BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday confirmed a sessions court ruling which awarded one year of simple imprisonment and imposed Rs 5,000 fine on a KSRTC bus driver who knocked down a commuter named Chitrashekharappa in 2019 at Chikkaballapura bus stand, leading to his death due to head injury.
The HC said that the accused, being a professional driver, was expected to drive the bus by expecting unexpected things to occur within the precincts of the bus station.
The court also noted that merely on the ground that the accused, Nagaraj G H, attached to the Chikkaballapura depot, would lose the job if the conviction is upheld, cannot be treated as a mitigating circumstance to set aside the sentence of imprisonment either.
Justice V Srishananda passed the order recently, while partly allowing the criminal revision petition filed in 2023 by Nagaraj, challenging the order of conviction and sentence passed by the sessions court. He confirmed the order passed by the magistrate in 2023 for the offence under Section 304A IPC and one month imprisonment and Rs 1,000 fine for the offence under Section 279 IPC.
However, the high court noted that the separate sentence ordered by the magistrate for the offence under Section 279, a one-month simple imprisonment, needs to be set aside. No other mitigating circumstances are found to reduce the punishment for the offence under Section 304A, the judge said.
The court noted that the accused was first required to exercise extra diligence when he was driving the bus inside the KSRTC bus stand, considering there would be movement of the passengers. Further, if the accused had driven the bus at the required speed with diligence, he could have applied the brake so as to avoid knocking down Chitrashekharappa, the court noted.