A traffic challan in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands: ninety-seven rows, and one of them corrected us.

First: a correction to our own pages

This page is about the largest published traffic schedule in India that we have found. But it has to start somewhere else, because while transcribing that schedule we discovered that we have been printing three wrong figures across four recent pages, and one of our findings rests on one of them.

We would rather you heard it from us, at the top, than found it yourself.

What we got wrong, exactly

We checked this against the amending Act itself — the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 — rather than against a commentary, which is a rule we made for ourselves after being misled by one earlier in this series.

And what that does to a finding of ours

This is the part that actually matters, because a wrong figure in a reference table is a nuisance and a wrong conclusion built on it is worse.

The underlying point on that page survives: a schedule from 2010 is a long way below an Act amended in 2019, and a reader should know which rulebook produced their figure. What does not survive is the stronger claim we hung on it.

How a police force in Port Blair caught us

We did not spot this by re-reading our own work. We spotted it because this territory's schedule disagreed with our table, and when a government document and our table disagree we check the Act.

Correct subject-matter, correct figure. And rows 4 and 5 price section 192(1) in a graduated band from ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 — which is the first-offence range exactly, used end to end and never exceeded.

A second correction: the fastest in the series

And while we are here. We have written, on several pages, that Assam issued its compounding notification twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment commenced and that this was the fastest response in the series.

The list itself

Now the document. The Andaman and Nicobar Police publish, on their Rules and Regulations pages, a section headed “Spot Fines” and under it a table headed “List of Traffic Offences, Section of Law and Fine Amount”.

It runs to ninety-seven rows. The page records its own last modification as 6 October 2026 — the day before this page was written. That makes it both the largest and the most current schedule in this series.

What it is made under

The middle column of the table carries, as its heading, the full list of what the amounts rest on. It is worth quoting exactly, because no other schedule in this series states its authorities this openly.

Five sources in one sentence: the central Act in both its forms, the central rules, the territory's own rules, a Supreme Court committee's orders, and a gazette notification of the Administration.

The Supreme Court Committee

That fourth item is the one we had not seen before. The Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety was constituted to monitor road safety implementation across the country, and here its orders — cited by file number, No. 05/2014/CoRS Part-III dated 18 August 2015 — appear as part of the authority for a schedule of fines.

Notification No. 224

The fifth item is the one that should be the schedule's backbone: a gazette notification of the Administration, No. 224 dated 23 September 2019.

We could not find it. The number and date are cited; the instrument is not published anywhere we could reach. That puts this territory in the position we found in Nagaland — a citable notification nobody can read — except that here, unlike there, the amounts it produced are fully published, which is the part that actually helps a driver.

The rows that matter most

We are not going to reproduce all ninety-seven. Here are the ones an ordinary driver will meet, transcribed as the list has them.

Those amounts sit inside the Act throughout. Over-speeding at ₹1,500 and ₹3,000 falls inside the statutory bands of ₹1,000–₹2,000 and ₹2,000–₹4,000. Section 196 at ₹2,000 is the first-offence figure exactly. Overloading is the Act's own formula reproduced.

The rows that say Court Challan

Instead of a figure, several rows carry the words “Court Challan”. That is a schedule telling you, in advance, that there is nothing to pay at a counter.

Puducherry did this too, in seven rows, and we praised it there. This list does it in eight and ties each one to the section that makes it non-compoundable.

And the one that says the licence is seized

Row 13 carries one more thing, in brackets, in the amount column:

That is section 206(4) — the power to seize and forward a driving licence — written into a schedule so a driver knows before the stop. Only Chandigarh, which printed the three-month disqualification in its own rows, has done anything comparable in thirty-two jurisdictions.

Three thousand rupees, and the rest to court

Now the row we think is the single best piece of drafting in this series.

Section 184 is dangerous driving. Since the Jan Vishwas amendment it is compoundable only to the extent of the use of hand-held communication devices — one limb, and no more. Everything else under section 184 has to go to a court.

Why that row is the best drafting in the series

Because it does three separate things at once that other schedules do badly or not at all.

• It identifies the compoundable limb rather than pricing the whole section, which Sikkim's 2010 schedule does and could not have known not to.
• It prices that limb, which Chandigarh stops short of — Chandigarh writes “184 (only for use of handheld communication devices)” and leaves the rest implicit.
• It routes the other five limbs to court in the same row, so an officer and a driver are looking at the same page and the same answer.

That is what a compounding schedule is supposed to look like.

Graduating by vehicle, correctly

Rows 4 and 5 handle registration and fitness together and grade the amount by what you drive: ₹2,000 for a non-transport vehicle, and for transport vehicles ₹2,000 for two and three wheelers, ₹3,000 for light, ₹4,000 for medium and ₹5,000 for heavy.

One row with a rank on it

Row 73 deals with a conductor who fails or refuses to accept a fare or supply a valid ticket, under section 178(2). Alone among ninety-seven rows, it carries a note:

Section 200(1) asks a government to specify two things: the amounts, and the officers. This schedule specifies the amounts ninety-seven times and the officers once. That is not compliance, but it is evidence that somebody somewhere has the rank list, and it makes the question worth asking.

One lakh rupees

Rows 36 and 37 price contraventions of Chapter VII under section 182A — a vehicle without right-hand steering control, and other construction and type-approval breaches — at ₹1,00,000 “as per such motor vehicle”.

That is the largest figure in any schedule in this series by a factor of five. It is also correct: section 182A carries penalties of that order, because it is aimed at manufacturers, importers and retrofitters rather than at drivers.

Fifty rupees, and a hundred

At the other end, row 74 prices refusal to ply under section 178(3)(a) at ₹50, and row 93 prices a restriction on the use of coloured lights at ₹100.

One row we are flagging

Row 40 prices taking a vehicle without authority under section 197 at ₹5,000.

We are raising it because we have praised this schedule heavily and it would be dishonest to praise it without reading it critically.

The rows that only exist here

A good third of the list is local, charged under the territory's own 2006 rules read with section 177, and it is a portrait of what traffic enforcement actually involves in these islands.

• Public service drivers and conductors without khaki uniform — two separate rows.
• Fare meters: without one, with a broken seal, defective, or simply not operated — four rows.
• Buses halting too long at a stop, or halting anywhere else; booking boards not displayed; route plans and fare tables not shown.
• Vehicles at the airport and seaport required to park only in the parking places and not to approach people for hire.
• Carrying an animal in a goods vehicle without sufficient space.
• A public service vehicle without a first aid box, or without a stepney.

Those are the rules of a place where most people's transport is a bus or a shared vehicle, and where the port and the airport are the two points everything passes through.

What ninety-seven rows actually buy a person

It is easy to treat the length of a schedule as a curiosity. It is not. The number of rows decides how often an ordinary person can check their own challan, and that is the whole of what this series has been measuring.

A thirty-row schedule covers the Act's named offences and stops. Everything charged under the general penalty in section 177 — which in practice is most roadside enforcement — falls into one line that says “contravention where no other penalty is provided, ₹500”, and a driver handed a ₹500 challan for something they do not understand has no way to find out what the something was.

The cost of doing it is obvious and it is why most jurisdictions do not: somebody had to sit down with the central rules, the territory's own rules and the Act, and write ninety-seven lines. It is clerical work of a kind nobody gets credit for. It is also, as far as we can tell, the single most useful thing a transport or police administration can publish.

What the length does not achieve

Two things, and they are worth stating so that this does not read as an advertisement.

A place with very few roads

One last thing about the islands themselves, because it bears on how to read everything above.

This is a Union territory of several hundred islands of which a few dozen are inhabited, where the road network is essentially one trunk route down the Andamans and short local systems elsewhere, and where a great deal of movement is by sea rather than by road. The vehicle population is small. The distances that matter are between islands.

A rulebook from 1939

The same police page, above the spot fines, lists the instruments it works from. The first of them is “The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Motor Vehicles Rules, 1939”, together with a link for notifications and amendments to them.

Nineteen thirty-nine. Those rules would have been made under the Motor Vehicles Act of that year, and they are still listed on a police force's Rules and Regulations page in October 2026. It is the oldest instrument still carried on a government page anywhere in this series — older than Puducherry's 1989 rules, older than Tripura's 1991 rules, and a lifetime older than Sikkim's 2010 schedule.

The working rules are the 2006 ones, which the spot fines list cites throughout. But the 1939 set is still there, and alongside it a press note from 9 December 1994, fourteen numbered notifications running from 1993 to 2015, a Supreme Court judgment on tinted glass, and the standard operating procedures for the protection of Good Samaritans.

A Regulation, not an Act

Row 10 of the list charges plying without paying road tax, and cites its source as “4(3)/10 A&N Islands Tax reg. VIII of 1940”.

A Regulation, not an Act, and from 1940. That is not a quirk of drafting — it is how law is made for this territory.

How this territory is governed

So this is a Union territory without a legislature, administered by a Lieutenant Governor, where some of the statute book arrives as Regulations made under Article 240 rather than as Acts. The 1940 tax regulation is one of them, and it is still being cited in a fine schedule in 2026.

Who holds the section 200 power here

This series has been following a question for six pages: when section 200 confers a power on the “State Government”, who exercises it in a Union territory?

Three territories of the same constitutional kind, three instruments, and the same answer every time: the Administrator or Lieutenant Governor. What differs is how much of the result reaches the public. Chandigarh published the instrument. This territory published the output and not the instrument. Ladakh published neither.

What the Administration tells the public

Separately from the police list, the Transport Department issued a detailed public notice in early February 2026, carried in the Administration's own newspaper. It sets out pedestrian rules, helmets, lane discipline and vehicle lighting, each with its sections cited, and it opens by invoking the Supreme Court's directions to all States and Union territories on strict enforcement.

The laws it names are the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, the ANIMVR — the territory's own rules — and the Rules of the Road Regulations.

Saying the disqualification out loud

And it contains a sentence we have been waiting thirty-two jurisdictions to see a government print.

And never using the word compounding

With one gap. That long and careful notice names five bodies of law, cites a dozen sections, and never once mentions compounding or section 200. It tells you the law and the penalty, and not how an ordinary breach is actually settled at a roadside.

That is not unique — we found the same silence in Ladakh's mission statement and Jammu & Kashmir's enforcement reporting. It is simply more striking here, in a territory that has published a ninety-seven row list of exactly those amounts a few clicks away.

The cameras

Automated enforcement has arrived here too. CCTV-based challaning was introduced in the capital, and within a week more than 450 challans had been issued through surveillance cameras installed across the city — for riding without a helmet, not wearing a seat belt, using a mobile phone while driving, over-speeding, reckless driving, jumping red lights, stop-line violations and obstructive parking.

No published procedure, again

That is the same position as Jammu & Kashmir, with its 835 cameras and no procedure, and the opposite of Sikkim, which answered public anger with a ten-day cure window, alerts by SMS and WhatsApp, and double the penalty back for a falsely generated challan.

Port Blair, Sri Vijaya Puram

One practical note. The capital was renamed Sri Vijaya Puram in September 2024. Older instruments, press notes and notifications carry Port Blair; newer ones carry the new name, and the Transport Department's February 2026 notice is datelined Sri Vijaya Puram.

If you are searching for anything official about this territory — a notification, a court listing, an office address — you will need to try both names, and the older the document the more likely it is to be under the old one.

What you can check

1. Find your row. Ninety-seven of them, with the section against each. Most jurisdictions in this series cannot offer you this step at all.
2. Check whether the row says Court Challan. If it does, there is nothing to pay at a counter and the matter starts in a court.
3. Compare the amount with the row. A mismatch between your paper and a published government figure is the strongest thing you can put in a letter.
4. Check the row against the Act. The schedule sits inside the Act throughout as far as we checked, but the Act's ceiling is what finally binds.
5. Check whether a disqualification attaches. The Administration says in public that a helmet offence costs three months of licence as well as a thousand rupees.

The Act’s own figures, corrected

Here is our statutory table with the three corrections applied. This is the version we will be using from now on.

The three that arrived in 2025

Sub-section (1) of section 200 was replaced in full by serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, brought into force by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025. Three sections joined the compoundable list: 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B, and section 201. The replacement text is on our Nagaland page.

This list has no row for any of them, which is exactly what you would expect of a schedule whose authority notification is dated 2019. It is the one respect in which an otherwise very current document is six years behind.

What cannot be compounded anywhere

• 185 — drink or drugs. This list marks it Court Challan, correctly.
• 187 — leaving the scene of a crash or withholding information.
• 188 — abetment; the section fixes no sum of its own.
• 193 — unlicensed agents and canvassers.
• 197 — taking a vehicle without authority. This list prices it at ₹5,000, which we have flagged above.
• 199A — where the rider was a juvenile.
• 184 — except the hand-held device limb, which this list handles better than anybody.

Reading your own challan here

1. Note the section and the amount on the paper.
2. Find the matching row in the published list.
3. If they differ, that is your letter. A published government figure is the best evidence a person in this position can have.
4. If the row says Court Challan but you were charged at a counter, or the reverse, say so — the routing matters as much as the figure.
5. If a camera issued it, check what it says happened and when; there is no published dispute procedure here, so the letter is the procedure.
6. Keep the receipt and the row number together.

What is worth asking in writing

An RTI application at five hundred rupees covers all four. But for most people reading this page the live problem is simpler than that, and it is what the next section is about.

What we would actually tell most readers

Find your row. If the amount matches and the offence happened, pay it and keep the receipt — you are in the small minority of people in India who can verify their own challan against a published government figure before paying it.

Write when the amount does not match the row, when a court row has been settled as a spot fine or the reverse, when section 197 or another non-compoundable section appears as a spot fine, or when a camera challan describes something that did not happen. In a territory with a published schedule, a written reply is a far stronger document than it is anywhere else, because you are not arguing about what the figure should be — the government has already said.

Where this territory sits after thirty-two jurisdictions

On the single question this series exists to ask — what does it cost, and can I check it? — this is the best-served jurisdiction of the thirty-two.

Four Union territories without legislatures

Chandigarh, Ladakh, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Puducherry (which has one, and is the exception that raised the question). The three without legislatures have now each produced an instrument signed by an Administrator or Lieutenant Governor, and the constitutional question is settled in practice.

What they have not produced is anything like a common standard. One published the instrument and not the outcome, one published the outcome and not the instrument, and one published a funding rule and neither. Same constitutional position, same central section, three completely different results.

What a schedule is actually for

We have revised this four times and this territory adds nothing new to the theory — it simply does the thing. So here is the whole position, and then the point.

1. Not a safety measure. Corrected on Tripura. A schedule is a citizen's protection; safety depends on enforcement and on what follows a crash.
2. Traceability, even when stale. From Sikkim — an old schedule still tells you which rulebook produced your figure.
3. A routing instruction. From Jammu & Kashmir, where sixty-nine per cent of challans went to a court.
4. An input to road safety spending. From Ladakh, where twenty per cent of compounding receipts buys ambulances.

What this page cannot do

It cannot produce notification No. 224. It cannot tell you why section 197 is on a spot fines list. It cannot tell you what this territory collects. It cannot tell you how to dispute a camera challan here, because no procedure is published. And it is not legal advice about your matter.

Added later: the other island territory

This page praises a ninety-seven row schedule heavily, and the praise needs a control. We have now written up the other island Union territory, and it makes the comparison exact.

Lakshadweep is the same constitutional animal: a Union territory without a legislature, governed partly by Regulations under Article 240, with a small population, a short road network and a police force whose published structure is built around coastal duty. It publishes no compounding schedule, no officers, and no traffic page at all — and its Department of Road Transport’s own page names no Act and no Rules whatsoever, which is unique in thirty-three jurisdictions.

The same police service, in a territory that publishes nothing

Immediately after this page we wrote up Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, and it threw this schedule into a light we had not expected.

Which is also the fairest thing we can say in this schedule’s favour. We have spent this page checking it, questioning one of its rows and using it to correct ourselves. It is worth adding that a sister territory, policed from the same service, publishes nothing comparable at all.

Where this schedule sits in India

We have now put the same question to thirty-four jurisdictions and counted the answers on a single state-by-state comparison page. It is worth saying plainly where this ninety-seven row list came out.

So the fair summary is that a police force in a union territory of under four hundred thousand people produced one of the five most current compounding documents in India, marked the court-or-counter routing row by row, and was right about two provisions we had wrong. We would not have predicted any of that when this series started.

What we could not establish

• Gazette notification No. 224 of 23 September 2019 — cited, not published.
• The Supreme Court Committee order No. 05/2014/CoRS Part-III of 18 August 2015.
• The full text of the A&N Motor Vehicle Rules, 2006.
• The officers specified under section 200, beyond the one rank on row 73.
• The basis on which section 197 appears as a spot fine.
• Any camera count, collection figure or dispute procedure for the CCTV challans.
• Any government road accident or challan series for the territory.
• Whether anything has been notified since January 2025 for the three new sections.

How this page was put together

The spot fines list was read directly from the Andaman and Nicobar Police website in a browser, because the ordinary fetch route was refused, and transcribed row by row including its column heading, its punctuation and its bracketed notes. The Transport Department's public notice was read from the Administration's own newspaper of early February 2026 and is quoted from it. The CCTV challan figures are from local reporting of June 2026 and are attributed as such. For every statutory figure we worked from the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 itself rather than from a commentary, which is how the three corrections at the top of this page were established; the compoundable list is the one substituted on 13 January 2025. The renaming of the capital is from the Government of India's own announcement of September 2024.

When a document stops being the answer

A row marked Court Challan. Drink driving, red light jumping, driving dangerously — these begin in a court and the licence may already have been taken.

A licence at risk. 194C and 194D each carry three months off the road, and paying does not buy it back.

A non-compoundable section settled at a counter. If that happened to you, it is worth somebody competent looking at the paper.

An injury to anyone. Stop here and get an advocate the same day.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

What we charge

Asking us something is free, and so is being put in touch with an advocate. Every document we draft shows what it costs on its own page, before you decide anything.

This territory is the clearest case in the series for a written reply at two thousand five hundred rupees rather than an information request, and the reason is a compliment: the figures are already published, so the argument is never about what the amount should be. It is about whether your paper matches the row, and that is a reply, not a question. Where you want the instrument behind the list, an RTI application at five hundred does that; for the plainer requests there is a simple application at one thousand five hundred.

No part of an advocate's fee comes to us.

And what thirty-two jurisdictions have not changed: read the section, find the ceiling, settle it, and put the paper away. Here, for once, you can find the row as well.

Questions people ask