In motor accident matters, Justice Karol did something that struck me as both simple and deeply significant. He did not allow the passage of time to disappear into the procedural history of the case. A perusal of his judgments in motor accident matters would reveal that he would bring the delay itself to the forefront. In Naseema v. Rajendra Singh, the very first page of the order recorded in the form of a table the time consumed at each stage of the litigation. In this case, it was 7 months before the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT), almost 18 years before the High Court and another 1 year before the Supreme Court. Those numbers could easily have remained in the case chronology, but by placing them on the first page of the judgment, Justice Karol made the delay impossible to overlook.
This was not confined to one case. In one of his last judgments, in Shishu Pal @ Shish Ram and Others v. Surjit and Others, he had examined more than 100 motor accident compensation matters which had come up before him and had found that the claims were, on average, pending for approximately 6 years before the MACT and around 8 years before the High Court. In that case, he passed slew of directions with respect to timely disposal of these accident cases. Instances like these show that this court functioned not merely to ensure compliance of any rules, but to understand how laws and rules encountered human life.