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AI live in Auroville, Tamil Nadu for the last six months.
On 18 April I had a bicycle accident which caused both bones of my right forearm to break severely. I had surgery to fix the forearm with titanium plates, and spent six days in hospital. I am back home for the last five weeks now.
Initially, I was too pre-occupied with the pain, surgery, and managing practical things, since I live alone here and have been here for only a few months, so I barely know any people. Slowly, I have figured out how the accident happened – after jogging my memory several times about the last seconds before I fell and visiting the accident site almost every day because it is on the path I take my daily walks on.
I am confident that the accident happened because of a malfunction in the e-cycle I was riding.
I am exploring if I can claim damages from the renting company, which is a unit of Auroville. I am thinking about this because the accident has left my arm in a sling for 3 months, put me through surgery which is draining to the body’s vitality – and I may possibly need another surgery in six months if my bones don’t fuse because the fracture was a severe grade IIIA fracture and small parts of the bones were crushed to powder, leaving significant gaps that may prevent bone fusion. It left me with a 25% chance of not recovering full mobility and strength in my right arm lifelong, as is the case with all Open Reduction and Internal Fixation surgeries. I am 40 years old, male. Plus the emotional trauma and financial stress of going through this.
I wonder if on this forum I can get help in understanding –
– Most importantly, how do I find a good lawyer for this? I got some recommendations through neighbourhood groups but I don’t know how good they are. Online searches throw up random lawyers in Pondicherry but again I don’t know what their skill is like.
– What is the likelihood of my claims being proven true? At the moment I find that the likelihood is low because it is hard to prove that the malfunction caused the accident.
– What amount of damages is reasonable to claim, going by law or precedent?
Below is a description of the accident as I remember it.
The bicycle I rented had a mechanical flaw called delayed acceleration. This means that if you press the button on the front bar to increase pedal assist level (another name for gear) from 1 to 5, sometimes the speed remains the same for 5 seconds and then suddenly starts to increase. I noticed this twice in the month or so that I had rented the bicycle but didn’t think that this could be a big issue. At level one the speed is about 8 kmph and at 5, the maximum level, the speed can go to 25 kmph. In the last six months I have rented 4-5 different cycles from the company because none was available beyond a few weeks, and some of the others also occasionally had this problem.
Auroville has mostly mud roads, and there is loose sand often on some of these roads. I was riding home on one of these roads. I had halted to let a car pass. I then started pedalling and increased the assist level from 1 to 5 but the bicycle did not speed up. 5 seconds or so later, I was on loose sand and the bicycle skidded slightly. This has happened numerous times in my six months of being here and riding a cycle an hour or two everyday. It happens to everyone who cycles here. It is easy to handle this. You just press the breaks and the bicycle stops skidding. In some cases you need to put your foot or both feet on the ground for extra friction and support. It is no big deal.
In this case, however, just as the tire was skidding to the left, the acceleration which I had set 5-8 seconds ago kicked in and the cycle suddenly sped from, I am guessing, around 8-10 kmph to 20 kmph in a second or a few seconds. This accentuated the skidding, and as the cycle skidded leftward on the loose sand, I was flung into the air to the right.
When I landed I saw my arm was badly swollen and in extreme pain, and my bicycle was at least 13-15 feet away to my left. Since the bicycle skidded on the ground while I was flung away to the right side in air, I think of these 13-15 feet I would have been flung a greater distance than the bicycle, easily 8-10 feet. I landed on the opposite side of the mud road which is 8-10 feet broad, roughly speaking.
I stood up, there was nobody around. It was 1 PM. I walked about 30 seconds to an office compound and talked to the security guard there. He called an auto which took me to the hospital. I also asked him to get my cycle and bag from the site of the accident and park it in the compound, which he did.
The auto driver, after dropping me at the hospital, informed the manager of the guest house I live in for the last six months about the accident. The manager went and got the cycle and returned it to Kinisi, the unit that rents out the e-cycles.
5 days later, when still in hospital, I got a mail that Kinisi has refunded my Rs 9000 for the booking of the cycle for the next 5 weeks. I was happily surprised because their agreement says they don’t refund money unless there you cancel your booking several weeks before the starting date.
When I came back to my suite in my guest house, I still hadn’t fully understood what caused the accident. I went to Kinisi to return the cycle charger, with my arm still in plaster. The senior executive at the desk had guilt and sadness written all over his face. I asked him if this kind of accident happens frequently and he gave me vague replies about people falling sometimes. I met the owner and he was cordial but in a hurry and tried to avoid talking to me beyond a minute, even though I was trying to thank him for the refund. Another day he saw one of the junior employees talking to me on the street outside and quickly reprimanded him to go back to work, lunch time is over. I found all this behaviour very unusual and suspicious.
Over the weeks, I visited the site of the accident frequently and tried to remember the last moments before I fell. I realised that the cycle had suddenly sped on loose sand which caused the skidding and my body being flung in the opposite direction. I did some online reading and realised that delayed acceleration is a phenomenon of malfunction that can happen in e-cycles. All the pieces fit together and now I get what actually happened that afternoon.
If I hadn’t extended my forearm when I was flung I would have landed on my skull and could have died. I wonder if someone must be held responsible for this.
The cycle has been rented to a neighbour of mine till 2 May.
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