A traffic challan in Arunachal Pradesh: no published schedule, but for once we can work out what is actually being charged.

What we went looking for, and did not find

Section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act does one thing. It lets a state take money across a counter instead of taking you to court, for a list of offences the central Act specifies, and it says the amount is to be fixed by the State Government “by notification in the Official Gazette”. So for every jurisdiction in this series the first question is the same: has the state issued that notification, and can an ordinary person read it?

For Arunachal Pradesh the answer to the second half is no, and we cannot establish the first half either way. We went through the obvious routes and then the unobvious ones. The state transport department domain would not resolve for us at all, which we tried from two different directions and are reporting as a fact about our attempt rather than as a finding about the department. The district transport office pages that are reachable sit on district administration portals rather than on a transport domain. The district administration sites we could open do not carry a compounding schedule. The press coverage of enforcement in this state is about equipment and campaigns, not about rates. And nothing we found anywhere cites a notification number.

The only state statute the transport office names

This is the detail that made us stop and read twice. The District Transport Office for the Itanagar Capital Complex publishes a short statement of what it does. It is worth quoting as it stands:

Read the shape of that sentence rather than its content. Central law first: the Act of 1988, the Central Motor Vehicles Rules of 1989, and whatever the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways issues. Then state law. And the only state law named is a taxation Act — the Arunachal Pradesh Motor Vehicle Taxation Act, whose parent instrument is from 1984 and which has been amended, the office tells us, in 2006 and 2010.

There is no state Motor Vehicles Rules in that list. There is no state compounding notification in that list. The office that issues and collects in this state describes its own state-law universe as consisting of a tax statute, and everything else as central.

What the district transport office says it does

The same office gives its address as the Truck Terminal at Lekhi, Naharlagun, and lists the services it provides. We read all of them. They are the ordinary business of a transport office: learner's licences, driving licences, renewals, duplicates, international permits, registration, transfer of ownership, hypothecation entries and removals, fitness, permits, no-objection certificates, tax payment and the rest of it.

Sixteen items. Not one of them is compounding a traffic offence. Not one of them mentions a fine, a penalty or a challan.

Sixteen services, and not one of them compounding

The practical consequence is worth spelling out, because it changes what you should do if you are actually holding a challan in Arunachal Pradesh. In a state with a published schedule, your first move is to find the row. In a state like this one, there is no row to find, and looking for it on a transport department page will waste your afternoon. The transport office is not withholding the schedule; it is not the body that would have it in front of it.

So the check moves. It moves off the state's own pages and onto the central Act, which is published, which is free, and which sets a ceiling nobody in any state can exceed. We set out those figures further down this page, and in a state with no schedule they are not a fallback — they are the whole of what you have, and they are enforceable.

No Arunachal Motor Vehicles Rules that we could find

Almost every state in this series has its own Motor Vehicles Rules: Tripura's are from 1991 and have been amended eleven times, Puducherry's are from 1989 and were made by the Lieutenant-Governor, and so on. These rules are where a state does its own detailed work — fees, forms, local procedures, sometimes a compounding fee in a quite different sense from section 200.

We could not find Arunachal Pradesh Motor Vehicles Rules. We are not asserting they do not exist. Rules can be perfectly valid and simply unpublished online, and in a state where the departmental domain did not load for us at all we are in a poor position to make a negative claim. But we looked, we failed, and the state's own district office named only a taxation Act, which is at least consistent with the central rules doing most of the work here.

Ninety point-of-sale machines

What Arunachal Pradesh does publicise about enforcement is its equipment. On 28 February 2024, at the closing of the thirty-fifth National Road Safety Month in Itanagar, the Transport Minister Nakap Nalo launched an electronic challan system for the state, reported as ninety point-of-sale machines, with the State Bank of India and the National Informatics Centre named as the partners handling payment and the software.

Ninety machines is a real commitment for a state of this size and terrain. An electronic challan system changes several things at once: the officer selects a section from a list rather than writing one, the amount is generated by the software rather than agreed at the roadside, the payment leaves a trail, and the whole thing becomes countable. That last consequence is, we think, why Lohit district was able to publish a challan count and a revenue total at all.

What a launch tells you, and what it does not

Here is the gap. Every report of that launch we read describes the machines, the partners, the minister and the occasion. Not one mentions a notification, a schedule, or section 200.

That matters more than it sounds. An e-challan machine has to have amounts loaded into it. Somebody decided what number appears on the screen when an officer selects section 177. That number came from somewhere — either from a state notification under section 200, or from the Act's own figures, or from a software default that the vendor shipped. The first is law. The second is lawful and conservative. The third would be neither, and would be invisible to everyone including the officer using it.

So Arunachal has built the apparatus that makes compounding countable, and has not published the document that makes it checkable. Those are separable, and this state separated them.

One district published its own totals

On 28 January 2026, the police of Lohit district published a report of the previous year's work. The Superintendent of Police, Thutan Jamba, set out what the district had done across its range of responsibilities. Two of the figures in it are, for the purposes of this series, unprecedented.

We have been asking twenty-seven jurisdictions what they charge, and the answers have been documents: a schedule, a formula, a notification nobody publishes, two notifications that contradict each other, thirty-eight notifications about parking. This is the first time a government body in this series has published what it actually collected and from how many people.

The arithmetic

It divides. We did the division ourselves and we are labelling it as ours, because it is not in the report and nobody in the Arunachal government has asserted it.

Eleven hundred and fifteen rupees and fifty paise. In a series where every figure so far has come off a piece of paper, this is the first one that comes off a road.

What an average is not

We want to be careful here, because an average is the easiest number in the world to misuse and we have spent twenty-seven pages refusing to misuse figures.

• It is not a price. No officer in Lohit charges ₹1,115.50 for anything. It is the mean of 3,782 different amounts for an unknown mix of offences.
• It is not a schedule. You cannot hold it up at a counter. It has no legal standing of any kind and no officer is bound by it.
• It is not evidence that any individual challan was correct. A mean sits happily on top of a distribution containing both undercharges and overcharges.
• It is not the whole state. Lohit is one district of a state with more than twenty, and its own report says Itanagar–Naharlagun collected more.
• It may not be only compounding. “Revenue collected” in a police report of this kind is most likely compounding money, but the report does not say so in those words, and we are not going to pretend it did.

What it is, and this is worth having, is an order of magnitude. And the order of magnitude is the reassuring part.

Which sections a figure that size is consistent with

Put ₹1,115.50 next to the Act's own numbers and see where it lands. Section 177 is ₹500 for a first offence and ₹1,500 for a second. No helmet under 194D is ₹1,000. No seat belt under 194B is ₹1,000. Driving without a licence under 181 is ₹5,000. No insurance under 196 is ₹2,000. Section 177A, which became compoundable only in January 2025, runs from ₹500 to ₹1,000.

A mean of about eleven hundred rupees is what you would expect from a caseload dominated by helmets, seat belts, documents and ordinary section 177 contraventions, with a scattering of the heavier sections pulling the average up. It is well below the figures for licence and insurance offences and well above the floor for the lightest ones.

“Second-highest in the state”

The report's own framing is that Lohit's collection was the second-highest in the state, after Itanagar and Naharlagun. That is a claim about rank, and it tells us two things.

First, somebody in this state is keeping district-wise challan and revenue figures and comparing them. You cannot know you are second without a table. That table exists somewhere. It is not published, and it is exactly the sort of thing an information request can ask for by name.

Second, the top district is the capital complex, which is where the transport office we quoted earlier sits, and where the e-challan system was launched. If Lohit is second with 3,782 challans and ₹42,18,800, the capital's numbers are larger — and nobody has published them.

The figure we could not get

We tried to find the Itanagar–Naharlagun figure, because having the first and second together would let us say something about the state rather than about one district. We could not.

This is an honest dead end rather than a mystery. The Lohit number exists in public only because one district's police chose to publish an annual report and put it in it. There is no obligation to do that and most districts do not. We are not treating the absence of the capital's figure as a concealment; we are treating it as the ordinary consequence of a system where publication is a local decision.

Deaths in Lohit, in the same report

The same report carries the district's road casualty figures, and they moved sharply in one year: deaths from 15 to 9, critically injured from 24 to 7.

Small numbers. We are going to resist doing to them what we did with Tripura's, because at this scale a single bad night changes the percentage. Nine deaths against fifteen is a fall; it is not a trend, and one district-year is not a series. We print the figures because the district printed them and because they are part of the same document that gave us the challan count. We are not going to build an argument on them.

What the district says it did

The report attributes the year's work to the team rather than to any single initiative, and it names what was done on the road safety side. There were awareness campaigns at a college and at two government higher secondary schools, directed at helmet use, triple riding and rash driving. Vehicles with modified silencers were seized.

Modified silencers are worth a sentence, because they sit in an interesting legal place: that is typically a construction or alteration matter rather than a driving-behaviour one, and the sections that bite are about the vehicle's compliance with the standards it was approved against. It is also one of the few enforcement subjects where the public complaint and the legal provision line up neatly.

Revenue framing, and why we are flagging it

The report leads on record collection. We are going to say plainly that this is the thing to watch, and equally plainly that we are not accusing Lohit district of anything.

Compounding money is not supposed to be revenue. The whole architecture of section 200 is that the state forgoes a prosecution and takes a fixed sum instead; the sum is a substitute for a court outcome, not a source of income. The moment a collection total becomes a performance measure, the incentive quietly inverts, and that is true of every enforcement system in the world, not of this district in particular.

Why one district’s report is worth this much space

Because of what the rest of this series looks like. Twenty-seven jurisdictions in, we have schedules that are published and wrong, schedules that are right and unpublished, formulas instead of tables, two documents from one department that contradict each other, and a state that published thirty-eight notifications about where to park and none about what anything costs.

In all of that, nobody told us what was collected. Governments publish the rule and not the result. One district in Arunachal Pradesh published the result and not the rule, and the result turns out to be the harder thing to get and in some ways the more informative. We would rather have both. Given one, this series has spent long enough asking for the rule to be honest about the value of the other.

Article 371H

Now the constitutional part, which is the reason this page exists in the order it does. Three pages ago we started chasing a single question: who, in law, is the “State Government” that section 200 empowers? We raised it in Puducherry and deliberately did not answer it. We watched Chandigarh answer it in practice. Arunachal Pradesh is a full State with its own legislature, so on the face of it the question should not arise at all here. It arises anyway, for a reason specific to this one state.

Article 371H of the Constitution was inserted by the Constitution (Fifty-fifth Amendment) Act, 1986, when Arunachal Pradesh became a State. It contains a provision that exists for no other State in India.

The text itself

There is no equivalent clause for Uttar Pradesh, or Tamil Nadu, or Assam. In every other State the Governor acts on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers on matters of this kind. Here, on law and order specifically, the Governor consults and then decides.

“Individual judgment”

Those two words are a term of art and they are doing real work. Consulting is not the same as being bound. The clause requires the Governor to put the question to the Council of Ministers and then to form his own view of what should be done. It does not say he must accept theirs.

It is also carefully bounded. It applies to law and order, and to nothing else. Roads, transport, taxation, licensing and every other subject in the State List are outside it. The ordinary constitutional position — Governor acts on advice — continues to apply to all of them.

The two provisos

Clause (a) carries two provisos and they pull in opposite directions, which is itself informative.

• The first makes the Governor's own view of his own jurisdiction unchallengeable. If a question arises whether a matter is or is not one on which the Governor is required to act in the exercise of individual judgment, the Governor's decision on that is final, and the validity of anything he does cannot be called in question on the ground that he ought or ought not to have acted in individual judgment. That is a strong clause.
• The second provides for the whole thing to end. If the President, on a report from the Governor or otherwise, is satisfied that it is no longer necessary for the Governor to have that special responsibility, the President may by order direct that the Governor shall cease to have it. The provision was built to be temporary, and whether that order has ever been made is not something we established.

Not less than thirty members

Clause (b) is a floor on the size of the Legislative Assembly. It is there because Arunachal Pradesh is a large territory with a small population, and without a floor the ordinary apportionment rules would have produced an assembly too small to function as one. We mention it because it tells you what kind of article 371H is: not a restriction imposed on a State, but a package of special arrangements made when a territory with unusual characteristics became a State.

The question this raises

Here it is, stated as plainly as we can and then left where it is.

And why we are not answering it

Because we do not know, and because the arguments run both ways with real force.

We printed both and we are choosing neither. This is the same thing we did on Puducherry, and for the same reason: a constitutional question that has not been decided by anyone whose job it is to decide it does not become decided because a website needed a conclusion.

What the General Clauses Act says about a State

For completeness, and so that the three pages can be read together, here is the definition that has been doing the work across all of them. Section 3(60) of the General Clauses Act, 1897 defines “State Government” by reference to what kind of territory is in question. For a State it is the Governor. For a Union territory it is the Central Government.

That single definition produced three completely different situations in three consecutive pages, which is why we have given it this much attention.

Three jurisdictions, one question

Three jurisdictions, three constitutional positions, and one statutory power that reads identically in all of them. Chandigarh is the only one where a government has put its answer in writing.

The Inner Line Permit

There is one more thing about being stopped on a road in Arunachal Pradesh that has nothing to do with the Motor Vehicles Act and will confuse you if nobody says so.

Arunachal Pradesh is a protected area. Entry and stay by persons who are not residents is regulated by the Inner Line Permit, which operates under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 — a nineteenth-century instrument that is still in force and still the basis of the permit. ILP checking has been intensified in and around Itanagar in recent years, and the police of the Itanagar Capital Region have reported enforcement activity against ILP violators.

Two permit regimes at one stop

This is the practical problem. A vehicle stopped at a check-gate in this state can be asked for two entirely different families of document by the same officer in the same minute.

Because both get asked for at the same stop, people conflate them, and a challan that mixes them up is one of the few things on this page we would tell you to put in writing immediately.

Two hundred and nineteen

To show that this is not a theoretical concern: police in the Itanagar Capital Region reported 219 ILP violators externed from the capital region. Externment is a serious administrative consequence. It is not a fine, it is not compounding, and nothing about section 200 applies to it.

We are not commenting on the merits of ILP enforcement, which is a policy matter for the State and a live political subject in the region. We are pointing out that a person who is stopped, and who has both a vehicle issue and a permit issue, is in two different systems at once and should not be treated as being in one.

An ILP matter is not compoundable under section 200

Section 200 compounds offences “punishable under” the sections it lists, and every one of those sections is in the Motor Vehicles Act. There is no mechanism in the Motor Vehicles Act for compounding anything under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, and no notification under section 200 could create one.

What you can check when there is no schedule

This is the operative part of the page. In a state with a published table you check the row. In Arunachal Pradesh there is no row, so you check three other things, and all three are available to you without any state document at all.

1. The section number printed on the challan. Everything else follows from it. If no section is printed, that alone is worth asking about, because the authority to take money comes from the section and not from the stop.
2. Whether that section is on the compoundable list at all. Section 200(1) contains a closed list. If your section is not in it, no amount of money settles it at any counter anywhere in India, and the matter belongs in court.
3. Whether the amount exceeds the Act's own maximum for that section. A state notification can fix an amount at or below the statutory figure. It cannot exceed it, and no state has the power to let an officer exceed it. This is the ceiling that does not depend on Arunachal publishing anything.

Those three checks are the whole of what a person in this state can do at the moment of being charged, and between them they catch the great majority of genuine problems.

The Act’s own figures

Here are the sections that make up ordinary roadside enforcement, with the figure the central Act sets. In Arunachal Pradesh these are not a guide to what you will be charged — they are the limit on what you can be charged.

Our Lohit average of about ₹1,115 sits in the middle of that table rather than above it, which is the arithmetic and the law agreeing with each other for once.

The three sections that arrived in 2025

On 13 January 2025, sub-section (1) of section 200 was replaced in its entirety by serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, brought into force by S.O. 227(E). The substituted list added three sections that had not been compoundable before: 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B, and section 201.

This matters more in a state with no schedule than in one with a schedule, and the reason is counter-intuitive. A state with a published schedule from, say, 2019 now has a schedule that is missing three rows, and an officer there has no amount to charge for those sections. A state with no schedule at all was always working from the Act, and the Act now includes them. Arunachal's position did not change on 13 January 2025 because there was nothing to change.

What cannot be compounded anywhere

Some sections are not on the list and never have been. No state notification can add them, and no counter can take money for them.

• 185 — driving under the influence of drink or drugs.
• 187 — failing to stop or to give information after an accident.
• 188 — abetment of an offence. Note that the section itself provides no figure of its own, which is why a correctly drafted schedule cannot price it.
• 193 — agents and canvassers operating without a licence.
• 197 — taking a vehicle without authority.
• 199A — offences by juveniles, which brings in the guardian or owner.

If your challan cites one of these, there is nothing to pay and nothing to negotiate at a counter. The matter starts in court, and that is the point at which you need somebody who appears in one.

The three-month disqualification

Sections 194C and 194D carry a three-month disqualification of the driving licence alongside the money. Paying the compounding amount does not displace it: section 200(2) is explicit that the composition does not affect the disqualification, and it ties back to section 206(4), under which the officer may seize the licence and forward it.

This is the single most commonly misunderstood thing about a helmet or overloading challan anywhere in India, and it is worse in a state with no published schedule, because Chandigarh is the only jurisdiction in this series whose schedule actually prints the disqualification in its own rows. Everywhere else, including here, you have to know it from the Act.

Reading your own Arunachal challan

1. Find the section. It should be printed. On an e-challan generated by one of the ninety machines it will be, because the software requires a selection.
2. Check it against the 2025 list. On the list, compoundable. Off the list, court.
3. Check the amount against the Act's figure from the table above. At or below is lawful. Above is not, in any state, whatever any document says.
4. Check whether a disqualification attaches — 194C, 194D, or 190(2) on a repeat.
5. Check that it is a Motor Vehicles Act matter at all and not a permit matter that has been written up as one.
6. Keep the receipt. In a state with no published schedule, your own paper is the only record of what was charged, and if you ever need to ask a question about it the receipt is the question.

What is worth asking Arunachal in writing

Four questions, and they are unusually well-posed for this state because two of them ask for something that demonstrably exists.

The fourth question is the interesting one, and it is why this state is the clearest case in the series for an RTI application rather than a reply. Turn the average into a breakdown and you have reconstructed, from collection data, what Arunachal Pradesh is effectively charging per section. No state has ever been asked that in this series because no state gave us a reason to think the data existed.

What we would actually tell most readers

Pay it. If the section is printed, the section is on the list, and the amount is at or below the Act's figure, then the challan is lawful whether or not Arunachal Pradesh has ever published anything, and our arithmetic suggests the amounts being taken in at least one district are in the ordinary range. Pay, keep the receipt, read the section on it.

Write when one of three things is true: the amount exceeds the statutory maximum, the section cannot be compounded at all, or a permit matter has been mixed into a vehicle-document matter. Those three are worth putting on paper. Nothing else on this page is.

Where Arunachal sits after twenty-eight jurisdictions

It is the twenty-eighth jurisdiction in this series and it is the first one to give us a result instead of a rule. That is a genuinely new category.

Six north-eastern jurisdictions, six different answers

This region has now produced six consecutive pages and not one of them resembles another.

• Assam charges the statutory maximum on all eighty-eight rows, and issued its notification twenty-five days after the central amendment — the fastest in the series.
• Meghalaya wrote a formula instead of a table.
• Nagaland is the only state government that told the public section 200 itself had changed, and the only one whose notification we can cite but not read.
• Mizoram publishes both halves from one department and they do not match — a 2025 penalties page naming section 177A, against a 2018 compounding notification that still lists section 191.
• Tripura publishes thirty-eight parking notifications and no prices, and its deaths fell forty per cent while its crashes fell nine.
• Arunachal Pradesh publishes no schedule, names only a taxation Act as its state law, and has one district that published what it collected.

Six states, six answers, one central section. That is the finding of this region and it took six pages to establish it.

A schedule is not a safety policy

We said something wrong for most of this series and corrected it on the Tripura page, so we will restate the correction here rather than let it sit on one page.

We used to treat a published schedule as evidence of a well-run system. It is not. A published schedule is a citizen's protection: it lets you check a figure, and that is a real and important thing. Whether roads are safer depends on whether enforcement actually happens and on what follows a crash, and those are different variables entirely.

Arunachal Pradesh is a clean illustration. It publishes no schedule, which is a failure of checkability. One of its districts did a great deal of enforcement and reported fewer deaths, which is a different axis. A government owes you both, and the two come apart in both directions.

What this page cannot do

It cannot tell you the amount for your section in Arunachal Pradesh, because no published document sets one. It cannot tell you whether a notification exists. It cannot tell you whether Article 371H bears on section 200. It cannot turn one district's average into a rate for the state. And it is not legal advice about your matter, which depends on your paper and not on this page.

Added later: why a stale schedule still beats none

This page said that Arunachal gives you an average and not a row, and that a schedule is what you need at a counter. The next jurisdiction we looked at sharpened that, and it is worth bringing the correction back here.

Sikkim publishes a full schedule — forty-four priced rows, four columns, graded by vehicle class — made in July 2010. Sixteen years on it prices a general contravention at ₹100 against the Act’s ₹500 and has no helmet row at all, because section 194D did not exist when it was written. We expected to conclude that a schedule that out of date was nearly worthless.

One other thing travelled between the two pages. This page noted that the only state statute the district transport office names is a taxation Act, and we treated that as a local oddity. Sikkim’s Motor Vehicle Division publishes a page headed “Acts And Rules” whose five items are a motor vehicle taxation amendment Act and four of its schedules — nothing else. Two consecutive north-eastern jurisdictions, researched separately, where a transport department’s own account of the state law it administers is about collecting tax.

What we could not establish

• Any notification under section 200 for Arunachal Pradesh — number, date or text.
• Any Arunachal Pradesh Motor Vehicles Rules.
• The Itanagar–Naharlagun challan and revenue figures, which the Lohit report implies are larger than Lohit's.
• Whether “revenue collected” in the Lohit report is compounding money only, or includes other receipts.
• The offence-wise composition behind the 3,782 challans, without which the average stays an average.
• Any state-wide government road accident series for Arunachal Pradesh.
• Whether any order under the second proviso to Article 371H(a) has ever been made.
• The state transport department's own website, which did not load for us by any route we tried, including from a browser on an ordinary domestic connection.

How this page was put together

The constitutional text is Article 371H as inserted by the Constitution (Fifty-fifth Amendment) Act, 1986, quoted from the Article itself. The transport remit and the service list are from the District Transport Office page for the Itanagar Capital Complex, read directly in a browser because the ordinary fetch route failed. The challan count, the revenue total, the rank claim and the casualty figures are from the Lohit district police report of 28 January 2026 and are attributed to it. The average is our own division and is labelled as ours everywhere it appears. The e-challan launch details are from the reporting of the 28 February 2024 event. The section 200(1) text and the statutory amounts are from the Motor Vehicles Act as amended, including the substitution effected by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 and commenced by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025.

When a document stops being the answer

A section that cannot be compounded. 185, 187, 188, 193, 197 or 199A on your paper means there is no counter outcome to aim at and the matter begins in court.

A licence already at risk. 194C and 194D each carry a disqualification that paying does not remove.

A permit matter tangled with a vehicle matter. This is the Arunachal-specific one, and it is the situation where getting the two separated early is worth far more than arguing about the money.

Anyone hurt. Stop reading this and find 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 costs nothing. Being introduced to an advocate costs nothing. Each document we draft shows its own price on its own page before you commit to anything.

Arunachal Pradesh is the strongest case in twenty-eight jurisdictions for an RTI application at five hundred rupees, and not because the state is being unhelpful. It is because the four questions above are unusually well-posed, and two of them ask for data a district has already proved it holds. Where an amount needs to be challenged rather than a document requested, a written reply is the right instrument; for the plainer requests there is a simple application. And if what you need is the schedule itself rather than a figure, the RTI route is the only one that can produce it.

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

And the admission we have now made in twenty-eight jurisdictions, no less true where nothing is published than where thirty rows are: for the overwhelming majority of challans the right move is to look up the ceiling, hand over the money, and stop thinking about it.

Questions people ask