A South Delhi consumer commission has held National Insurance guilty of denying a theft claim unjustly, ordering the insurer to pay over Rs 2 lakh along with interest and compensation, amid a broader trend of stricter insurer accountability.
A South Delhi consumer commission has held National Insurance Company Limited liable for wrongly rejecting a theft claim after a car was stolen from the roadside when its engine failed on a winter night in 2016.
In an order dated July 24, the commission, led by president Monika Aggarwal Srivastava with members Rajendra Dhar and Ritu Garodia, said the insurer had committed a deficiency in service and must pay the insured sum of Rs 2.06 lakh with 7 per cent annual interest from December 7, 2016, the date of theft, until payment is made. It also ordered Rs 20,000 as compensation and awarded litigation costs.
The complainant had bought a Tata Indica in 2011 and insured it with National Insurance. According to the order, the car broke down while he was returning from Meerut near Gadaipur in New Delhi on the night of December 6, 2016. After road assistance did not materialise, he locked the vehicle, moved it to the side of the road, covered it with branches and went to look for a mechanic. When he came back in the early hours, the car had vanished. He filed an FIR the same day, and police later submitted an untraced report.
National Insurance argued that the claim was correctly repudiated because the owner had left the vehicle unattended, breaching the policy’s duty of care requirement. The commission was not persuaded. It said the insurer did not place the surveyor’s report on record and did not prove that the complainant had acted negligently. On the facts before it, the bench said the owner had taken reasonable precautions by securing the vehicle and trying to arrange repairs, so the denial of the claim could not stand.
The ruling fits a wider pattern in consumer disputes involving insurance claims. In August 2025, the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission ordered National Insurance to pay 75 per cent of the insured value, or Rs 2 lakh, in a separate stolen-car case involving a woman from Ghaziabad. In other recent matters, Delhi consumer forums have said insurers cannot reject claims on the basis of conjecture, including a January 2026 jewellery-loss case and a May 2026 dispute over a stolen Honda City that was later treated as a total loss. Together, the decisions underline that consumer bodies are increasingly requiring insurers to justify repudiations with evidence rather than broad allegations of policy breach.
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