NEW DELHI: If smoking a single cigarette in a room leaves a strong odour for hours, imagine the stench that would hover if 50,0000 packets, containing 10 or 20 cigarettes, get burnt inside a storeroom!
Surprisingly, the surveyor did not find any smell of cigarette smoke on visiting the premises hours after fire broke out. The missing stench made the Supreme Court on Friday dismiss a petition seeking Rs 43 lakh compensation for alleged destruction of 50,000 cigarette packets. It upheld a National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission decision rejecting a shop owner’s claim against New Insurance Co Ltd.
A bench of Justices Navin Sinha and Krishna Murari was unimpressed with the arguments of advocate Qurratulain, who appeared for Sunil General Agency, that the surveyor played truant as the agency refused to pay bribe and did not truthfully record the extent of damage caused to goods caused by a fire in the store situated on Kalas Alandi Road in Pune in 2009.
The bench said, “As many as 50,000 packets of cigarettes got burnt in the fire that broke out at 2.30 am. The surveyor comes to inspect damages in the morning. But, he does not find any strong smell of cigarette smoke there? How is it possible? He finds some debris of other good burnt, but nothing of cigarettes. We are not impressed by your argument about denial of bribe to the surveyor.” It dismissed the appeal.
The shop owner had claimed compensation of Rs 70 lakhs against damage to his insured goods, including Rs 43 lakh for cigarette packets allegedly lost due to fire. The insurance company, on the basis of the surveyor’s report, approved a compensation of Rs 20.7 lakhs. Both the State Consumer Commission and NCDRC had upheld the compensation of Rs 20.7 lakhs.
The surveyor in his report had stated that “the storage place required for the stock claimed to have been burnt works out to around 421 cubic feet. If the stock in so much area had been burnt, substantial identifiable debris/ash would have remained in the said area, which was not there in the area identified… The debris at the place was for items other than cigarettes.”
The insurance company said, “As no remains/debris of the cigarettes was available in the area identified for storage, the loss to the tune of around 50,000 packets (5630 boxes) is not justified. Even preliminary surveyors had commented that there was no overpowering smell of cigarettes and no identifiable remains of cigarettes were available when they visited.”