Price tags on life and limbs

Lawmakers fix compensation amounts but do not revise them for decades

There has been a massacre of some 1,500 obsolete colonial laws in Parliament in the past three years. But there are still some relics. Section 59 of the Transfer of Property Act, for instance, says that “where the principal money secured is Rs 100 or upwards, a mortgage can be effected only by a registered instrument signed by the mortgagor and attested by at least two witnesses”. Where the amount is less than Rs 100, a mortgage may be effected either by registration or by the delivery of the property. Section 510 in the Indian Penal Code proclaims that a