. In the middle stand the travelling offences, punishable with short imprisonment or modest fines, aimed at the integrity of the ticket system and the order of the carriage. At the top stand the wrecking and endangering offences, where the chapter speaks the language of the general penal law and the punishments rise accordingly. The passenger’s position in the scheme of the Act can be read off the grading: the Act is indulgent to the passenger as victim, strict with the passenger as cheat, and severe with anyone, passenger or stranger, whose act imperils the train. The same statute that refuses to let a passenger’s negligence defeat his family’s compensation claim makes his fraud a crime and his false claim an offence, and the two positions are not in tension but are the two faces of a single settlement, in which honesty and payment of the fare are the passenger’s whole contribution and safety of outcome, within the defined events, is the administration’s.

Appeal, execution and the life of an award

A claim under Chapter XIII has a procedural life after the Tribunal’s order, and completing the pillar requires it to be traced. The Tribunal Act gives the appeal in Section 23: an appeal lies from every order of the Claims Tribunal that is not an interlocutory order, and not from an order passed with the consent of the parties, to the High Court having jurisdiction over the place where the bench that passed the order is located, and it must be preferred within ninety days of the date of the order appealed against. The appeal period carries its own severity, since the Madhya Pradesh High Court has held that in the absence of a condonation power in Section 23 comparable to the power Section 17(2) gives the Tribunal over applications, the High Court cannot extend the ninety days by recourse to the Limitation Act, the Tribunal Act being a complete code on the matters it governs. The practical consequence is that the appeal clock is the hardest deadline in the scheme, harder than the one year for the application itself, which the Tribunal may extend for sufficient cause: a party who lets the ninety days run has, on that authority, no remedy against an order it considers wrong, and advisers diarise the appeal period from the date of the order and not from the date of its receipt or of the certified copy.

The appellate jurisdiction is the scheme’s error correcting mechanism, and its reported exercise has already been noticed in this article: exclusions accepted on inference, tickets demanded as conditions, negligence treated as self infliction, threshold burdens misplaced, sums awarded beyond the Schedule in sympathy or below it in error. The High Court on appeal re examines the Tribunal’s findings of fact and law within the limits of an appellate forum, and its decisions, together with the Supreme Court’s in Prabhakaran Vijaya Kumar, Jameela, Rina Devi and Doli Rani Saha, constitute the living gloss on the chapter. Below the appeal, execution is provided for by the Tribunal scheme itself: the Tribunal’s order is executable as a decree, and the Tribunal may transmit the order to a civil court of local jurisdiction which executes it as its own decree, while the Railways Act’s own miscellaneous chapter restricts execution against railway property in a manner that channels satisfaction through the administration rather than through seizure of the instruments of the public service. Interest, where awarded, runs as the award directs, and the combination of the scheduled sum, interest for the period of the proceedings and the costs position the Tribunal adopts is the complete monetary content of a successful claim.

Set beside the civil suit it replaced, the procedural scheme is the second half of the bargain the chapter strikes. The claimant surrenders the open ended damages of the general law and in return receives a forum that charges no fee for his application, that is not bound by the full technicality of civil procedure, that works to a one year limitation with a condonation power, that decides on affidavit evidence under a burden structure settled in his favour at the threshold, and that pays a sum certain. The administration surrenders every fault based defence and in return receives a ceiling it can budget for, a single forum for a defined class of claims and a bar on parallel proceedings over the same ground. Each side’s surrender is the other’s gain, and the durability of the arrangement, unamended in its essentials since 1994, suggests that the settlement the two surrenders compose has been found workable by the institution that pays, the tribunals that decide and the families who claim, which is the closest thing to a verdict on a procedural scheme that three decades of operation can supply.

What a passenger should take from the statute

Reduced to its working propositions, the Act gives the passenger these positions. Travel without a proper ticket is prohibited, and the consequences range from an excess charge to prosecution where fraud is involved. A reservation, a refund and the conditions of the booking are governed by rules and published conditions, not by the Act. Luggage kept in the passenger’s charge is at the passenger’s risk except against the administration’s proved negligence, while luggage booked and receipted is carried under the carrier provisions. Death or injury in a train accident is compensated without proof of fault. Death or injury in an untoward incident, including an accidental fall from the train and violence on the train or within station precincts, is likewise compensated without proof of fault, unless the administration proves one of the five exclusions. The amount is the scheduled amount in the Compensation Rules, eight lakhs for death, and the claim lies to the Railway Claims Tribunal within one year, with a power in the Tribunal to admit a later claim for sufficient cause. Complaints about the quality of the service, as distinct from compensation for death, injury, goods or refunds, lie to the consumer commissions. This article describes the law of the Railways Act 1989 and the rules and tribunal scheme connected with it; it is information about a statutory scheme, not advice on any individual claim, and a family with a live claim needs advice on its own facts and documents.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does the Railways Act 1989 cover?

The Act consolidates the law relating to railways in India. It constitutes the railway administrations and the Commissioners of Railway Safety, confers powers to construct and maintain works and acquire land, governs the opening of railways and the fixation of rates, regulates the carriage of passengers and of goods, states the administration’s responsibilities as a carrier, provides for notice and inquiry into accidents, imposes liability for death and injury to passengers, regulates hours of work, creates offences and penalties, and confers rule making powers. It replaced the Indian Railways Act, 1890 and came into force on 1 July 1990.

Q: What is the railway’s liability for a passenger’s death or injury?

The liability is strict. Under Section 124, where a passenger dies or is injured in an accident to a train carrying passengers, and under Section 124A, where death or injury results from an untoward incident, the railway administration must pay compensation to the extent prescribed by the Compensation Rules, whether or not there has been any wrongful act, neglect or default on its part. The claimant does not have to prove negligence. The Supreme Court confirmed in Prabhakaran Vijaya Kumar that Section 124A lays down no fault liability, so the inquiry is confined to the event, the passenger’s status and any exclusion the administration proves.

Q: What counts as an untoward incident?

Section 123(c) defines an untoward incident in two limbs. The first is the commission of a terrorist act, the making of a violent attack or the commission of robbery or dacoity, or rioting, shoot out or arson, by any person in or on any train carrying passengers, or in a waiting hall, cloak room, reservation or booking office, or on any platform or in any other place within the precincts of a railway station. The second limb is the accidental falling of any passenger from a train carrying passengers, which the courts have held includes a fall while boarding or alighting.

Q: When is railway compensation refused?

Compensation under Section 124A is refused only where the proviso applies and the administration proves that the death or injury was due to suicide or attempted suicide, self inflicted injury, the passenger’s own criminal act, an act committed by the passenger in a state of intoxication or insanity, or a natural cause or disease or medical or surgical treatment that did not become necessary because of the incident. The list is exhaustive. Mere carelessness is not a ground of refusal: in Rina Devi the Supreme Court held that self inflicted injury requires intention, so a passenger’s negligence cannot be used to defeat a claim founded on no fault liability.

Q: Who decides a railway compensation claim?

The Railway Claims Tribunal, constituted under the Railway Claims Tribunal Act, 1987, decides the claim. Section 13 of that Act gives the Tribunal jurisdiction over compensation payable under Sections 124 and 124A of the Railways Act for death or injury in an accident or untoward incident, over goods claims and over fare and freight refunds, and Section 15 bars any other court or authority from those matters. The Tribunal follows natural justice, has civil court powers for evidence, charges no fee on a death or injury application, and its orders are appealable to the High Court under Section 23 within ninety days.

Q: What is the railway’s liability for lost luggage?

Section 100 draws a sharp line. The administration is not responsible for loss, destruction, damage, deterioration or non-delivery of luggage unless a railway servant has booked the luggage and given a receipt for it. Booked luggage is carried under the carrier provisions of Chapter XI. For luggage carried by the passenger in his own charge, the administration is responsible only where it is also proved that the loss was due to the negligence or misconduct of the administration or of any of its servants. A theft of unbooked luggage, without proof of such negligence or misconduct, is therefore outside the section.

Q: Can a passenger go to a consumer forum instead?

For some complaints, yes. The bar in Section 15 of the Railway Claims Tribunal Act extends only to the matters Section 13 assigns to the Tribunal: compensation for death and injury under Sections 124 and 124A, goods claims and fare and freight refunds. A complaint about deficiency in service, such as a delay, a reservation the system failed to honour or the condition of the accommodation, is not within those heads, and consumer commissions have entertained such complaints under the consumer protection legislation. A death or injury claim cannot be reframed as a service complaint to escape the Tribunal or the prescribed amounts.

Q: What compensation amounts apply to a railway claim?

The amounts are prescribed not in the Act but in the Schedule to the Railway Accidents and Untoward Incidents (Compensation) Rules, 1990. Part I of the Schedule fixes rupees eight lakhs for death. Part II fixes rupees eight lakhs for the gravest enumerated injuries, such as loss of both hands, loss of a hand and a foot, and loss of sight that prevents all work. Part III fixes graduated sums for other specified injuries. Rule 4 caps the total for any one person at rupees eight lakhs. The death figure was doubled from four lakhs by the Amendment Rules of 2016, in force from 1 January 2017, so the Rules must be checked rather than any older figure relied on.

Q: How much time does a claimant have to apply to the Railway Claims Tribunal?

Section 17 of the Railway Claims Tribunal Act, 1987 prescribes one year from the occurrence of the accident or untoward incident for an application for compensation for death or injury. Goods claims carry three years from entrustment, and fare and freight refund claims three years from payment. The one year period is not absolute: Section 17(2) empowers the Tribunal to entertain a later application where the applicant satisfies it that there was sufficient cause for not applying within the period. A claimant who is late should therefore apply and plead the cause, rather than treat the claim as lost without a hearing.

Q: Who may apply for compensation when a passenger dies?

The dependants of the deceased passenger, and the application is made under Section 125 of the Act to the Claims Tribunal. Section 123 defines a dependant to include the wife, husband, son or daughter of the deceased, the parent where the deceased was unmarried or a minor, and specified other relatives, including a minor brother and an unmarried or widowed sister, where wholly or in part dependant on the deceased. The compensation for death is a single scheduled sum payable for the benefit of the dependants as the Tribunal directs, and no fee is payable on the application.

Q: Does the class of ticket held change the compensation payable?

No. The Schedule to the Compensation Rules fixes sums by reference to the outcome, death or the class of injury, and not by reference to the class of travel, the fare paid or the deceased’s income. A passenger who dies travelling on an unreserved ticket and a passenger who dies in an air conditioned coach attract the same Part I sum of rupees eight lakhs, provided each was a bona fide passenger and no exclusion is proved. That flat character is the scheme’s deliberate contrast with the motor accident regime, where awards are computed from income and age.

Q: What is ex gratia payment, and how does it differ from compensation under the Act?

Ex gratia payment is an administrative payment announced by the railway administration after a major occurrence, made without admission of liability, without application to the Tribunal and in amounts fixed by the announcement. It is not compensation under Chapter XIII, is not governed by the Schedule to the Compensation Rules, does not depend on the exclusions and creates no precedent. Compensation under the Act is a legal entitlement decided by the Railway Claims Tribunal on the statutory conditions. A family may receive an ex gratia payment and still pursue the statutory claim; the announcement figure reported in the press is not the measure of the legal entitlement.

Q: Is a person holding only a platform ticket covered for an untoward incident?

Yes. The explanation to Section 124A provides that passenger, for the purposes of that section, includes a railway servant on duty and a person who has purchased a valid ticket for travelling by a train carrying passengers on any date, or a valid platform ticket, and becomes a victim of an untoward incident. A platform ticket holder injured in a violent attack, robbery or other listed event within the station precincts is therefore within the section, even though he was not travelling. The falling limb is framed around a passenger falling from a train, so the platform ticket’s practical coverage is the violence limb and the station premises it names.

Q: If an injured passenger later dies from the injury, is further compensation payable?

Yes. Rule 3 of the Compensation Rules provides that where compensation has been paid for an injury, being less than the amount that would have been payable had the person died, and the person subsequently dies as a result of the injury, a further compensation equal to the difference between the amount payable for death and the amount already paid becomes payable. The dependants claim the balance up to the Part I figure for death, subject to the overall ceiling in Rule 4 of rupees eight lakhs for any one person. The later claim proceeds on the same statutory footing before the Tribunal.

Q: Is compensation available for an injury that the Schedule does not list?

Yes, within limits. Rule 3 of the Compensation Rules provides that an injury not specified in Part II or Part III of the Schedule which, in the Tribunal’s opinion, deprives a person of all capacity to do any work carries rupees eight lakhs. For an injury resulting in pain and suffering that is not otherwise specified, the Tribunal determines a reasonable amount on the medical evidence and the circumstances of the case, but where more than one such injury is caused by the same occurrence, the total payable for them cannot exceed rupees one lakh sixty thousand, and Rule 4 caps all compensation for one person at rupees eight lakhs.

Q: What material must a claimant place before the Tribunal?

The claimant must establish that the injured or deceased person was a bona fide passenger and that the death or injury resulted from an accident or an untoward incident. In practice the file consists of the affidavit of the claimant stating the relevant facts, the journey ticket or reservation record where it survives, the police record including the first information report and inquest papers, the post mortem report in a death case, the medical treatment records in an injury case, and the identity and relationship documents of the claimants. Under Rina Devi, an affidavit discharging the initial burden shifts the burden to the administration to disprove the case.

Q: Can interest be awarded on railway compensation?

The Act fixes the compensation at the prescribed extent and does not itself set a rate of interest, but the Tribunal may award interest on the sum it grants, and appellate courts have directed interest where payment of an established entitlement was delayed, so the claimant is not wholly without remedy for the time the proceedings take. Interest is ancillary to the award and does not alter the scheduled amount. Which revision of the Rules governs the principal sum is a separate question, answered in the claimant’s favour in Rina Devi where the amount had been revised upward between the occurrence and the award.

Q: Is a railway servant on duty treated as a passenger for compensation?

For the purposes of Section 124A, yes. The explanation to the section states expressly that passenger includes a railway servant on duty. A servant injured or killed in an untoward incident while on duty is therefore within the compensation scheme of Chapter XIII. That inclusion coexists with Section 128, which saves the right to claim under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 or any other law while forbidding recovery under both regimes for the same death or injury, so a servant’s family may have an election between the scheduled railway payment and the employment based claim, but cannot recover twice.

Q: Can compensation under the Act be combined with a claim under another law for the same death?

No. Section 128, headed Saving as to certain rights, preserves the right of a person entitled to compensation under Chapter XIII to claim compensation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 or any other law for the time being in force, but provides that no person shall be entitled to claim compensation under more than one of those laws in respect of the same death or injury. The claimant may elect the other route, which for a negligence based claim may promise a larger, assessed sum, but must then prove the case that route requires and gives up the certainty of the scheduled payment.

Q: Does the Act give a passenger a claim for delay or a failed reservation?

No. Chapter VIII contains duties about the exhibition of fares, the supply of tickets, cancellation and refund, the prohibition on travelling without a ticket and the conditions of carriage, but it creates no entitlement to compensation for delay, for a missed connection or for a reservation that fails, and it promises neither punctuality nor a seat on a full train. Refunds are governed by the rules and published conditions rather than by the Act. A grievance of that kind is a complaint of deficiency in service, which lies, if anywhere, under the consumer protection legislation and not under this Act.