A traffic challan in Assam: the one state that gave no discount at all, and then stopped charging half of it.

Twenty-five days

The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 came into force at the beginning of September 2019. Assam issued its compounding notification on 23 September 2019.

Three weeks and four days. For comparison: Chhattisgarh took until October 2021 and Madhya Pradesh until March 2023. Every other state in this series is still working from a document written before the amendment — some of them from 2008 or 2011.

So Assam is the fastest responder of the eighteen, and that speed turns out to explain almost everything about what the document contains.

The document

The enabling clause is quoted here as printed, OCR damage and all, because the damage is part of what we are telling you about the source:

“Confened” is “conferred”. The scan is poor and we deal with that honestly further down. What is not in doubt is the power: section 200(1), named precisely, and expressly tied to the Act as amended in 2019.

Sixteen years, and then three weeks

The notification it replaces was dated 8 January 2003. So Assam went sixteen and a half years without revising its compounding schedule, and then revised it within a month of being required to.

That pattern is worth holding on to, because it is probably the normal one. These documents are not maintained continuously. They sit untouched until a central amendment forces the issue, and then they are rewritten in a hurry. Several of the oddities later on this page look like the marks of a document written fast.

The clearest explanation of compounding we have found, from a government

Separately from the notification, the Commissionerate of Transport’s own website carries one sentence that does more work than most of what is written about this subject:

Read it slowly. The default is court. Compounding is the exception, it exists only because section 200 creates it, it applies only to some offences, and it is exercised by officials rather than by a judge.

Everything else on this page follows from that sentence. A compounding schedule is a list of the exceptions. Which is why the question of which officer may compound which offence is not administrative housekeeping — it is the boundary of a power to keep a criminal matter out of court.

Assam is the only state in eighteen that has drawn that boundary on paper.

Four schedules, not one

Every other state in this series publishes a single table. An officer list sits beside it, and the implication is that anyone on the list may compound anything in the table.

Assam does something else. It publishes four tables, each headed by its own designated officers, each containing a different set of sections.

The designations are quoted from the notification. Table B, for example, is introduced as “Designated officer:- commissioner of Transport, Addl. commissioner of Transpoft, Deputy Commissioner of Transport, Asstt. Commissioner of Transport, District Transport Officer and Motor Vehicle lnspector of the TransPort Department, Assam” — again, scan damage included.

The price does not change. The permission does.

The first thing we checked was whether a section costs different amounts in different tables, because that would be remarkable and also alarming.

It does not. Section 177 is five hundred rupees rising to fifteen hundred in table A, in table B, in table C and in table D. Section 180 is five thousand in all three tables that carry it. Section 196 is two thousand rising to four thousand wherever it appears. We went through every section that appears more than once and found no discrepancy anywhere.

Table A — the Enforcement Inspector’s schedule

Thirty-one rows, and the widest of the four. Figures as printed.

Two cells that do not contain money

Rows 12 and 13. Look at what is printed in the column headed “Amount of C.F for subsequent offence”.

Across eighteen states and several thousand priced rows, this is the only place we have found where a compounding schedule answers the question “how much for a second offence?” with a consequence instead of a figure.

A first speeding offence in a light motor vehicle is two thousand rupees. A second one, on this schedule, is not priced. It is your licence.

What section 206(4) is

Section 206 is the provision allowing an officer to demand and take temporary custody of documents. Sub-section (4) is the limb concerned with seizing a driving licence and forwarding it for disqualification proceedings, in specified circumstances including speeding offences.

So the schedule is not inventing a penalty. It is pointing at a power that already exists in the Act and saying: at the second offence, that is what happens, rather than a payment.

Two practical consequences, and they point in opposite directions.

• There is nothing to settle. If the officer is applying row 12 or 13, no amount will make the matter go away, because the schedule does not offer one. A person reaching for their wallet is reaching for the wrong thing.
• It requires a first offence on record. Impounding on this row depends on it being a subsequent offence, which is a question of fact with a documentary answer. That is the thing to establish, in writing, before the licence goes anywhere.

The question seventeen states left open

This is worth stopping on, because it closes something.

Our Kerala page is built on a High Court holding that compounding ends the offence and leaves everything else standing — including the driving licence, which must go to the Licensing Authority even where the offence has been compounded. Our Chhattisgarh page found that the Act attaches a three-month disqualification to two of the sections every state prices, and that not one state schedule mentions it.

Assam mentions it. Not as a footnote — in the amount column, as the answer.

It does not do it everywhere. The helmet row and the motorcycle-safety row here carry a figure and say nothing about disqualification, exactly like the other seventeen states. But on speeding, one state has written into its schedule the thing the others leave a citizen to discover afterwards. That is the difference between a price list and a document that tells you what is going to happen to you.

Table C — five rows, and no inspector may touch them

The shortest schedule is the most interesting one. Its designated officers are the Commissioner, Additional, Deputy and Assistant Commissioners of Transport and the District Transport Officer. No Enforcement Inspector. No Motor Vehicle Inspector. No police.

The two one-lakh rows — the dealer and manufacturer provisions, the largest figures in Indian traffic compounding — are reserved to officers of District Transport Officer rank and above.

Exactly the check Chhattisgarh does not have

On our Chhattisgarh page we wrote that its notification names twenty-four kinds of officer and never says which may compound which offence, so that on the face of it an Assistant Transport Sub-Inspector and the Transport Commissioner have identical powers — including over the one lakh rupee rows. We flagged it as a gap and said one of the few real checks a citizen can run cannot be run there.

Assam is what the answer looks like. A lakh rupees per vehicle is a figure that can end a business, and in Assam the officer who can impose it by agreement is a District Transport Officer or better. It is a short table and it is doing a lot of work.

Table B — and the two rows an MVI may not touch

Table B is table A with three differences, and we found them by comparing the two lists row by row rather than by reading a note, because there is no note.

Thirty-one minus two plus one is thirty, which is exactly what table B has. The arithmetic checks out, which is how we know the difference is deliberate rather than a transcription accident.

And the division makes sense once you see it. Overloading and weighing are roadside enforcement at a weighbridge, which is the Enforcement wing’s work. An illegal alteration is a condition of the vehicle, which is what a Motor Vehicle Inspector examines. Two inspector grades, each holding one power the other does not.

Table D — what the police may not do

The police table has twenty-two rows. Setting it against table A produces the most practically useful list on this page.

The police cannot compound overloading in Assam

Not one of the four overloading and excess-load rows appears in the police table. Neither does the excess-passenger row, and neither do permit offences.

In Assam, goods-vehicle weight is entirely a Transport Department matter. That is a clean, checkable proposition with a practical edge: if a police officer offers to settle an overloading charge on the spot in Assam, that offence is not in the table that names police officers.

We are not telling anyone to refuse an officer at the roadside. We are telling you what the notification says, and that the right response is to ask for the challan in writing with the section on it, which is something you are entitled to and which costs nothing to ask for.

And they cannot compound racing either

Section 189 is in table A and table C. It is not in table D.

Racing on a public road is about as police-facing an offence as exists, so finding it reserved to the Transport Department is genuinely odd. The notification gives no reason, and we are not going to construct one.

What it means in practice is narrow but real: a racing matter stopped by the police is not one they can settle. On the Commissionerate’s own description of how this works, the default for anything outside the compounding tables is the judiciary.

What the two inspector grades actually are

Tables A and B turn on a distinction most people have never had explained, so it is worth two paragraphs.

A Motor Vehicle Inspector is, at root, a technical examiner. The grade exists to inspect vehicles: fitness, construction, permitted dimensions, whether a vehicle is what its papers say it is. An Enforcement Inspector belongs to the enforcement wing, whose work is on the road and at the weighbridge — checking vehicles in motion rather than vehicles presented for examination.

Seen that way, the split makes sense without anybody having to write it down. Weighing a lorry and pricing its excess tonnage is enforcement work, so it sits with the Enforcement Inspector. Deciding that a vehicle has been altered in a way the rules do not permit is an examiner’s judgement, so it sits with the Motor Vehicle Inspector.

We are reconstructing the logic, not reporting it. The notification states the two lists and gives no reasons at all. But the fit is close enough that the division looks designed rather than accidental, which matters because the alternative reading — that two rows were left out of one table by mistake — would make the document much less reliable than it appears.

Guwahati, listed separately

Table D names two sets of police: the ordinary district hierarchy from Superintendent down to Sub-Inspector, and then, for the Guwahati Commissionerate, the Commissioner of Police, Joint, Deputy and Assistant Commissioners, Inspector and Sub-Inspector.

That is housekeeping rather than policy — a city with a police commissionerate has different rank titles, and a notification that only named Superintendents would have left Guwahati’s traffic police without the power. The sections they may compound are identical.

It is worth noticing anyway, because it tells you the document was drafted by somebody paying attention. A schedule written in three weeks that still remembers to name the Commissionerate ranks separately is not a careless schedule. That makes the things it leaves out — and there are several — more interesting, not less.

Reading the four tables as one map

Put together, the thirty-five provisions sort into four groups, and this is the summary we would want if we were stopped in Assam.

• Anyone on any list can settle the ordinary road offences: the catch-all, licence offences, speeding on a first occasion, mobile phone, unfitness, pollution, registration, belts, helmets, horn, insurance.
• Transport only: tickets and refusal to ply, permits, oversized vehicles, racing.
• Transport enforcement only: overloading, refusal to be weighed, excess passengers, over-dimension loads.
• Senior transport only: the dealer and component offences at a lakh rupees each.

No other state in this series allows that map to be drawn, because no other state publishes the information.

We measured every row against the Act, again

On the Chhattisgarh page we started doing something nobody publishes: putting each compounding figure next to what the Act itself provides for that section, so a reader can see whether a state is being lenient or not.

Chhattisgarh gave a scattered answer — a tenth of the statutory figure on one section, the whole of it on five others, with no visible rule.

Assam gives the simplest answer this exercise has produced.

One hundred per cent, on every row we could check

Not one discount in eighty-eight rows. The Assam schedule is the Motor Vehicles Act, transcribed into a table.

Which, written three weeks after the Act changed, is probably the point. A department given a month to produce a schedule does not hold policy discussions about the right price for a helmet. It copies the figures Parliament has just published and gets the notification out.

Why row 14 prices only the mobile phone

Table A, row 14 is section “184 (c)” — “Using Mobile phone while driving” — and nothing else of section 184 appears anywhere in these eighty-eight rows. When this page was written we noted that Assam was the only state to price section 184 by limb, and we could not say why.

Our Meghalaya page found the answer, by going and reading section 200 itself. One published rendering of the list substituted in 2019 covers “section 184 only to the extent of use of handheld communication devices”. On that reading, the mobile-phone limb is the only part of section 184 any state may compound.

Which means this schedule was not being inventive. Drafted twenty-five days after the amendment, it priced exactly the limb Parliament permits and left the rest of section 184 to be prosecuted — while Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, drafting later, both price “driving dangerously” without that limitation.

The Meghalaya page sets out the caveat in full: the limitation appears in one of three divergent renderings of section 200, and this row is circumstantial support rather than proof.

And the section 191 puzzle has an answer

Further down, this page records a discrepancy we could not explain: the Commissionerate’s website lists section 191 among the compoundable sections, and 191 appears in none of the four schedules in the state’s own 2019 notification.

It now looks like a question of dates. Section 191 is in the pre-2019 list in section 200(1) and absent from the 2019 substitution. If it was dropped, then the web page predates the amendment and this notification postdates it — drafted three weeks after the Act changed, it was already working from the new list.

Not a contradiction, then. An out-of-date web page beside an up-to-date instrument, which is the normal condition of government publishing and worth remembering whenever the two disagree.

What happens when the figures are in an Act instead

Everything on this page is in a notification. That is how compounding works almost everywhere: the legislature creates the power in section 200 and the executive fills in the amounts, which means the amounts can be changed without going back to a legislature.

Himachal Pradesh has one regime that works the other way. On the sealed and restricted roads of Shimla the governing law is a state Act, and the fine, the settlement rate and the rank of officer who may settle are all in the Act’s own penalty section — so moving any of them took an amendment Act in 2026.

The difference shows in the one thing Assam does not have. This schedule names twenty-four kinds of officer and gives no appellate authority at all; the Shimla Act names two appellate authorities with periods of thirty and fifteen days. Figures in a notification are easy to update and silent about remedies. Figures in an Act are hard to update and come with the rest of the machinery attached.

The fifth point on a spectrum

Over five state pages this series has, without planning to, collected five different answers to the same question: where inside the Act’s range should a compounding figure sit?

Five governments, none of them trying to prove anything, between them describing the entire range and every way of using it.

The helmet, across six states

One row makes the spread concrete. Section 194D, riding without a helmet, carries a statutory figure of a thousand rupees.

Same helmet, same head, same statute. Three hundred rupees in one state and a thousand in another. We have said it before on these pages and this table is the clearest version of it: a compounding figure is a statement of enforcement policy, not a measure of danger.

Overloading, and what halving does on a real load

Section 194(1) is where the differences become serious money. The Act sets twenty thousand rupees plus two thousand per tonne of excess.

Twice as much in Assam as in Madhya Pradesh for the identical load under the identical central provision. The fifteen tonne figure is not invented — it is close to the 15,090 kilogram excess recorded in the Kerala judgment our Kerala page is built on.

And whatever the figure, it buys less than people assume. The rule that a settled overloading charge still does not entitle the lorry to move with the load on it comes from the Supreme Court, not from any state’s table, so it reaches Assam exactly as it reaches Kerala. The money closes the offence. The offloading is what gets the vehicle back on the road.

A fifty rupee row that settles an argument

This one is small and we are pleased about it.

On the Chhattisgarh page, five days of work ago, we flagged that section 178(3) — refusing to carry a passenger — is priced at a hundred rupees for a two or three wheeler, while the published statutory figure appeared to be fifty. We reported it as a measurement rather than a conclusion, because we had one rendering of the Act and no second source.

That does not prove Chhattisgarh wrong, and a state is entitled to be checked against the bare statute rather than against a neighbour. But it is independent corroboration from a government document written within a month of the amendment, and it makes the Chhattisgarh row worth asking about rather than merely worth noticing.

And a bigger one: section 177

The same page ran into a genuine problem. Section 177 is the catch-all and therefore the most charged provision in the country, and two normally reliable published texts gave different wording: one reading “may extend to five hundred rupees”, a ceiling, the other “shall not be less than five hundred rupees”, a floor. We printed both and refused to choose.

Assam prints ₹500 for a first offence and ₹1,500 for a subsequent one, on all four of its tables.

That settles the numbers: five hundred and fifteen hundred are the figures the Act works with, on both limbs. It does not by itself settle whether they are floors or ceilings. But it does make one thing clear that was not clear before: Chhattisgarh’s three hundred and nine hundred are three fifths of the statutory figures, not of something we had guessed at.

We have left the floor-or-ceiling question open on both pages, because the authenticated bare Act is what would close it and we have not read it.

Five thousand rupees per alteration, for the fourth time

Table B, row 11: “Alteration of motor vehicle by owner not permitted by Act Rules” — five thousand rupees per alteration.

That figure, with those words, has now turned up in four separate documents from four jurisdictions:

• Assam, 23 September 2019 — the earliest of the four.
• Chhattisgarh, 25 October 2021.
• Madhya Pradesh, 6 March 2023.
• The Kerala High Court, 12 April 2023, which spells out that it means five thousand for each after-market multi-coloured LED, laser or neon light.

They agree because the Act fixes it with no range to exercise discretion over. The agreement is still worth having, because it settles the thing people argue about at the roadside: the two words “per alteration” are doing the work, and four lights are four alterations.

About the scan, and what we did with it

The notification we read is a scanned copy whose text layer is badly damaged. The letterhead comes out as “TransDort DeDartment DisDur”. “Conferred” is “confened”. “General” is “Ceneral”. Figures suffer too: the letter l stands in for the digit 1, and r0,000 appears where 10,000 is meant.

What Assam actually collects, from its own figures

The Commissionerate publishes something almost no other state does: a table of cases detected, cases disposed, cases undisposed and compounding fine realised, by category of offence. It is the only official enforcement data this series has been handed rather than had to infer.

The page does not say which period it covers, which is the first thing we would want and the first thing we could not get.

Ninety-eight per cent of enforcement is two things

Documents and belts-and-helmets together account for 1,86,290 of 1,89,827 detections, which is 98.1 per cent.

Overloading is 1.6 per cent of cases. Over-speeding and dangerous driving together are 0.2 per cent — four hundred and seven cases in a state of three crore people.

That is not a comment on Assam. Every enforcement system in the world charges what is cheapest to detect, and a missing document is the cheapest thing in the world to detect: it requires no device, no calibration and no evidence beyond asking. Speed requires a camera or a gun and a certificate for it. Weight requires a weighbridge.

But it does mean something for a reader. The elaborate four-table structure above, with its reserved powers and its lakh-rupee rows, governs about two per cent of what actually happens. Ninety-eight per cent of Assam’s traffic enforcement is two rows.

One line that confirms what we have said eighteen times

In the compounding-amount column for drunken driving, the department has not written a figure. It has written “Sent to Judiciary”.

Section 185 is outside the compounding machinery everywhere in India. We have written that on every state page in this series, usually by inference from a section’s absence. Here a government has printed it in a table, in the column where money would otherwise go.

Sixty-five cases, none of them disposed by payment. If you are facing a section 185 matter there is nothing to settle and a magistrate decides, and our page on drink driving cases sets out what follows.

We divided the money by the cases

Nobody publishes an average, so we worked them out. The results are more interesting than we expected.

Two of the four come out at a perfectly round number to the paisa. Sixty-four thousand five hundred and thirty-two cases at exactly five hundred rupees. Three hundred and fifteen cases at exactly a thousand. The other two do not.

Three ways to read that, and we cannot choose

We are going to set out the possibilities rather than assert one, because the honest position is that the table alone cannot distinguish between them.

• The realised column may be computed rather than summed for those two rows — cases multiplied by a nominal rate, in which case the exactness is an artefact of how the statistic was produced and tells us nothing about what was collected.
• Half the scheduled amount may actually be what is taken for helmets and belts. That would be a gap between a notification and practice, and it would be a large one on the category that is forty-eight per cent of all enforcement.
• “Disposed” may not mean “compounded”. Some disposals may be court referrals or withdrawals, which would pull the average below the scheduled figure without anybody charging the wrong amount.

Two things argue for taking the question seriously. The exactness is to the paisa in two rows and absent in the other two, which is a strange pattern for a single accounting method. And the overloading average — three thousand and seventy-five rupees against a scheduled minimum of twenty thousand plus two thousand a tonne — is about fifteen per cent of the floor, which no rounding explains.

This is the kind of question a written request answers and speculation does not.

Twenty-seven per cent undisposed

51,400 of 1,89,827 cases were undisposed when the table was published. Most of them are in the two big categories: 25,026 document cases and 26,129 belt-and-helmet cases.

That matters more in 2026 than it did when the table was compiled. In S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India on 28 September 2026, the Supreme Court addressed unpaid e-challans nationally — around ₹49,194 crore recoverable against ₹26,175 crore recovered — and approved consequences including impounding the vehicle, freezing online services, barring renewal of a registration certificate or a duplicate RC, withholding fitness and pollution certificates, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal, blocking transfers of ownership and suspending licence renewal for repeat violations.

An undisposed challan is no longer something that simply sits there.

And then, in 2024, the state stopped charging for half of it

On 27 or 28 June 2024 — reports differ by a day and we have not been able to settle which — the Assam Cabinet announced a change, briefed by the Chief Minister after a cabinet meeting.

The Chief Minister’s reported words: “While we follow a zero-tolerance policy against violations of the law, we understand that there are some offences that might be inadvertent, at times.” And, separately and plainly: “If riding without a helmet, a fine will be imposed.” The reason given was the burden on economically vulnerable commuters and the treatment of auto rickshaw drivers.

Put the two documents next to each other

Assam has the strictest compounding schedule in this series — the only one that takes the Act’s full figure on every row. Five years later, the same state announced that it would stop charging for the category that is half of all its enforcement, for the vehicles most people own.

Those are not contradictory. They are the same fact seen twice. A schedule written in three weeks by copying Parliament’s numbers produces a thousand rupee helmet fine and a five thousand rupee document fine in a state where a great many riders cannot absorb either. Something was going to give, and in June 2024 it gave.

The Chief Minister put the revenue at six to seven crore rupees over three years. Set that against the department’s own ₹25.02 crore realised from documents. The sensible reading is that the six-to-seven crore figure covers only two- and three-wheelers while the departmental table covers all vehicles over a different period — but neither source states its period, so we are offering that as a reading and not as a fact.

A warning is not a compounding, and the difference is not academic

This is the part of the page we most want a reader to take away, and it is the part nobody says.

So the 2024 policy is generous in the way that matters most immediately — you keep your money — and it leaves you with less than a five hundred rupee receipt would have. That is not an argument against it. It is a reason to ask for something in writing when you are warned, even though almost nobody will.

Who is counting to five?

The auto rickshaw rule is warnings for the first four offences and a fine from the fifth. That requires somebody to know which number you are on.

If a warning generates no receipt and no entry a citizen can see, two questions follow and neither has a published answer. Where is the register that records warning number three? And how does a driver who believes this is his second contest a claim that it is his fifth?

A system that counts has to be able to show its count. Our Chhattisgarh page makes the same point about repeat-offence columns generally: a subsequent-offence figure needs a first offence behind it, and that is a matter of record you are entitled to ask about.

The question we could not answer

Compounding amounts under section 200(1) are fixed by notification. The 2019 schedule is a notification: numbered, dated, signed, gazetted.

We have not been able to find a notification giving effect to the June 2024 decision. The reports describe a cabinet decision taking effect immediately, with the department asked to frame standard operating procedures afterwards.

A section on the website that is not in the notification

A smaller discrepancy, found by comparing the department’s own two publications.

The Commissionerate’s page lists the compoundable sections as 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196 and 198.

Section 191 is not in any of the four tables. It concerns the sale of a vehicle in a condition contravening the Act. It is on the website and it is not in the notification, and the notification is the instrument that counts.

Most readers will never meet section 191. We mention it because it is a reminder that a department’s explanatory page and its gazetted notification are different things, and when they disagree it is the notification you cite.

What “without documents” is, in section numbers

Half of Assam’s enforcement sits in one category on the department’s table, and the category has no section number against it. Working out what it contains is worth doing, because it is also the category the 2024 cabinet decision is about.

Now read those figures as a rider on a two-wheeler in a district town. Five thousand rupees for a licence left at home. Ten thousand for an expired pollution certificate. These are the Act’s own numbers, which is exactly the point — Assam did not choose them, it adopted them, and they were written for a country, not for this rider.

Ninety-five thousand six hundred and twenty-nine of these cases were detected. That is what the June 2024 decision is actually about, and seeing the figures makes the decision look less like leniency and more like an adjustment that was always going to have to happen.

What is in none of the four tables

Thirty-five provisions appear across the four schedules. These do not appear in any of them.

• 185 — drink driving. Confirmed non-compoundable by the department’s own table, which writes “Sent to Judiciary” where the money would go.
• 187 — a driver’s duties after an accident. Andhra Pradesh states in terms that this one is not compoundable and only prosecution is possible.
• 190(1) and 190(3) — unsafe vehicles and dangerous goods. Assam prices 190(2), the pollution limb, and leaves the other two out.
• 191 — selling a vehicle in a condition contravening the Act. Listed as compoundable on the department’s website and absent from the notification, which is dealt with below.
• 193 — unlicensed agents and canvassers.
• 197 — taking a vehicle without authority.
• 199A — offences by juveniles, inserted by the 2019 amendment, where the guardian or owner is deemed guilty.
• 183(2) — the owner who causes or allows speeding, as distinct from the driver.

Most of that list matches what other states say out loud when they publish a non-compoundable list, and the 190(1)/190(3) split is a sensible one. The absence of 199A is the one we would most like explained, because it is new law and a family facing it has no counter to go to.

“First” and “subsequent”, across the whole schedule

Every one of the four tables has a subsequent-offence column, and in Assam it does real work: section 177 triples, insurance doubles, the mobile phone row doubles, and speeding stops being a payment altogether.

Which makes one question worth asking on any Assam challan where the higher figure is being applied: what was the first offence, and when?

It is not a hostile question. A subsequent-offence figure is only correct if there is a prior offence behind it, that prior offence is a matter of record, and a record can be produced. On the speeding rows the stakes are at their highest, because the consequence of being treated as a repeat offender is not a larger bill but the loss of the licence.

Ask it in writing and keep the answer. If the answer is that there is no earlier record, the higher column does not apply and the lower one does.

If you have been charged in Assam

1. Get the section, in writing, on the challan or receipt. Everything below depends on it.
2. Note who stopped you — police, or Transport Department. In Assam that determines whether they may compound that section at all.
3. If it is an overloading, weighing, excess-passenger or permit section and the officer is police, that section is not in the police table. Ask for the challan in writing rather than arguing.
4. Check the amount against the table above. Assam charges the Act’s full figure, so a demand above the schedule has nowhere to come from.
5. If it is a second speeding offence, there is no amount to pay — the schedule says the licence is impounded under section 206(4). Establish in writing that there was a first offence.
6. If it is a two-wheeler document offence, ask whether the June 2024 policy applies and under what instrument.
7. Keep every receipt. A receipt closes an offence; a warning closes nothing.

Step six is the one most worth asking about, and the fastest way to get an answer that applies to everybody rather than just to you is to ask the department for the instrument itself. An RTI application costs five hundred rupees to have drafted, asks one question, and would close the biggest gap on this page.

The three questions worth asking in writing

• Is there a notification, with number and date, giving effect to the decision of June 2024 on two-wheeler document offences and auto rickshaw warnings — and if so, does it amend or supersede notification TMV.250/2019/67?
• What record is maintained of warnings issued under that decision, and how is the count of four prior offences established?
• Has notification TMV.250/2019/67 been amended since 23 September 2019, and if so by what?

Three questions, one application. The answers would be useful to every rider in the state and we would put them on this page.

Added later: row 14 was the Act, read correctly, in twenty-five days

Two things on this page are now settled, and both of them make Assam’s drafting look better than we could prove at the time.

Row 14. We said we could not explain why this schedule prices “184(c) Using Mobile phone while driving” and nothing else of section 184 across all eighty-eight of its rows. The answer is in the Act. Section 200(1) does not make section 184 compoundable; it makes clause (c) of the Explanation to section 184 compoundable — one limb only. Assam, drafting twenty-five days after the amendment came into force, read that and copied the limb. Several larger states did not, and price section 184 as “driving dangerously” without limitation. We have printed the authentic text of the substituted sub-section on our Nagaland page.

Rows 12 and 13. We noted that where other states put a figure in the subsequent-offence column, Assam put “Impounding of Driving License as per Section 206(4)”, and we called it an unusual thing for a schedule to do. It is not improvisation. Section 200(2) itself provides that compounding does not exempt an offender from proceedings under sub-section (4) of section 206. Assam was writing down what the Act already said. Seventeen other schedules in this series left it out.

One thing on this page remains open. Section 177A is absent from all four of these tables, and we had no explanation. The explanation is that section 177A was not compoundable at all until 13 January 2025, when the Jan Vishwas Act’s substitution of section 200(1) came into force. Assam could not have priced it in 2019. Whether Assam has issued anything since, we do not know.

Added later: the section 191 question is now closed

This page flagged a mismatch it could not resolve: the Transport Commissionerate’s website describes section 191 as compoundable while the state’s own notification of 23 September 2019 does not mention it. We could not tell which was wrong.

Neither was. Mizoram’s compounding notification is dated 1 August 2018 and its section list, which that department quotes in full on its own website, includes section 191.

So a document written before September 2019 was correct to list 191, and a document written after was correct to leave it out: the 2019 amendment substituted the list in section 200(1) and dropped it. The website had not fallen behind the notification. They were two accurate statements of two different versions of the law.

The general lesson is one we would rather state than keep rediscovering: before treating a state document as careless, check what the Act said on the day it was written. It applies to every page in this series, this one included.

Added later: a second government wrote the section 184 limitation down

This page’s row 14 — “184(c) Using Mobile phone while driving”, and nothing else of section 184 across eighty-eight rows — was the thing we could not explain when we built it, and which the Act later explained.

Assam is no longer alone. Chandigarh’s schedule of 6 December 2019 prices row 14 as “184 (only for use of handheld communication devices)” — the limitation written out in words rather than implied by a clause letter.

The two notifications are eleven weeks apart, from governments at opposite ends of the country, and both were drafted with the 2019 amendment open in front of them: Assam at twenty-five days, Chandigarh at ninety-six. States that re-notified years later, or never, price section 184 as “driving dangerously” without limitation.

Chandigarh also does the other thing this page was alone in doing. Where rows 12 and 13 here put “Impounding of Driving License as per Section206(4)” in place of an amount, Chandigarh’s speeding rows carry the same note. Two instruments out of twenty-six mention section 206(4) at all, and they are the two fastest off the mark.

Added later: not quite the fastest after all

This page records that Assam issued its compounding notification on 26 September 2019 — twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment commenced — and we have repeated across the series that this was the fastest response of any jurisdiction we had looked at.

It was not, by three days. The Andaman and Nicobar Police publish a ninety-seven row spot fines list whose authority heading cites a gazette notification of the A&N Administration, No. 224 dated 23 September 2019 — twenty-two days after commencement.

What does not change is the rest of what this page says about Assam: eighty-eight rows, every one of them at the statutory maximum, issued within a month of the law changing. Three days is a detail. Being among the two fastest administrations in India on this is not.

What we could not establish

• Any notification implementing the June 2024 cabinet decision.
• Whether the 2019 notification has been amended since.
• The period covered by the Commissionerate’s enforcement table.
• Whether “disposed” in that table means compounded, or includes court referrals.
• Why section 189 is reserved to the Transport Department and withheld from the police.
• The appellate authority and the period for a compounding decision in Assam.
• Whether any settlement or discount scheme has run for traffic challans. The one-time settlement notifications we found concern fitness and vehicle scrappage, which are different matters entirely.
• A certified copy of TMV.250/2019/67 with an undamaged text layer.

Almost every line of that list is something the Transport Department either holds or does not, which makes it a written-question problem rather than a research problem. One RTI application covering the three questions above would close most of it, and we would put whatever comes back on this page with the reply attached.

We also noticed, adding up the department’s own columns, that the disposed figures sum to 1,38,437 against a stated total of 1,38,427, and the undisposed to 51,325 against a stated 51,400. Small discrepancies in a published table, mentioned because we checked and because a reader should know we did.

How this page was put together

The schedule, the officer categories, the enabling clause, the number, the date, the signatory and the supersession come from the scanned notification published on a Government of Assam site. We read it four times: once to identify it, once to count the tables and columns, and twice to take the rows, because a first pass at a damaged bilingual scan is reliably wrong.

The enforcement statistics and the quoted description of compounding come from the Commissionerate of Transport’s own website. The averages are our arithmetic on those figures and nobody else’s. The comparison figures for the Act come from published renderings of the 2019 amendment rather than the authenticated statute. The June 2024 decision comes from two Assam newspapers reporting the same cabinet briefing, and we have flagged where they differ.

Everything here was written for this page. Nothing is copied from a commercial challan website, and where we could not establish something we have said so.

When this needs an advocate rather than a document

Checking a figure against a published table does not. Nor does asking which officer may compound what, or asking for an instrument by number.

An advocate is the right answer when a licence has actually been impounded and a disqualification proceeding has started; when a goods fleet or a permit is exposed, because the money stops being the point; when a prosecution has begun rather than a challan being pending; and where an accident is involved, since the driver’s duties after an accident sit outside compounding altogether.

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

There is no fee to ask us anything and no fee to be introduced to an advocate. Every document we draft shows its own price on its own service page before you commit to it, and whatever an advocate charges stays entirely with the advocate — we take no share of it and never have.

On this page in particular, a good many readers will turn out to need nothing at all. If you were warned rather than fined, or your figure already matches the schedule, the correct advice is to do nothing and keep the paper. We would rather tell you that than sell you a letter.

Questions people ask