Claims that were decided in public, and what decided them.

HeldFire was a named peril and the fire peril carried no exclusion for how the fire started. Once the loss is caused by fire, what lit it does not decide the claim unless the fire cover itself says so. An exclusion written under one peril does not travel to another.

Source: The judgment, on Indian Kanoon

HeldThe burden of proving non-disclosure, and of proving it was fraudulent, sits on the insurer and not on the family. Saying a fact was suppressed is not the same as proving it, and the court would not let the insurer do the first and call it the second.

Source: The case report

HeldWhere an insurer could have verified something for itself from its own records or from a previous policy, it is on much weaker ground saying later that the proposer hid it. Read this one next to the case above: the two together are most of what a disputed non-disclosure turns on.

Source: The judgment, on Indian Kanoon

What it showsWorth reading precisely because nothing went wrong. A listed company has to tell the exchanges what it claimed and what it received, which is why the pair of figures exists at all; for everybody else that pair is commercially confidential and you will never see it published.

Source: The report of the settlement

What it showsTwo insurers on one loss is ordinary on a risk of any size, and it is also where money goes missing: each pays its share and neither chases the other's. If your schedule names more than one insurer, somebody has to run both files, in step.

Source: Business Standard's report

HeldCorrosion found after the event cannot be turned into a non-disclosure before it. An insurer that inspects nothing at inception and then argues, after a loss, that the insured should have volunteered what the inspection would have found is asking the policy to do the opposite of what it was bought for.

Source: The case report

HeldThe policy ran from 16 May to 15 June 2013, which is to say it covered a period that necessarily crossed the monsoon. A condition the cover itself makes impossible to keep is not a condition the insurer can later repudiate on. Read your own special conditions against your own policy dates before you need them.

Source: The judgment, on Indian Kanoon

HeldThe most useful entry on this page, because the insurer won. Exclusions are read strictly against the insurer, which is the rule everybody quotes; it does not help when the excluded thing is what actually happened. A claim is decided on the facts of the work, and this one was decided by how the span was cast.

Source: SCC Online's report of the judgment

HeldA surveyor's report is not the last word, and it is not nothing either. Where two assessments differ the forum has to reason between them rather than take the larger one because it was not contradicted in time. If your own figure is going to be argued, it has to be evidenced when it is first put, not in a rejoinder.

Source: The case report

HeldThis is the judgment the later delay cases run back to, so it is worth knowing on its own. The reasoning is that where an FIR was lodged at once and the claim is otherwise genuine, a delay in telling the insurer does not by itself defeat it. What the condition protects is the insurer's ability to investigate; where the police record already exists, that ability was never lost.

Source: The judgment, on Indian Kanoon

HeldDelay is answerable, and it is not answerable forever. What saved this one was that the delay could be explained: the owner had been searching for the vehicle and the police had refused to register the FIR. The Commission followed Om Prakash v Reliance General (2018) and Gurshinder Singh v Shriram General (2020), which allow a delay that is explained and not one that merely happened.

Source: The order, on Indian Kanoon

HeldTwo things worth taking. A fidelity claim turns on whether the chain from the dishonest act to the loss is direct, and arguing that a contractual consequence breaks that chain is the standard defence. And four years to reach a repudiation was itself held against the insurer: how long a decision takes is part of the claim, not separate from it.

Source: The report of the order

What it showsIncluded for scale rather than for reasoning. A catastrophe does not argue about whether the peril happened; it argues about sums insured, because every business in the affected belt discovers its declared values on the same day. That is the one part of a catastrophe you can decide in advance.

Source: A contemporary account

What changedThe commonest reduction on a health claim used to be a room-rent limit dragging the whole bill down with it. If your claim was cut that way, the date on your policy decides which regime applies to it, and that is the first thing to establish before arguing the deduction.

Source: The circular on IRDAI's own site

What it showsThe covers that paid were the ones businesses buy for something else. Flood is not a separate policy in India; it sits inside standard fire cover as a named peril, and whether it answers depends on what was declared and what the sum insured was set at long before the water arrived.

Source: Business Standard's report at the time