Normally, an employer owes no duty of care for the safety of his employee while the employee is proceeding to the place of employment from his house. The point, however, is whether the same rule prevails when the situation is abnormal and when as a result of outbreak of violence in the city, the law enforcement authorities promulgate curfew order requiring citizens to be within doors as the only means which can reasonably ensure their safety. In such a situation, when every citizen is expected to be within doors as a matter of safety, if an employer requires his employee, to come to the place of employment in early hours of the morning, it is reasonably foreseeable that the employee is likely to suffer injury at the hands of some ruffian while on the way to join his work unless adequate arrangements are made by the employer for the safety of the employee. Requiring an employee to come to work in such a situation is itself such an act from which harm to the employee is forseeable and the employee being closely and directly connected with the act of requiring him to join his work, the employer must have his safety in contemplation. On the principles enunciated by Lord Atkin in Donoghue v. Stevenson (quoted earlier) the employer must, in the circumstances prevailing in the instant case, be held to owe a duty of care to the employee while he was on his way to the place of work. The employer should have taken adequate care for the safety of the employee while he was on his way either by providing safe transport or some persons to accompany and guard him. In case it was not possible for the employer to make any arrangement for the safety of the employee, the employer should have temporarily closed down the business, as the only alternative of avoiding harm to the employee. It has also to be kept in view that the employee, in the instant case, unlike a police constable or a fireman, was not in such an employment where it was expected of him from the nature of employment to face the hazard of a riot.
Madhya Pradesh High Court
Madhya Pradesh State Road ... vs Mst. Basantibai And Ors. on 30 April, 1971
Equivalent citations: (1971) IILLJ 273 MP
Bench: S Bhargava, G Singh
