Both sides arrive with the same sentence. The landlord says it is his property and he wants it back. The tenant says he has paid on time for years and is being pushed out. Both feel obviously right, and neither of them has yet asked the question that actually decides the case: which law is this tenancy under? Because Delhi has two completely separate systems running side by side, the road you are on is fixed by a single line in a statute, and that line was drawn at a figure that will surprise you. Everything else — which forum, what grounds are even available, how fast it moves, what the tenant can and cannot be evicted for — follows from it. This page is written for both sides, and it does not take one.
Section 3 of the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 is headed “Act not to apply to certain premises”. Clause (c) of it provides that nothing in the Act shall apply to any premises, whether residential or not, whose monthly rent exceeds three thousand and five hundred rupees.
Read that once more, because almost nobody in Delhi believes it the first time. If the monthly rent of the premises is above that figure, the Delhi Rent Control Act does not apply to the tenancy at all. Not partly. Not for some purposes. The whole protective structure — the Rent Controller, the closed list of grounds, the protection against eviction, the machinery for deposit of rent — is simply not available, to either side.
And if the rent is at or below that figure, the opposite is true with equal force. The landlord cannot evict because he wants to, cannot evict because the agreement has expired, and cannot evict because he has found a tenant who will pay more. He can evict only on a ground the statute itself lists, before an officer the statute itself creates, and on evidence.
The rent figure decides which of two separate systems you are in. Below the line: Rent Controller, a closed list of grounds, slow but protective. Above the line: civil court, the agreement and the ordinary law, and possession is a normal civil remedy. Nobody on either side may take possession by force whichever system applies. And a tenant served in a bona fide requirement case has one narrow, dated opportunity to defend, which is lost by doing nothing.
So the first thing to establish is not what the agreement says, not what the notice said, and not who is morally right. It is the rent. Everything on this page after this section is written twice — once for each side of that line.
The reason is history, and knowing it stops the figure feeling absurd.
Rent control legislation in India came out of a period when housing was desperately short and tenants could be turned out at will. The answer the legislature chose was to freeze the relationship: rent could not be raised freely, and a tenant could not be evicted except on stated grounds. That protection is powerful, and it was meant to be.
But a protection that strong, applied to every tenancy forever, has a well-known side effect — owners stop letting property out at all, because a tenant once in is very difficult to get out. So the Act was given a ceiling: above a certain rent, the tenancy is treated as a commercial arrangement between people who can look after themselves, and the ordinary law governs it. The ceiling was fixed at three thousand five hundred rupees by an amendment in 1988, and it has not been revised since.
The practical result today is that the overwhelming majority of Delhi tenancies signed in the last two decades are outside rent control, because almost no rent in the city is below that line. But a great many older tenancies — shops in the walled city, rooms let decades ago, premises where rent was never revised precisely because the tenant knew what revision would cost him — are still firmly inside it. Those are the cases that run for years.
Neither system is the “real” one. They both operate, in the same city, on the same day, in the same building sometimes.
Section 3(d) carries a second exclusion that matters for newer buildings. Premises constructed after the commencement of the 1988 amending Act are exempt from the Act for a period of ten years from the date of completion of construction.
So a tenancy can sit outside rent control for two entirely different reasons, and they behave differently over time. A rent above the line keeps the tenancy outside for as long as that rent stands. A ten-year exemption on a new building is temporary — when it runs out, a tenancy whose rent is below the line comes back into the Act.
That second situation is rare in practice today, because a building completed shortly after 1988 has long crossed ten years and almost no tenancy in such a building is under three thousand five hundred rupees a month. But it is worth knowing the clause exists, because it is the kind of point an opponent raises and nobody in the room has an answer to.
If the flat is in Gurugram, none of this page applies. Haryana has its own statute — the Haryana Urban (Control of Rent and Eviction) Act, 1973 — and its ten-year exemption for newly completed buildings is not a historical curiosity there but the ordinary position for much of the city. What changes across that border, and what does not, is on our Gurugram page.
| Rent at or below ₹3,500/month | Rent above ₹3,500/month | |
|---|---|---|
| Governing law | Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 | The agreement, the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, and general law |
| Forum | The Rent Controller (and the Rent Control Tribunal on appeal) | The civil court of appropriate jurisdiction |
| Grounds for eviction | Only what Section 14(1) lists — a closed set | Determination of the tenancy, then possession as an ordinary civil claim |
| Tenant’s position | Statutory protection; a tenant paying rent and behaving is very hard to remove | Contractual; once the tenancy is validly ended, continued occupation is not protected |
| Speed | Usually slow, except the Section 25B route | Depends entirely on the court’s list and how the case is run |
| Rent increase | Regulated by the Act | Whatever the agreement provides, and what the parties agree at renewal |
A petition filed before the Rent Controller for premises that are outside the Act does not get decided on its merits — it gets thrown out for want of jurisdiction, and the months spent on it are gone. The reverse is equally true. This is why the rent figure is established first, in writing, from the agreement and the receipts, before anybody drafts anything.
Where the seven district complexes sit and what happens inside them is set out on our Delhi courts page; the complex that hears your matter depends on where the property is.
This is the section that surprises landlords. Section 14(1) begins by stating that no order or decree for the recovery of possession of any premises shall be made by any court or Controller in favour of the landlord against a tenant — and then sets out the provisos on which alone such an order may be made.
The structure matters. The default is that the tenant stays. Eviction is the exception, and the exceptions are written down. Broadly, they cover non-payment of rent after a proper demand, subletting or parting with possession without consent, using the premises for a purpose other than the one they were let for, causing substantial damage or making unauthorised construction, causing nuisance, the tenant having acquired or been allotted other suitable accommodation, the premises being required bona fide by the landlord for his own occupation, and the premises being required for rebuilding or repairs which cannot be carried out without vacating.
What is not on that list is the whole point. “The agreement has expired.” “I have found somebody who will pay double.” “He is rude to my family.” “I have decided to sell.” None of these is a ground. Under rent control, a landlord who has nothing from the list has no case, however strongly he feels about it, and the sooner he is told that the less money he spends discovering it.
The exact wording and the conditions attached to each ground are for whoever is advising you to read against your facts — several of them carry provisos that change the answer completely. We have deliberately not reproduced the clause text here, because a paraphrased ground used in a petition is how petitions fail.
Non-payment of rent is the commonest ground and the one most people assume is automatic. It is not, and Section 14(2) is the reason.
In substance, where the ground is non-payment, the Controller shall not make an order for recovery of possession if the tenant makes payment or deposit as required by Section 15 — but that relief is not available to a tenant who has already had the benefit of it once before. The Act gives a defaulting tenant one chance to put the money right and keep the premises. One.
If you are the landlord and the arrears are the real grievance, a legal notice properly drafted and provably served is the first step and often the whole of it — a surprising number of tenants pay on receiving one. If you are the tenant and one has arrived, a considered reply sent within time is worth far more than silence.
Of all the grounds in Section 14(1), one behaves differently from the rest: the landlord’s bona fide requirement of the premises for occupation as a residence for himself or for any member of his family dependent on him, where he has no other reasonably suitable residential accommodation.
Every word of that carries weight and each one has been fought over. Bona fide — genuine, not a device to get the premises back for reletting. Requirement — a real need, which is a higher thing than a wish, although the courts have repeatedly said it does not have to be a dire necessity. For himself or a dependent family member — not for a relation who is independent of him, and not for a business where the clause is the residential one. No other reasonably suitable accommodation — and the other premises the landlord owns are going to be put to him in cross-examination, one by one.
For the tenant, this is the ground to take most seriously, for a reason that has nothing to do with its merits and everything to do with the procedure attached to it.
Because a genuine owner who needs his own house should not have to wait a decade, the Act attaches a special summary procedure to bona fide requirement cases. It is in Section 25B, and it inverts the ordinary position in one decisive way.
In an ordinary case, a defendant who does nothing still forces the claimant to prove his case. Under Section 25B, the tenant on whom the summons is served shall not contest the prayer for eviction unless he files an affidavit stating the grounds on which he seeks to contest, and obtains leave from the Controller. And if he does not, the section provides that the statement made by the landlord in the application for eviction shall be deemed to be admitted by the tenant and the applicant shall be entitled to an order for eviction.
We have deliberately not printed the number of days here. It lives in the prescribed form of summons rather than in a much-quoted section number, and a wrong figure repeated from a website is exactly the kind of error that costs somebody their home. Read the summons, and take it to an advocate the day it arrives. Not the week it arrives.
The Supreme Court in Abid-Ul-Islam v. Inder Sain Dua (2022) dealt with this procedure and the approach to leave under it. The point that matters for an ordinary tenant is a simple one: leave to defend is not granted for the asking. The affidavit has to disclose facts which, if proved, would disentitle the landlord from obtaining an order. A denial is not such a fact.
This is why the summons is not a document to think about over a weekend. Facts of this kind take days to assemble, and the affidavit has to be sworn and filed inside a period that began the moment you were served. Whoever drafts it has to know the facts before the clock runs out.
Our part of this is the typing and the assembly: the affidavit as your advocate settles it, the application, the annexures indexed and paginated, the attestation arranged. What goes into it is his work, and it is the part that decides the case.
If the rent is above the line, none of the above applies to you. There is no closed list of grounds, no Rent Controller, and no Section 25B. What there is instead is the agreement you signed and the general law of landlord and tenant.
The shape of such a case is different. A landlord does not need a ground at all in the rent control sense. What he needs is for the tenancy to have come to an end — by the expiry of its term, or by a valid notice determining it — and then a decree for possession from the civil court, because even here he may not take possession himself.
That last clause is the one landlords outside rent control most often get wrong. “The Act does not apply to me” is true. “So I can take my own property back” is not.
| Landlord assumes | What is actually so |
|---|---|
| “The eleven months are over, so he is a trespasser” | He is in possession, and possession is recovered through the court, not by you |
| “I can change the lock while he is away” | That is the one act that turns your strong case into his |
| “I will stop the water and the power” | An application will follow, and it will be heard before your possession claim is |
| “The agreement says I can re-enter” | A clause does not authorise forcible dispossession of a person in settled possession |
| “He has no papers, so he has nothing” | A tenancy can be proved by receipts, payments, and conduct. The absence of writing cuts both ways |
For tenancies governed by ordinary law, Section 106 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 sets out how a tenancy in the absence of a contract or usage to the contrary is presumed to run and how it is ended. A lease of immovable property for agricultural or manufacturing purposes is deemed to be from year to year, terminable by six months’ notice; a lease for any other purpose is deemed to be from month to month, terminable by fifteen days’ notice.
The notice has to be in writing, signed by or on behalf of the person giving it, and either sent by post to the party intended to be bound by it or tendered or delivered personally, or affixed to a conspicuous part of the property. Section 111 sets out the ways a lease determines, of which notice is one.
Two practical points that decide more cases than the law does. First, the notice period runs from service, so how you served it is a fact you will have to prove — keep the postal receipt, the tracking, the acknowledgement. Second, the agreement may provide for something different, and where it does, the contract is where the answer starts.
A notice that describes the premises wrongly, is addressed to the wrong person, gives a period that does not match the tenancy, or cannot be shown to have been delivered, is a month spent for nothing. That is the whole reason to have it drafted rather than copied.
The instinct is either to ignore it or to reply in anger. Both are expensive.
A notice is not an order. Nobody has decided anything yet, and receiving one does not oblige you to move. What it does do is fix the other side’s version of events in writing, on a date, and if you say nothing, that version stands unanswered when the matter reaches a court months later.
We prepare the reply to your advocate’s instructions, and where there is no advocate yet, the directory is free to search and free to write through.
Whatever the rent, whatever the agreement says, whichever system applies: a person in settled possession of immovable property is not to be dispossessed except in accordance with law.
That principle is the reason Section 6 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963 exists. If any person is dispossessed without his consent of immovable property otherwise than in due course of law, he, or any person claiming through him, may by suit recover possession — and the suit is to be brought within six months from the date of dispossession.
Two features of that remedy explain why it is so dangerous to a landlord who takes matters into his own hands. First, in such a suit the court is concerned with possession and dispossession, not with title. The tenant does not have to prove he had a right to be there. He has to prove he was there and was put out otherwise than in due course of law. Second, it is fast by design.
If you are being advised to do this by somebody confident and helpful, that is the moment to get a second opinion from an advocate. It is the single most common way a winnable matter is lost in this area of law.
Act quickly and do three things in order.
First, record what has happened while it is fresh — photographs with dates, the state of the door and the lock, what is inside, who was present. Second, report it, so that there is a contemporaneous record made by somebody other than you; we prepare police complaints to your instructions, and what the police will and will not do with a matter of this kind is set out below. Third, see an advocate about the six-month period in Section 6, because it is not a long one and it runs from the dispossession, not from the day you decided to do something about it.
Bring the agreement, the rent receipts or bank entries, the electricity bill in your name if there is one, and anything showing the address was yours. Possession is a fact, and facts are proved with ordinary paper.
More landlord-tenant disputes in Delhi are actually about the deposit than about possession. The tenant has left, the landlord has kept two months’ deposit against damage nobody agreed on, and there is no independent record of what the premises looked like on either date.
The deposit is money held on terms. What those terms are is whatever the agreement says, and where the agreement is silent, the deposit is refundable subject to lawful deductions that the person making them has to justify. “I felt it needed painting” is not a justification; a bill is.
Where a deposit is withheld and the amount is worth pursuing, the ordinary route is a legal notice followed, if nothing comes of it, by a civil claim for recovery; we prepare the plaint to your advocate’s instructions. A clean rent agreement drawn up at the start costs a fraction of what this argument costs at the end.
Inside rent control, revision of rent is regulated by the Act and is not a matter of what the landlord announces. There is a mechanism, and it has conditions attached.
Outside rent control, the answer is the agreement. If it provides for an increase of a stated percentage at a stated interval, that is what applies. If it provides nothing, the rent stays what it is for the term, and an increase is a new bargain the tenant is free to refuse — at which point the landlord’s remedy is to end the tenancy properly, not to demand more and treat non-payment of the demanded amount as a default.
That last point catches people. A landlord who unilaterally raises rent, is paid the old rent, and then says the tenant is in arrears of the difference has created a dispute about the increase rather than a case about arrears. And a tenant who quietly starts paying the higher figure has made the increase a fact.
We have not printed the permitted percentage for rent-controlled premises, the interval, or any figure connected with it. That is Rule H on this site: anything set by statute that has been amended, or that turns on conditions we cannot see, is not stated as a number. Your advocate reads the current provision against your tenancy.
No. This is one of the few questions on this page with a clean answer on both sides of the line.
A tenancy is an interest in the property, and the person who buys the property buys it with the tenancy on it. The purchaser becomes the landlord, and the tenant becomes his tenant, on the same terms. A sale does not determine the lease and does not by itself create a right to possession.
What does change is practical. The new owner will usually want the rent paid to him, and the tenant is entitled to be told of the transfer and to know whom he is paying — paying the wrong person is a problem the tenant carries, not the seller. Ask for the sale deed or at least proof of the transfer before changing who you pay, keep the letter that told you to change, and take receipts from the new owner in his own name from the first month.
Where a tenant is being told the sale has ended his tenancy, that is simply wrong, and it is worth saying so in writing early. Where a purchaser genuinely needs the premises, the route is the same route any landlord has — which is the rest of this page.
Subletting or parting with possession without the landlord’s consent is a ground under the Rent Control Act, and it is one of the grounds most often alleged and least often proved.
The reason is that the allegation is easy to make from the street and hard to establish in evidence. Somebody else is seen in the shop. A different name appears on the board. A relative has moved in. None of that is by itself subletting, which requires parting with possession — the tenant giving up control of the premises to another in exchange for consideration — and not merely the presence of another person.
For the landlord who genuinely has a sublet on his hands, the case is built on documents rather than sightings: who pays the electricity, in whose name the trade licence or registration stands, what the signage says, what the bank entries show, who the neighbours deal with. For the tenant wrongly accused, the answer is the same kind of material pointing the other way.
Where a family member, a partner or an employee is in occupation and the relationship is legitimate, say so plainly at the first opportunity and document it. Denials that shift over time are what lose these cases.
A commercial tenancy is not a separate legal universe, and this surprises people on both sides. Section 3(c) of the Rent Control Act applies to premises “whether residential or not”, so the same three-thousand-five-hundred line decides a shop just as it decides a room.
Two differences matter in practice. First, old commercial tenancies in the older parts of Delhi are far more likely to be genuinely under rent control, because the rent was fixed decades ago and never revised — which is exactly why those disputes are so bitter and so long. Second, the bona fide requirement ground in its residential form is about residence; a landlord who needs the premises for a business is on different ground and needs to be advised specifically on which clause he is under.
The stakes are also different. A shop is a livelihood with goodwill attached to a location, so both sides should think hard about settlement before they think about hearings. A commercial tenant who loses possession does not merely move house.
This is the most confidently repeated piece of wrong advice in the field.
The idea is that if the document is called a licence rather than a lease, the occupier is a licensee, no tenancy exists, and possession can be taken back on the terms of the document. The difficulty is that what the document is called is not what decides the question. The substance does — whether exclusive possession was given, what control the owner retained, how the arrangement actually operated month after month.
A document headed “leave and licence” under which a family lives alone in a flat with their own lock, their own electricity connection and their own furniture for six years is going to be examined on those facts, not on its heading. And the landlord who relied on the heading to take possession himself has done the one thing that cannot be undone.
That is not a reason to avoid the form — a properly drawn leave and licence agreement has real uses, and our guide to it explains where. It is a reason not to treat the label as a shortcut past the courts.
Look at what each side actually wants once the anger has been priced.
The landlord wants the premises back and would prefer them back this year. The tenant wants time to find somewhere, his deposit returned, and not to be treated as a thief on the way out. Those two positions are not far apart, and they are reconcilable in an afternoon. What is not reconcilable is the version where each side spends two years establishing that the other behaved badly.
Where a case is already filed, this can be recorded before the court so it becomes enforceable rather than a promise. Mediation is available through the court system and it works better in tenancy matters than in almost any other kind, because the dispute is about money and dates rather than about who is a better person. We prepare the applications and the terms as your advocate settles them.
We are not going to print a number of months, and the reason is the same as everywhere else on this site: the real answer depends on the forum, the ground, whether the tenancy itself is admitted, how many witnesses there are, and how much of the file has to be proved.
What can be said honestly is the shape of it. A bona fide requirement case under the summary procedure is the fastest route the Act provides, and it is fastest of all where the tenant does not obtain leave — which is exactly why the tenant’s first fortnight matters more than anything he does later. A contested ordinary case under rent control, where the tenancy, the arrears and the ground are all in issue, is slow, and appeals sit on top of that. A possession suit outside rent control sits somewhere between, and turns heavily on whether the notice and the tenancy are admitted.
Two things shorten every one of these, and neither is a procedural trick. Admitting what is not really in dispute, and having the documents ready before the first date instead of after the fourth.
An order for possession is not itself possession. It is a decision that has to be executed, and execution is a separate proceeding with its own application, its own dates and its own file.
This is where a landlord who has been patient for three years often becomes impatient in a week and does something irreversible. The same rule applies as on day one: possession is taken through the process of the court, with the officer of the court, and not by you. An order in your favour does not license self-help; it makes self-help unnecessary.
What execution requires is the decree or order, a certified copy of it, the execution petition properly drawn, and patience through a process that has its own steps. Where the judgement debtor raises objections, those get decided before the warrant issues, and that is part of the system rather than a failure of it.
Note the other side of this too. A tenant against whom an order has been passed is not helped by resisting execution — it adds nothing to his position and it removes whatever sympathy remains. Where there is a genuine ground to challenge, the route is an appeal or the appropriate application, filed in time.
Both sides call the police, and both are usually disappointed for the same reason: a landlord and tenant dispute is a civil matter, and the police cannot decide who is entitled to possession.
What they can do is act where there is a criminal element — a break-in, force, threats, damage to property, a person put in fear. So the tenant whose lock has been broken and the landlord whose premises have been damaged both have something to report, and a report made contemporaneously is worth a great deal when the civil matter is heard months later.
What they will not do is evict a tenant for a landlord, hand possession to anybody, or enforce an agreement. A landlord who is told at the station that this is a civil matter has not been brushed off; he has been told the law correctly.
We draft complaints to your instructions. What is written in one matters, because a complaint that overstates is used against the person who made it later, and a complaint that leaves out the dates is of no use to anybody.
Not eloquence. Paper, and the dates on it.
| Question in issue | What answers it |
|---|---|
| Is the Act applicable at all? | The rent actually payable — the agreement, the receipts, the bank credits, over a period |
| Is there a landlord-tenant relationship? | The agreement, receipts in the landlord’s name, conduct, correspondence |
| Are there arrears, and from when? | Bank statements month by month, receipts, and the demand with proof of service |
| Was the notice valid and served? | The notice itself, the postal receipt, the tracking, the acknowledgement or the returned cover |
| Is the requirement bona fide? | What else the landlord owns, who lives where, and since when |
| Has there been subletting? | Electricity and licence records, signage, who deals with whom, payments |
| What was the condition of the premises? | Dated photographs on both handovers, the inventory, meter readings |
| Was possession taken by force? | Photographs, the police record made on the day, neighbours, the lock itself |
Every row of that table is ordinary material that existed before the dispute started. The side that kept it wins arguments the other side thought were about fairness.
This section exists because the honest version of it is not written anywhere.
If you have not paid, the rent is not disputed and there is no defect in the case against you, fighting does not produce a better outcome. It produces the same outcome later, with costs, with an order recorded against you, and with the deposit gone. What produces a better outcome is dealing with it early: an agreed time to vacate, an agreed treatment of the arrears, and a handover that does not end in a complaint.
There is one important qualification. “In the wrong” on the facts is not the same as having no defence in law, and people regularly assume they have none when they do — the first-default protection under Section 14(2), a demand that was never properly made, a petition filed in a forum that has no jurisdiction over the premises, a ground pleaded that the facts do not support. Have somebody look before you concede. A single consultation is cheap next to a concession that was not necessary.
| If you are the landlord | If you are the tenant | |
|---|---|---|
| Establish first | The rent figure, from the agreement and receipts — it decides your forum | The same figure, for the same reason |
| Find the paper | Agreement, receipts, bank credits, every message about rent | Agreement, proof of every payment, the deposit receipt |
| Before acting | Identify the ground, if you are under the Act. If you have none, stop | Read the document you received to the end, and note the date of service |
| Never | Change locks, cut utilities, remove belongings, send anybody round | Ignore a summons, or leave the premises without a written handover |
| Do this week | Have a notice drafted properly and served provably | See an advocate if a summons has arrived — this week, not this month |
| Ask early | Whether a settlement gets the premises back faster than a case | Whether a settlement gets you time and your deposit |
A tenancy dispute is very often a dispute between people neither of whom has spare money, and a tenant facing eviction is by definition facing a housing cost he is already struggling with. Free legal services under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 exist precisely for this, and the entitled categories include people below the income limit that the State Authority notifies, along with several categories entitled regardless of income. The Delhi State Legal Services Authority publishes the current limit and its helpline, there is a legal services committee attached to the court complexes, and asking costs nothing. We have not printed the income figure here because it is revised. Ask at the complex, or ask us and we will point you at the right desk.
Tenancy disputes outlive memories. Keep one folder, and keep it in date order: the agreement and every renewal, proof of every rent payment from the first month, the deposit receipt, meter readings and utility bills, dated photographs from both handovers, every notice sent or received with its proof of service, every court paper with the date it was received written on it, and a single sheet at the front listing what happened and when.
That last sheet is the one thing nobody makes and everybody needs. Six months in, when your advocate asks when the demand was served, the answer should take four seconds.
| What was done | What it cost |
|---|---|
| Filed before the Rent Controller for premises outside the Act | A petition dismissed for want of jurisdiction, and months gone |
| Assumed the expiry of an eleven-month agreement is itself a ground | A rent-control petition with no ground under Section 14(1) |
| Put a Section 25B summons aside for a fortnight | No leave to defend, and the landlord’s case deemed admitted |
| Filed leave to defend denying everything without facts | Leave refused on an affidavit that disclosed no triable issue |
| Changed the lock while the tenant was away | A Section 6 suit the landlord defends instead of the case he was winning |
| Served a notice by hand with no acknowledgement | Service denied, and the whole period counted again |
| Took rent in cash for years with no receipts | The rent figure itself in dispute — and with it, which law applies |
| Started paying an increase “under protest” without saying so in writing | Conduct that establishes the increase was accepted |
| Handed over the keys with nothing signed | The deposit argument, with no record of the condition or the date |
| Relied on the heading “leave and licence” and re-entered | A dispossession case decided on the substance of the arrangement |
The tenancy document and every renewal of it. Proof of the rent actually paid month by month — receipts, bank statements, transfer records — going back as far as you have it, since this establishes the figure the whole case turns on. The deposit receipt. Electricity and water bills and the name they stand in. Photographs of the premises with dates. Every notice or letter that has passed between the parties, with proof of how it was sent. Any court paper already received, with the date of service noted on it. And the ownership document, if you are the landlord, or whatever you have about the ownership if you are the tenant.
Add affidavits sworn before an oath commissioner where they are required, translations of anything not in English or Hindi prepared in advance, and certified copies of orders already passed. Where a landlord’s NOC is needed for something unrelated — a passport, a registration, a licence — that is a different document and it does not affect the dispute.
And where the obstruction is coming from the society rather than from the tenant — gate passes refused, a rule about who may be let in, a demand for a higher charge because the flat is rented out — that is a dispute with the association and not a tenancy dispute at all. What the association may actually impose depends on which statute it is registered under, and we have set that out on our page about society and RWA disputes in Delhi.
Documentation, and nothing beyond it. Nobody here is an advocate, nobody appears before a Controller or a court, and nobody advises either side on whether to fight, settle or vacate. What we do is the paper: the rent agreement or the leave and licence agreement drawn properly at the start, the legal notice and the reply to one, the petition or plaint typed to your advocate’s instructions, the written statement or reply, the applications including leave to defend, the affidavits and their attestation, translations, certified copies, the execution petition and, where it comes to that, the appeal papers.
What is argued, and whether to argue it at all, belongs to counsel. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. The directory is free to open and free to write through, it runs A to Z, and no listing on it was bought.
Every document has its price on its own service page, and you can read it before you order anything or speak to anybody. Court fees, process fees and whatever a government office levies are shown separately from our charge, because that money is not ours and does not pass through us.
You are told the whole figure before work begins, and none of it is payable in advance. And on a tenancy matter we will regularly say the thing that costs us the work: where the two sides are four weeks and one deposit apart, a settlement written down properly is worth more to both of you than a file that runs for years, and we will say so before drafting a petition.
Listed alphabetically. We do not rank, rate or feature advocates, and nobody pays for a position here — the reason is on our Find an Advocate page. Neither reading a profile nor writing to somebody through it costs anything.
Outside the Delhi rent regime the machinery is quite different, and so is the timetable: accommodation held from a Government department or a public sector body is dealt with by an estate officer whose show cause period runs in days, not months. That regime, and the separate remedy for anybody put out of premises without an order, are set out on our eviction notice page.
Send us the agreement and whatever proof of rent you have, from either side of the dispute. We will tell you which system your tenancy is in, what the paper you have received actually is, and what a complete set of documents would contain — and put the directory in front of you, because if a summons has arrived, the days are already counting. Searching it is free and no commission from anybody on it reaches us.
Three different suits wear one name. Whether you are asking for a share, for possession, or for a document to be undone — and why each has a different clock. Self-acquired against coparcenary, a daughter’s right by birth, why a mutation entry is not ownership, why GPA and will papers are not a conveyance, and the two decrees a partition suit ends in.
ReadOne “no” at the counter is not where the law ends. The three doors, in the order the law gives them — the police station, the DCP under Section 173(4), the Magistrate under Section 175(3) with its new affidavit condition — plus the complaint case where the accused is now heard first, and why the officer refusing you is sometimes right.
ReadThe distinction everything rests on, and why it is decided on the medical record by another doctor rather than by how bad the outcome was. Why the complete record is the first step and must be obtained before you complain, consent as a separate and often stronger ground, and the three roads — compensation, prosecution and professional discipline — of which only one pays.
ReadThe one law that can take back property you already signed away. Section 23 and what Urmila Dixit (2025) settled about eviction and possession, the Maintenance Tribunal before a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the ceiling on the monthly amount and the route that has none, whether you may actually bring a lawyer, and where a daughter-in-law’s right of residence fits.
ReadFees, transfer certificates, admission and expulsion — and why the door that opens is the Directorate of Education rather than a court. What the Delhi High Court held in May 2026 about a hike at the start of a session against one imposed mid-session, why a certificate cannot be held against your dues, and how to ask the regulator for something it can actually do.
ReadFive different papers, five different answers to “what if I do nothing”. A private legal notice against a civil summons, a criminal summons, a tribunal notice and a police notice; the thirty days that is directory and the hundred and twenty that is not; ex parte orders and the thirty days to undo one; and why complying with a Section 35(3) police notice now protects you.
ReadWhat a family does in the first twenty-four hours, and the two rights nobody will offer you: default bail under Section 187(3), which turns on sixty or ninety days rather than the merits and dies the day the chargesheet is filed, and release under Section 479 after half the maximum sentence — a third for a first-time accused. Plus sureties, conditions, and why a bail order is not release.
ReadThe court is not deciding which parent is right. It is deciding one thing — the welfare of the child — and that re-sorts every argument you were planning to make. Custody, guardianship and access are three different things; Section 6(a) gives a starting position for a child under five and not a rule; joint custody is a Law Commission recommendation and not a statute. Plus interim orders, access as the child’s right, parental alienation, passports and travel, and what to do when an order is broken.
ReadGetting the content taken down and getting the person acted against are two different cases, with different addressees and different clocks. The Grievance Officer’s twenty-four hours and fifteen days, the twenty-four hour rule for nudity and morphed images, the thirty-day appeal almost nobody uses, why Shreya Singhal explains the wall you hit, Zero FIR, preservation requests, and the Section 63(4) certificate that decides whether your screenshots count at all.
Read“The marriage is over” is not a ground — Parliament never made irretrievable breakdown one, and no Family Court can act on it. So the case turns on what you can PROVE. The Section 13 grounds as they actually read, what cruelty means after Samar Ghosh and what it does not, desertion and its two years, the one-year bar, and why Section 23(1)(a) destroys a manufactured ground.
ReadThe danger is rarely a confrontation — it is a false complaint at a police station, and from that moment the State does the family’s work for it. What answers it is her own statement before a Magistrate. Plus the protection petition, why consenting adults are covered married or not, the three-day rule when you move, and the honest Delhi position on the thirty-day notice. For adults only.
ReadThe paper in your hand picks your procedure — not the amount, and not how obviously you are in the right. On a cheque, a note, a written contract or a guarantee, Order XXXVII gives you a suit in which the defendant has no right to defend. Plus the three-year clock, the written acknowledgment that restarts it, why a cheque bounce complaint is not a recovery suit, the mandatory mediation that gets commercial suits rejected, and why winning is not the same as being paid.
ReadTwo questions come before the facts: which door, and how much time is left. Section 6(1) built the Local Committee for the two situations in which the office route is useless — fewer than ten workers, or a complaint against the employer himself. Section 9(1) starts a three-month clock from the last incident, extendable by three, and recent decisions treat the outer edge as a wall. Plus who counts as an employee, what counts as a workplace, the conciliation that may not end in money, the inquiry’s civil-court powers, and why Section 28 means the committee and the police are not an either–or.
ReadWhat your building legally IS decides the case, not what you are complaining about. Most Delhi RWAs sit under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 — a registration statute with no power to levy maintenance, fine a member or recover anything, so the charge rests on the bye-laws and is enforced only by suit. A co-operative society goes to the Registrar under Section 70, where an election challenge dies in thirty days. And a building under the Delhi Apartment Ownership Act, 1986 has a Deed of Apartment, parking inside the statutory definition of common areas, dues as a charge on the flat, and model bye-laws that make elections and audit compulsory.
ReadA challan is two different things wearing one name. Some can be paid and closed; the rest cannot be paid at all, because the compounding list takes in Section 184 only for handheld phone use and leaves Section 185 out altogether. The notice is not a bill either – it is issued under the section headed “Restriction on conviction”. Plus what paying on the Virtual Court actually means, why the “three challans” suspension rule does not exist, and what to do when challans keep arriving for a car you sold years ago. No penalty figures, and the page says why.
Read“Court” on a challan does not mean a trial. It means a Magistrate now holds the file, and that the next click is a plea rather than a payment. How to find the case – and why a driving licence number will never find it. Why the summons only appears after you act. What contesting actually does, and the published figure showing how few people do it. The Act’s own short route, why traffic offences are expressly NOT petty offences under the new code, when you must attend in person, what the court can do to your licence, and what five official sources say – and do not say – about ignoring it.
ReadA licence goes out of two different doors – a government office under Section 19 and Rule 21, or a courtroom on conviction – and the grounds, the appeal and the way back differ for each. The appeal is thirty days from RECEIPT, and we found no provision for condoning delay. A High Court has quashed a suspension that named no ground and recorded no satisfaction. The licence does not simply revive when the period ends: the Act wants a refresher course, or a fresh test and a medical certificate. And almost nobody knows you can apply to have a disqualification removed after six months. Plus why there is no three-challan rule and no points system in force.
ReadEverybody argues “it was not me”. The strongest ground is usually not your evidence at all – it is whether the challan complies with the rule the government wrote for issuing it. Rule 167A requires the camera to carry a yearly approval certificate, requires the challan to be accompanied by FIVE named things including a photograph showing the offence AND the plate, and requires the notice to be sent within fifteen days. And Rule 167A(10) gives an owner who was not driving an express right to say so – a right the portal does not implement. Plus Delhi’s own complaint form, the cloned-plate gap nobody fills, and why Section 209 is a far weaker shield than people think.
ReadWe read the registration chapter of the Act section by section, and the answer is not the one anybody wants: there is no provision by which a seller can take himself off the register without a transfer being completed. Transfer needs the buyer. Cancellation is about the vehicle – destroyed, beyond repair, removed out of INDIA, not out of the State. And the challans are the smallest part of it: the Supreme Court has held that a registered owner who purported to sell but still appears in the records is not absolved of liability for compensation. Form 29 is necessary and has not been shown to be sufficient. One rule prevents all of it.
ReadThe counter says clear the challans first, and nobody says under what. We went looking. The Act has no such provision at all – not in section 48, not in section 50, not in fitness or permits. The power is in a rule, and the rule is narrower than the practice: ninety days, the offender’s own licence or the vehicle named in the challan, and permit, fitness and tax expressly left out. A 2018 ministry circular goes further and cites no authority for doing so. Then on 28 September 2026 the Supreme Court directed much of it anyway. Plus the Kerala judgment holding that a transfer after a death is not a transaction at all.
ReadThe section is headed “offences by juveniles” and the person it makes guilty is an adult: the guardian of the child or the owner of the vehicle, and those can be two different people. ₹25,000 and up to three years, the registration cancelled for twelve months, and no licence for the child until twenty-five. The part nobody prints: Section 199A is not in the compounding list, so it cannot be paid at a counter and must go to court. Plus the complete exemption in sub-section (3), the written representation the Act requires before a registration is cancelled, and why the Pune case was not this section at all.
ReadTwo things are said everywhere about this and both are wrong. It cannot be paid online – Section 185 is absent from the compounding list, so a court challan is issued and a magistrate decides, which the Delhi Traffic Police has itself confirmed. And six months in prison is the maximum, not the outcome: the reported figures show custody in under a tenth of cases, for days. The consequence that is real, and that nobody prints, is the licence – on conviction, disqualification of at least six months, and the provision carries no “special reasons” escape at all.
ReadSince the transport strike of January 2024 every page on this subject has been built on a provision that has never been brought into force. The government’s own release excluded Section 106(2) when the new criminal laws commenced, and the Delhi High Court confirmed in July 2026 that it was still unnotified. The charge in practice carries five years and is classified as bailable. Plus the twenty-four hour reporting window almost nobody knows about, and the ₹2 lakh claim the Supreme Court found only 205 families in the whole country made in a year.
ReadAcross nine pages on challans and road cases we kept saying this is a court application and not something to settle at a police station, and kept not explaining how. This is that page. The old provision had no deadline at all – its replacement gives the court fourteen days to record and photograph the vehicle and thirty days to order its release, and a High Court enforced that in August 2026. Plus why the registration certificate is not the whole answer, how much the bond can lawfully be, and the special statutes where the Magistrate has no power at all.
ReadOur first state page, and the state-specific part is narrower and stranger than people expect. Rajasthan’s notification binds officers by rank and by area: a Head Constable may compound inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, an Assistant Sub-Inspector everywhere else. The state’s own motor vehicles rules contain no compounding provision at all. Plus the thirty-day appeal to the RTO, a quarter of every compounding fee going to a non-lapsable road safety fund, who really owns the highway cameras, and why a seized vehicle here is so often a mining matter.
ReadSearch “Punjab e-challan” and almost everything you get belongs to Pakistan — the Punjab Safe Cities Authority in Lahore, a row of .pk sites, and commercial services. Not one Indian government result. The reason is that Punjab publishes almost nothing: its Transport Department’s whole notifications page holds nine items, four of them single scanned pages 11, 12, 16 and 17 of one user-charges file, and no section 200 schedule at all — while its own menu sends you to the centre. One date does exist: 19 December 2019, so here alone you can ask for the notification by name. Plus three two-second tells, the Gurmukhi-versus-Shahmukhi check, and why Chandigarh — whose Administrator is Punjab’s Governor — wrote the best schedule in India.
ReadOne question put to thirty-four Indian states and union territories: have you published what a challan costs, and who may take it? Five published a schedule after the 2019 amendment, seven are still running documents older than it — the oldest from 2008 — and around twenty publish no amount at all. In the whole country only two schedules tell you that a helmet offence costs three months of your licence. The full comparison table with every jurisdiction linked, the four jobs a schedule actually does, the patterns we did not expect — and every correction we have had to publish about our own pages, in one place.
ReadThe only jurisdiction in this series that was created while the amended Act was already running. Two Union territories merged on 26 January 2020, but section 17 of the Merger Act kept both rulebooks alive in their own halves — so the real question is whether Daman runs on one schedule and Silvassa on another. Neither exists. The registration mark was unified in four days; the municipal regime in eight months; the compounding schedule not in six years. The Transport Department publishes four documents, the whole legal library two entries, the police force’s rules shelf one reservation roster — and the traffic police page never once uses the word challan.
ReadThe smallest jurisdiction in this series, and the first where we had to ask whether our own question is fair. No two inhabited islands are joined by a road. The police run seven coastal security stations and publish no traffic page. The Department of Road Transport names no Act and no Rules at all — the only one of thirty-three — and a single Motor Vehicle Inspector is Licensing Authority for the whole territory. No section 200 notification could be found. We argue it both ways and then say where we come down: the principle holds, the scale does not — and a one-page notification would settle it.
ReadThe A&N Police publish a ninety-seven row spot fines list — the largest and most current schedule in this series. It marks which offences go to court instead of a counter, notes where the licence is to be seized, and prices the one compoundable limb of section 184 at ₹3,000 while sending the other five to court in the same row. Its notification is dated 22 days after the 2019 amendment — faster than Assam, which we had called the fastest. And row 17 of it caught three wrong figures in our own tables, which this page sets out in full.
ReadOn 25 August 2026 Ladakh notified S.O. 250, directing twenty per cent of everything collected by compounding traffic violations into a road safety fund — non-lapsable, audited by the CAG, and spent on signage, black spots, driving test tracks and ambulances. Puducherry promised exactly this in 2015 and never did it. The same notification calls a compounding fee one taken by “the officers authorised under Section 200” — so that authorisation exists, and we still could not find it. A territory that has published where a fifth of your money goes, and not what the money is.
ReadIn 2023 this territory recorded 13,72,501 traffic challans — 4,28,609 compounded and 9,43,892 sent to court. That is sixty-nine per cent going to a magistrate, which is the opposite of what section 200 exists to achieve, and no other jurisdiction in this series publishes the split at all. We could find no compounding notification here. The Act itself only arrived on 31 October 2019 — sixty days after the amendment — so this is the one place in India that has never known the pre-2019 Act. And in Srinagar 835 cameras now issue challans with no published procedure, for the one offence that costs you your licence.
ReadSikkim publishes the region’s fullest compounding schedule — forty-four priced rows in four columns, graded by repeat offence and by vehicle class — made by Notification No. 121/MV/T dated 29 July 2010. Sixteen years on it still prices a general contravention at ₹100, has no helmet row at all because the section did not exist, and carries two figures now below the statutory minimum. Meanwhile the same department runs AI cameras with a ten-day cure window and a written promise to pay you double if the machine is wrong — the most citizen-protective provision we have found anywhere. The newest enforcement in India, pointed at the oldest price list.
ReadArunachal publishes no compounding schedule, and the only state statute its district transport office names is a taxation Act. But one district did something no government in this series has done: it published what it collected. Lohit reported 3,782 challans and ₹42,18,800 in 2025 — which divides into about ₹1,115 per challan, the first real figure we have had for what is actually being charged on a road rather than what a document says it should be. And behind it sits Article 371H, under which this State’s Governor alone carries a personal responsibility for law and order — a question we raise and deliberately leave open.
ReadTripura publishes twenty-six no-parking zones and twelve parking zones in Agartala, each with a notification number and date; a tax penalty scale; and eleven amendments to its Motor Vehicles Rules, the latest dated five days before the central compoundable list changed. It publishes no compounding amount at all — and its Notices link points at nothing while its Acts link points at a file that will not open. Then its accident figures changed our mind: deaths fell forty per cent in two years while crashes fell nine. That is survival, not prevention — and it forced us to say plainly what a published schedule is actually for.
ReadPuducherry left us asking who the “State Government” is in a Union territory. Chandigarh answers it in practice: its notification of 6 December 2019 says the section 200(1) power is exercised by the Administrator — who since 1984 is, ex officio, the Governor of Punjab. What follows is the best compounding notification we have read: 30 rows, five columns, a column naming the only three authorities who may compound, the three-month licence disqualification written in (the first schedule in the series to do it), section 206(4) on the speeding rows, and section 184 limited in brackets to handheld devices. One problem: the police website misquotes it in four places, including a date fourteen months in the future.
ReadSection 200 gives the compounding power to “the State Government”. Puducherry is a Union territory — and the General Clauses Act says that in a Union territory those words mean the Central Government, while a Council of Ministers advises an Administrator whose disagreements go to the President. We set the provisions out and leave the question open. Underneath: the territory’s rules are not made under section 200 (second jurisdiction proved on the instrument’s face), two different monthly rates sit under one ₹100 cap, the police table of 95 offences carries pre-2019 figures — and the territory’s own 2015 policy recorded a death rate double the national average and promised to notify penalties and fund road safety from compounding.
ReadA compounding arrangement has two halves — what an offence costs, and who may settle it for which offences. Most states publish one. Mizoram publishes both, and they do not match. Its penalties page, updated February 2025, is the only state document in this series that names section 177A, and the only government page that prints the three-month licence disqualification under 194C. Its compounding notification is from 1 August 2018 — still listing section 191, which 2019 removed, and listing nothing 2019 inserted. So a helmet is priced at ₹1,000 on one government page and absent from the other. Plus the only rank floor in India with a uniform condition on it.
ReadTwenty-one pages read a state’s schedule. Nagaland does not publish one — but it published something no other state government did: a notice telling the public that section 200 itself had been replaced. Serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023, commenced by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025, substituted section 200(1) and added 177A, 192B(3) and 201 to the compoundable list — so every schedule in this series is now under-inclusive, and the community service power may have been deleted before any state used it. Following 177A back led somewhere stranger: the regulations it punishes were superseded in 2017, and state departments are still publishing the 1989 version.
ReadTwenty pages built around a table. Meghalaya’s section 200 notification has no table at all — instead of figures it sets a rule: amounts “not lesser than fifty percent of the maximum fine prescribed”. So a 2011 document still works, while Telangana’s fixed schedule from fifteen weeks earlier went stale. But the formula only saved the money, not the scope — its list of nine sections is from 2011, and section 194D for helmets did not exist then. Chasing that took us to something twenty-one pages had never done: reading section 200 itself — which settles that the compoundable list is Parliament’s and not the states’, confirms why drink driving can never be compounded, and reveals a community service power no state has used.
ReadThree pages in this series quoted a state rule capping a composition amount at ₹100 and we treated it as a stale state figure. We were wrong, and Goa proves it. Its rule 54 names its own parent provision — section 50(3), which allows “not exceeding one hundred rupees” in lieu of action under section 177. The ceiling is Parliament’s, not the state’s. In 1988 section 177 also carried ₹100 — the two matched exactly. In 2019 Parliament raised section 177 to ₹500 and ₹1,500 and left that ceiling alone: a 31-year symmetry became a 15:1 gap by nobody doing anything. Also here: the four paperwork delays this reaches, and why the real exposure on a late transfer is never the fee.
ReadOn Shimla’s sealed and restricted roads the law that stops you is not the Motor Vehicles Act — it is a Himachal statute of its own, the Shimla Road Users and Pedestrians (Public Safety and Convenience) Act, 2007. And it contains what no section 200 schedule in India contains: a fifty per cent on-the-spot settlement written into the Act itself, twice. Also here: the RC and the licence impounded if you do not pay; a plea of guilty by money order; time limits that run against the prosecution rather than against you; two appeals with named officers and real deadlines — the first appellate route in nineteen states that is in a statute; and section 22, confirming the Motor Vehicles Act keeps running alongside all of it.
ReadSeventeen states chose their own numbers. Assam did not choose. It issued notification TMV.250/2019/67 twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment — the fastest in India — and across eighty-eight rows gave no discount at all: every figure is the Act’s own. It is also the only state in eighteen that publishes four separate schedules, one per class of officer. The price never changes between them; the permission does. Police cannot compound overloading in Assam, and the two ₹1,00,000 dealer rows are reserved to senior transport officers. On a second speeding offence the schedule offers no amount at all — it offers impounding of the licence under section 206(4). Then in June 2024 the cabinet replaced the two-wheeler document fine with a warning, which is generous and which settles nothing.
ReadThe state publishes its own price list and almost nobody has read it. Notification F 5-5/VIII-Trans/2021 of 25 October 2021, issued under sub-section (1) of section 200 and sitting on the department’s own gazette archive — one of only two post-2019 schedules in India. Forty priced entries, twenty-four kinds of officer down to a Head Constable, and a repeat-offence column used on nineteen of forty rows where Madhya Pradesh — same 1994 rulebook, same design — uses it on six of thirty-one. We measured every row against the Act: a tenth of it on one section, the whole of it on five, one row above the Act and one below its floor. Plus the three-month disqualification that no schedule in seventeen states has ever mentioned.
ReadFifteen pages of schedules answer one question — what does it cost. Kerala answers the one that matters after you have paid. Following the Supreme Court, the High Court has held that even after a section 194 offence is compounded, the excess load cannot be permitted to stay on the vehicle — and directed that the driving licence goes to the Licensing Authority under section 19(1) even where the offence is compounded under section 200. Paying ends the offence. It does not authorise the condition, and it does not stop the second track. Also here: ₹5,000 per light for after-market LEDs, and Kerala’s 726 AI cameras — 1.3 crore challans, ₹900 crore issued, ₹300 crore collected, and ₹34.8 crore of payments frozen over questions about which cameras can even read speed.
ReadEvery schedule in this series was drafted before Parliament rewrote the penalties in 2019 — Telangana’s 2011, Andhra Pradesh’s 2008, Maharashtra’s 2016. Madhya Pradesh issued one on 6 March 2023, superseding all others. It is the only post-amendment list in fifteen states. And it prices three ways at once: by section, by first or second offence, and by what you drive. We checked every row — the repeat column changes the figure on only six of thirty-one, and those six turn out to be a coherent set. Also here: ₹1,00,000 per vehicle aimed at dealers not drivers, ₹300 for a helmet (the lowest anywhere), a load-projection row priced by what you are carrying, and 19 categories of officer including District Magistrates.
ReadBoth states carry a “Compounding” link. Open Andhra Pradesh’s and it is a different law altogether — not section 200 but section 86(5), the money taken instead of suspending your permit. G.O. Ms. No. 332 of 2008, rule 217, priced by what the vehicle is and what it carries: overload ₹2,000 + ₹100 per 100 kg, ₹200 per hour for missing your timings, ₹500 per excess big animal. Medium goods pay half, light goods a third. And AP is the only state in fourteen that publishes the other half too — a prosecution table naming the eight offences no payment will ever close. Its note four is the sting: the published fees are minimums, not prices.
ReadThirteen states in, we finally have the document itself. Every page so far ended the same way — the amounts live in a notification under section 200 that nobody can open. Telangana publishes its own. G.O. Ms. No. 108 of 18 August 2011: eighteen offences, two columns by vehicle, the officers who may take the money — and a proviso that does what nothing else in this series does. It writes the state’s own ceiling: the compounding fee shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Odisha showed the floor; this is the roof. One problem: it is dated 2011 and the Act changed in 2019. Also here: the real 80–90% discount of December 2023, a half-rate for agriculturists, and why the police have had to call the yearly “discount” messages fake and fraudulent.
ReadTwelve states in, this is the one that shows you the line. Odisha’s One Time Settlement Scheme for e-challans pending on 31 July 2025 is not a flat discount. Six rows say “50%”. Eleven say a rupee figure — and that figure is always the exact statutory minimum the Act prescribes, never half. Seventeen rows, no exceptions. Where Parliament wrote “may extend to” the state halved it; where Parliament wrote “not less than” the state stopped dead at the floor. We reproduce all seventeen. Also: what the annexure leaves out — helmet, seat belt, insurance, licence, overloading — the notified speed limits under s.112, and a scheme that names no power and carries no legible date.
ReadThree states have now printed a composition rate in their own rules, and all three measure delay differently. Karnataka counts months. Tamil Nadu uses bands of days. Uttarakhand counts weeks — and sets the rate by what you drive. Rule 45: one rupee a week for an invalid carriage, five for a motor cycle, fifty for everything else — and a proviso capping the lot at ₹100. So a lorry hits the ceiling in a fortnight and an invalid carriage takes two years. Unlike Tamil Nadu, transport vehicles are in. Also here: the first appeal fee printed anywhere in eleven states (₹20 and ₹25), the Deputy Transport Commissioner (legal and tribunal), and a year in which challans rose 118.77% while collections rose 37.07%.
ReadTen states in, and this is the one that is open about exactly one half of itself. Tamil Nadu publishes no compounding amounts for road offences and no officer schedule — and then prints four composition rates inside its own rules, which almost nobody is ever shown. Rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113: a late registration, a transfer not reported, a new registration mark, a change of address. ₹40 up to thirty days, ₹75 to sixty, ₹100 after — and ₹150 in the top slab of rule 113 alone. Each rule says the money is taken in lieu of any action under section 177, which no other state spells out. Also here: the enabling clause cites a section 311 that does not exist in the Act, rule 98 quietly leaves transport vehicles out, the founding notification carries no date, and section 200 is absent for the seventh time in seven tests.
ReadNine states in, the range has turned out to be enormous — and Gujarat sits at the bottom of it. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani announced the cuts on 10 September 2019: triple riding at ₹100, where West Bengal takes ₹1,000 and three months of your licence. Helmet and seat belt ₹500. A pollution offence ₹1,000, where Bengal takes ₹10,000 with a disqualification. Ten times, for the same words in the same Act. Then on 4 December 2019 the Transport Minister announced helmets would be optional except on highways and panchayat roads — we print what was said, flag that we could not find the notification, and say plainly that this is no reason to ride without one. Also here: rule 107, the first appeal procedure we have been able to read in nine states, and rule 98A’s thirty-day grievance clock for app aggregators.
ReadTwo things, and the first one saves money today. Rules 37 and 45 of the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules still compose a late registration renewal and a late transfer intimation at twenty-five rupees a calendar month, capped at one hundred rupees — figures written in 1989 and never updated, and the two lapses vehicle owners get caught by most. We quote both rules in full. The second thing is bigger: Karnataka is where somebody asked out loud whether a state may cut a traffic fine. The Centre said yes on 11 September 2019, Karnataka took legal opinion, cut on 21 September, and the Centre then said states had no authority at all. Both were right about different things — a state cannot touch the fine a court imposes, but section 200 gives it the compounding amount. That distinction is the key to every other state page on this site, and this is where it surfaced.
ReadEvery state publishes what you can pay. Maharashtra is the only one that also published what you cannot — a list of nine non-compoundable offences. Two of them are things your neighbours let you settle for money: driving without a permit (₹10,000 in both Jharkhand and West Bengal) and overloading (₹20,000 plus ₹2,000 a tonne in Jharkhand). Here there is no amount at all — a court decides, both the driver and the owner are charged, and a repeat permit offence carries a minimum three-month sentence. The same document shows a Police Constable as the compounding authority for about 95 of 104 offences, the lowest rank floor of any state we have examined and the exact opposite of Bengal. Its money is from 2016 and stale, it is still sitting on a government server, and we say so.
ReadFive states in, every page had a hole — Haryana told us who may issue a challan but never what it costs, Jharkhand the reverse. Bengal prints both halves in one notification. Schedule I names who may compound, and for oversized vehicles under section 182B that is the Director of Transport alone, one officer for the whole state. Schedule II runs to twenty-six rows and six columns, because Bengal is the only state that prints the section you broke and the section you are charged under separately — which makes a challan testable on its face. We reproduce both schedules. Then overloading, which is deliberately left out: it runs on its own notification that suspends the permit on a second offence and cancels it on a third, with the registration suspended behind it. Also: a ₹10,000 figure where Jharkhand charges ₹1,000, three rows where a licence disqualification rides along with the payment, a rule 349 that may crack our five-state pattern, and a police page still quoting superseded notifications.
ReadA District Transport Officer in Patna wrote that traffic challans could not be taken up at a National Lok Adalat. Somebody took that letter to the High Court — and fourteen months later the State had notified a scheme letting old e-challans be closed at fifty per cent, with the Chief Justice directing where the counters should stand and that no money be taken in cash. This page traces the whole sequence from Rani @ Rani Tiwari v. State of Bihar to Notification No. 3261 of 30 April 2026, sets out exactly which offences the scheme covers — and the one it leaves out, which is overloading, the most expensive offence in the Act. Also: why the Lok Adalat did not reduce anything, a correction to our own earlier pages, section 200 missing for the fifth state running, and the Supreme Court order pulling from the other end.
ReadThree state pages in we had to keep telling readers the amounts could not be printed, because the document fixing them was unreachable or a photograph. Jharkhand broke that. Its Transport Department memo Pari. Ayu.-192/2016 carries a five-column schedule — section, offence, penalty before 1 September 2019, penalty after, and the compounding fee — and we reproduce all twenty-five rows. Then the harder half: section 185 and a dozen others are not in it at all, section 194A has an empty compounding cell, and a second speeding offence carries a licence impoundment instead of a sum. Also here: three rows whose penalty columns appear transposed, the three-month deferral of September 2019, the state rules of 2001 that will not open, a Delhi address printed on the state enforcement page, and the Supreme Court order of 28 September 2026 that turns an unpaid challan into a blocked registration.
ReadAcross three state pages we kept asking the same question — who is actually allowed to stop you and write this — and Haryana is the first state that answers it. Rule 225 of its 1993 rules, substituted in 2021, appoints seventeen categories of officer and lists the sections each may challan under. We reproduce the whole schedule. The police floor is an ASI, their list is shorter than the transport list, and overloading under section 194 does not appear against the police at all — it is transport department work. Two provisos matter: five officers cannot touch private buses, and police powers widen outside municipal limits. Section 200 is missing from the enabling provisions for the third state running, so the amounts come from a notification we could not find — and we say so rather than copying a rate list.
ReadOur second state page, and the finding at the top of it is one the High Court only said out loud in August 2026: Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre, and the Bench asked the government to decide on creating one. The state’s own rules contain no compounding provision — section 200 is not even among their enabling sections — so the amount comes from a notification, dated June 2020, and the schedule everybody quotes online is older than the 2019 amendment. An appeal in a licensing matter goes to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone, not the RTO. Plus the High Court’s own Payment Setu portal across 74 district courts, the school-vehicle chapter nobody mentions, number portability, and why this page carries no compounding figures.
ReadA stay order is not a thing you can go and collect. It is an order made inside a suit, which is why the document that has to exist first is the plaint and not the application. The Supreme Court set three requirements, and most applications die on the third: irreparable injury means an injury that money at the end of the case cannot adequately repair — so “I will lose money” is usually not enough. Before any of that there is a gate: section 41 of the Specific Relief Act lists eleven situations where an injunction cannot be granted at all, including stopping a criminal proceeding, and one added in 2018 for infrastructure projects. Also the ex parte order and the thirty days in Rule 3A that people mistake for a result, what happens to somebody who breaks an injunction, and the appeal that runs both ways.
ReadAlmost nobody reading this chose arbitration. It was in the loan agreement, the builder agreement, the insurance policy — a clause nobody negotiated. So the first question is not how arbitration works; it is whether that clause can be used the way the other side says. On the two commonest versions the Supreme Court has said no. A party interested in the outcome cannot alone appoint the arbitrator (2019), and a Constitution Bench held in November 2024 that unilateral appointment clauses in public-private contracts violate Article 14. And if you are a consumer, the clause does not shut the consumer forum. Plus the twelve-plus-six month clock, the grounds for setting an award aside in the statute’s own words, the 2025 ruling on when a court may modify one, and why filing a challenge no longer freezes the award.
ReadThe one rule a court applies against you even if the other side never mentions it. Section 3 says a late suit shall be dismissed although limitation has not been set up as a defence, so hoping nobody notices is not a plan. We set out how the Schedule really works — and why the third column, saying when time starts, decides more than the number of years does. What restarts the clock (a signed acknowledgement, a recorded part payment) and the condition both carry. Why delay can be condoned in an appeal but never in a suit. The Covid exclusion of 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022, still worth nearly two years and still forgotten. And section 27, where losing the period does not just bar the suit — it extinguishes the ownership.
ReadEvery page on this subject opens by saying mediation is voluntary. That is true of one of the three mediations you can end up in. Before a commercial suit it is compulsory, and the Supreme Court has treated compliance as jurisdictional — skip it and the plaint is liable to be rejected. And a court can refer you without your consent at all, unlike arbitration. We also did the thing nobody seems to have done: checked how much of the Mediation Act 2023 is actually in force. The commencement notification we could find switched on the regulator and the rule-making power — not pre-litigation mediation, not confidentiality, not enforcement. Plus the section 12A judgments from 2022 to October 2025, what is privileged, and the four grounds on which a settlement can be undone.
ReadTwenty pages on this site mention it and none of them explained it, so here it is from the only angle that matters: the point of view of the person being asked to sign. A Lok Adalat cannot decide anything — the Supreme Court said so in 2008 — it only records what you agree to. And section 21(2) makes that record a civil decree against which no appeal lies to any court. Not a suit to set it aside, and not objections in execution: the Supreme Court shut both doors in November 2025, in a case where a man lost a property he had bought for four crore rupees through an award he was never party to. Also what can and cannot be referred, the divorce line nobody reconciles, the court fee refund, why the traffic challan discount has no instrument behind it, and the Permanent Lok Adalat, which can decide against you.
ReadThe words are not interchangeable in India and the difference has consequences. Who may appear for you, where notaries, legal consultants, document writers and “case managers” fit, and how to spot somebody who is not entitled to practise.
ReadA three-question test that does not depend on how frightened you are, an honest list of when the answer is no, what the Advocates Act actually restricts, why a power-of-attorney holder cannot argue your case, and who is entitled to free legal aid.
ReadHow to verify that somebody is really enrolled, why specialisation by forum beats seniority, the Bar Council rules that protect you before you sign anything, the conflict question to ask on day one, and the question almost nobody asks.
ReadWhy no honest Indian site publishes an advocate’s fee, the fee structures actually used, why “no win no fee” is not permitted here, what is a fee and what is an expense, and how to agree it so there is no argument later.
ReadWhat to take, in what order, what to say about the facts that hurt you, what a vakalatnama actually does and how long it lasts, what to write down before you leave, and what should happen in the first week afterwards.
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