The Reality of Negligence Claims

In my internship, I was amazed to see how negligence claims were handled in practice. We studied the Indian Penal Code's (IPC) Section 304A, which deals with 'causing death by negligence', during law classes. But what I didn't learn was how the law firm's lawyers would try to prove that the defendant did not have a duty of care towards the victim in the first place. It's not just about proving that they were careless, but also that they owed a responsibility to the victim to avoid harm. For e.g., in the famous case of M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (1987), the court held that the Delhi government owed a duty of care to the citizens of Delhi to prevent air pollution. The lawyers would then try to show that the defendant breached this duty of care, which led to the harm. It was quite fascinating to see the complexity of tort law in practice.