A District Transport Officer in Patna wrote a letter saying traffic challans could not be taken up at a National Lok Adalat. Somebody took that letter to the High Court. Fourteen months later the State had notified a scheme letting old e-challans be closed at half price, the Chief Justice was personally directing where the counters should stand and how the money should be taken, and thirty desks were running beside Gandhi Maidan. That sequence is what makes Bihar different — and the one offence the scheme leaves out is the one that costs the most.
The usual division applies here as everywhere. Parliament writes the offences, the penalties, the procedure once a magistrate has the file, the electronic enforcement code, the licensing chapter. A state controls four things: the sum at which it will let an offence be settled, which of its officers may act, where certain appeals go, and what it chooses to build and staff.
Bihar’s distinctive contribution is to the first of those, and it arrived by a route none of the other states in this series took. It was not a policy announcement and it was not a departmental circular. It came out of a courtroom, and the court has not let go of it since.
In September 2025 the District Transport Officer, Patna, put in writing that traffic challan matters cannot be taken up in National Lok Adalats. On its face that is a small administrative statement. In practice it closed the only cheap, quick route a person with an old challan had, because a National Lok Adalat is where compoundable matters get disposed of in bulk across most of the country.
It is worth pausing on how ordinary that letter was. Nobody was acting in bad faith; an officer answered a question with the position as he understood it. The reason it matters is what happened next, which is that somebody declined to accept it.
The case is Rani @ Rani Tiwari v. The State of Bihar and Others, Civil Writ Jurisdiction Case No. 20071 of 2025, in the Patna High Court. What was asked for was narrow and precise: a direction that the authorities issue explicit instructions permitting compoundable traffic challan matters to be heard and settled through National Lok Adalats and Permanent Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987.
Two things were put before the Court. The District Transport Officer’s letter, and the fact that other states routinely do take such matters up, consistently with the Manual for District Legal Services Authorities, 2023, which permits traffic challans in Special Lok Adalats. Put together, the argument was that Bihar was alone in its reading, and that the people paying for that reading were ordinary vehicle owners.
On 12 March 2026 a Division Bench of Chief Justice Sangam Kumar Sahoo and Justice Alok Kumar Sinha heard the matter and instructed counsel for the State to obtain necessary instructions on the issue, noting that the next National Lok Adalat was scheduled for 14 March 2026.
That is a modest-looking order and it did the work. A High Court asking a State to say formally whether its own position is correct tends to produce either a defence or a change of position. Bihar changed position, and did it at a scale nobody in that courtroom had asked for.
On 30 April 2026 the Transport Department, Government of Bihar, issued Gazette Notification No. 3261, with Cabinet approval, bringing into existence the One Time Traffic Challan Settlement Scheme, 2026.
The State had been asked whether challans could go to a Lok Adalat. It answered by creating a scheme that reduced them. When the matter returned, the Bench recorded its view of that in a sentence worth keeping:
“Such timely intervention reflects a constructive and cooperative approach towards the administration of justice.”
Patna High Court, Rani @ Rani Tiwari v. State of Bihar, order of 8 May 2026The published term is that a qualifying challan can be settled on payment of only fifty per cent of the total challan amount. Read that carefully: it is a reduction of the sum, not a deferral of it, not an instalment facility, and not a waiver of something attached to it. Half the figure, paid once, and the challan is closed.
It is also, legally, a reduction of the compounding amount rather than of a penalty. Nobody is being let off a fine imposed by a court. What is happening is that the State, which decides what it will accept to settle an offence out of court, has decided to accept half.
Two conditions and a list. The challan has to be an e-challan, and it has to have been pending for more than ninety days, with 31 March 2025 as the cut-off against which that pendency is measured. The offences named as covered are:
The covered list is, almost exactly, the list of things an ordinary private vehicle gets caught for. Papers out of date, phone in hand, no helmet, through a light. That is the population the scheme was built for, and for them it is a straightforwardly good deal.
Of every offence in the Motor Vehicles Act, overloading carries the largest numbers. On the Jharkhand compounding schedule, which runs on rules inherited from Bihar and which we were able to read end to end, the figure for an overloaded goods vehicle starts at twenty thousand rupees and climbs by two thousand for each tonne above the limit, while declining the weighbridge altogether is set at forty thousand.
So the state halved the challans that were worth a few thousand and left untouched the one that runs into five figures and upward. If you operate goods vehicles in Bihar, that single exclusion is the most consequential line in the whole scheme.
Because of who the two groups are. The person with a pending helmet challan has a small problem that just became smaller. The operator with overloading challans has a large problem that did not move at all — and, since September 2026, has got sharply worse, because an unpaid challan now blocks a fitness certificate, and a goods vehicle without a fitness certificate does not work.
West Bengal reached the same conclusion by a different route. Its 2022 compounding schedule expressly leaves overloading out and keeps it under a separate 2021 notification — one that does not set a price at all but a sequence, suspending the permit on a second offence and cancelling it on a third. Two states, both deciding that overloading is the thing not to discount. Our West Bengal page sets out that ladder.
We are not criticising the choice; a state is entitled to decide that it will not discount the offence it most wants to deter. We are pointing out that the publicity around a fifty per cent scheme reaches everybody, and the exclusion reaches almost nobody, so the people most affected are the least likely to know.
A second state has since run a settlement, and it did the arithmetic the other way round. Odisha’s 2025 scheme excludes nothing by subject at all — its only exclusion is procedural, where a prosecution report has already gone to court. What it does instead is set the reduction offence by offence: fifty per cent only where the Act prescribes no minimum, and the exact statutory minimum everywhere else, across all seventeen rows without exception. Bihar made one decision and carved out one offence; Odisha made seventeen decisions and carved out none. Our page on a challan in Odisha reproduces the whole annexure, and it is the clearest demonstration anywhere of the limit on what a state is able to reduce.
Say it plainly, because the wrong version is everywhere: the Lok Adalat did not reduce anything. A Lok Adalat has no power to cut a figure. What it does is record a settlement the parties have reached and dispose of the matter.
The reduction here came from the State, by gazette notification, exercising its own power to decide what it will accept in compounding. The Lok Adalat was the venue — the place where thousands of matters could be disposed of in one day, with judicial officers present and the disposal recorded properly. Venue and discount are two different things that happened to arrive together, and conflating them leads people to walk into a Lok Adalat anywhere in the country expecting half price.
On our Lok Adalat page and on each of the state challan pages, we wrote that we had not found a legal basis for a reduction in the amount of a traffic challan in any state. As a statement about Lok Adalats, that is still correct, and we stand by it.
But it read as though no reduction existed anywhere, and that is wrong. Bihar reduced challans by fifty per cent, by notification, in 2026. Delhi decided on fifty per cent compounding in September 2024. We were looking in the wrong instrument: the power sits with the state and its notification, not with the forum.
We have added a note to the Lok Adalat page rather than quietly editing the sentence away. A site that prints what it could not verify should also print what it got wrong.
The orders of 4 and 6 May 2026, by Chief Justice Sangam Kumar Sahoo and Justice Harish Kumar, are unusual reading for a High Court. They are mostly about logistics, and they are specific. The Bench recorded that in view of the gazette notification of 30 April 2026 and its publication there was a likelihood of a huge gathering of people in different district courts to take advantage of the scheme, and then set about managing it.
The directions, taken together, covered: that challan amounts not be collected in cash and that online payment facilities be available; that vehicle owners receive notification by SMS within two days of the reduced amount, with the event details and venue; that the Superintendent of Police ensure security and CCTV coverage, proper parking, queue management and verification desks for documents; that District Magistrates coordinate with the police and the judges to identify suitable space near court complexes where the existing facilities would not hold the numbers; and that external agents be prohibited from interfering.
“challan amounts are not collected in cash” … “online payment facilities are available”
Patna High Court, order of 6 May 2026A direction that a public authority must not take cash at a counter is a direction about something other than convenience. Thousands of people arriving in one day with notes in hand, at desks set up for the occasion, is a situation that goes wrong in familiar ways. Requiring the money to move electronically means every payment has a trail and every payer has a reference number, which protects the payer at least as much as it protects the exchequer.
The practical point for you is simple: if anybody at any such counter asks for cash, that is contrary to what the High Court directed, and you should not hand it over.
The Court directed that vehicle owners be told by SMS, within two days, of the reduced challan amount, along with the details of the event and the venue. The published process added that after payment the confirmation of cancellation arrives on the registered mobile number the next day.
Two things follow from that. First, the mobile number registered against your vehicle is load bearing in Bihar, and if it is an old number you will not be told anything. Second, keep the messages. A confirmation that the challan was cancelled is evidence, and it is the kind of evidence that becomes valuable eighteen months later when the same challan reappears on a portal during a transfer.
“access to courts must remain unhindered”
Patna High Court, order of 6 May 2026That phrase is the reason the rest of the directions exist. A settlement drive that fills every district court complex in the state is, for one day, a barrier to everybody who has an ordinary hearing listed. The Bench was balancing two kinds of access against each other: the access of the person with an old challan who finally has a cheap way to clear it, and the access of the litigant who simply needs to reach a courtroom that morning.
It is a small thing and it is the sort of detail that tells you the Court was actually supervising rather than approving. Courts that merely approve a scheme do not concern themselves with where the queue stands.
Among the directions was that external agents were prohibited from interfering. Anybody who has stood outside a government counter knows what that is addressed to: the people who offer, for a consideration, to make the queue shorter or the form correct.
If somebody approaches you outside a court complex offering to handle a settlement, the scheme does not contemplate them, the High Court has said they should not be interfering, and the process — register, pay online, take the receipt — is one you can do yourself. We say that knowing it costs us nothing, because this is not work we sell either.
The scheme did not end with May. A further National Lok Adalat was held on 12 September 2026 under the same One Time Traffic Challan Settlement Scheme, 2026, again at fifty per cent for e-challans pending more than ninety days, again with overloading excluded.
That it ran twice is useful information in itself. A one-off drive is an event; a scheme that reappears at the next National Lok Adalat is closer to a standing facility, and it makes it rather more likely that another round will follow. It is still not a guarantee, which is why the question of whether the window is currently open is one to ask rather than assume.
In Patna, thirty counters operated near Gate No. 7 of Gandhi Maidan, from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. Thirty desks is a lot of desks, and it is the clearest single indication of the volume the state was expecting.
We are giving the location because it is what was published, not because we can promise it will be the location next time. Venues move. The district court complex and the District Transport Officer’s office are the two places to ask.
For the September round, pre-registration ran at District Transport Officer offices from the 7th to the 11th of September, closing before the sitting itself. On the day, those who had pre-registered brought their registration document; those who had not completed registration at a designated counter first.
The point of pre-registration in a drive of this kind is throughput. Verifying a challan, a licence and an identity document takes a few minutes per person, and a few minutes multiplied by tens of thousands is the difference between a working day and a crush. If a future round is announced, the registration window is the part to watch, because it closes first and it is the part people miss.
The published requirement was a copy of the challan, the driving licence and an Aadhaar card, plus the registration document for anybody who had pre-registered. We would add the vehicle’s registration certificate, because a challan attaches to the vehicle as much as to the driver and somebody is eventually going to ask.
Take photographs of everything before you go. Counters keep papers, days run long, and the one document you handed over is always the one you need an hour later.
The sequence published for the September round was: register, deposit fifty per cent, receive a receipt, and receive confirmation of cancellation on the registered mobile number the following day. Those are two separate events and the second is the one that matters.
A receipt proves you paid. The cancellation confirmation is what tells you the challan has actually been closed in the system, and the system is where the consequences live — registration renewal, fitness, transfer, the national portal. Keep both, and if the confirmation does not arrive within a few days, chase it rather than assuming.
The sittings covered all districts of Bihar, held in court premises, which is the ordinary arrangement for a National Lok Adalat. So this was not a Patna facility that the rest of the state had to travel for; the scheme is a state notification and the forum was available everywhere.
What differs by district is scale and the specific venue. The High Court’s directions contemplated exactly that, by telling District Magistrates to find additional space near court complexes where what existed would not be enough.
We could not establish it, and this is the most important thing on the page that we do not know. We can document the notification of 30 April 2026 and sittings in May and September 2026. We cannot tell you whether the window has since closed, been extended, or become permanent.
That question has a cheap answer and it is not one you need us for: ask the District Transport Officer, in writing, whether the One Time Traffic Challan Settlement Scheme, 2026 notified by Notification No. 3261 dated 30 April 2026 remains in force, and if so until when. If you would rather have that drafted properly, an RTI application is the cheapest thing on this website.
The Court directed that complete disposal data and the amounts collected at the National Lok Adalat of 9 May 2026 be placed before it by affidavit, and listed the matter for 22 June 2026. That is a court requiring a state to account, in figures, for a scheme it created under the court’s eye.
We could not find what was filed or what the Bench made of it. If those numbers emerge they will tell you something no press release can, which is how many of Bihar’s pending challans actually got cleared when the price was halved. We will put them on this page when we have them, with the source attached.
The Bihar Motor Vehicles Rules, 1992. They are long — well past two hundred and fifty rules — and they are the base that Jharkhand also inherited when it was separated in November 2000. Appeals sit at rules 110, 111 and 112; the powers of officers of the Motor Vehicles Department at rule 254; the uniform those officers wear at rule 256; powers of inspection at rules 129 to 131.
The structure and the opening recital we could read. The provisions themselves defeated us: one copy cut off midway through and the other offered a contents list and nothing under it. They are named here so you know which rule number to ask for, and that is the limit of what we are claiming about them.
Every page in this series opens with one mechanical test, and it exists to save you a fortnight of reading. Take the recital at the head of the state’s rules — the sentence listing which provisions of the Act the rule-maker was acting under — and see whether the compounding provision is in it.
“In exercise of the powers conferred by Sections 28, 38, 65, 95, 96, 107, 111, 138, 159, 176 and 211 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 (Act 59 of 1988).”
Bihar Motor Vehicles Rules, 1992 — enabling clauseEleven sections, and section 200 is not one of them.
That makes it unanimous across the five states we have examined. And these are not copies of one another: the recitals differ in ways that show independent drafting across three decades. Where two of the others reach for section 213, this one reaches for 211. Section 159 appears here and nowhere else in the five. Section 93 appears in Haryana alone. A core of nine — 28, 38, 65, 95, 96, 107, 111, 138 and 176 — is common to every one.
And all five omit section 200. At five out of five that is not drafting habit, it is design: compounding is exercised by standalone notification everywhere, never through the rules. The practical consequence for a reader is worth stating once more, because it saves wasted effort — you will never find the amount by reading the state rules, however carefully.
One instrument we could read is the Bihar Motor Vehicle (Amendment) Rules, 2020. Its enabling provision is a single section — section 138, the general power to make rules about the carriage of passengers and goods — and what it does is substitute sub-rules (2) and (3) of Rule 122, bringing the operation of school vehicles under a seventh schedule.
It states that it extends to the whole State of Bihar and comes into effect from the date of its publication in the Bihar Gazette. We could not obtain the seventh schedule itself, so what school vehicles in Bihar actually have to comply with is a gap on this page.
The part of that amendment worth noticing is who it puts in charge. The authority named for imposing a penalty is the Road Safety Committee or District Road Safety Committee constituted under the provisions of section 215 of the Act.
A committee, not an officer. Put that beside Haryana, where the rules appoint seventeen named categories of individual officer and list the sections each may act under, and you are looking at two genuinely different theories of enforcement authority. Haryana identifies a person; Bihar, at least here, identifies a body. Which is better is not for us to say. Which is easier to challenge, if you ever need to, is a question worth asking an advocate.
Because the two documents are different and we only have one of them. The settlement scheme tells you that a pending challan can be closed at half. It does not tell you what the challan was for in the first place — what Bihar’s compounding amount is for over-speeding or for no insurance. That underlying schedule, issued under section 200, we could not find.
So this page carries a scheme and not a rate list, and we would rather say that than print figures with nothing behind them. For a state where the schedule could be read end to end, see our Jharkhand page, which reproduces all twenty-five rows — and which is the closest available proxy for Bihar, since Jharkhand runs on rules it took from Bihar in the first place.
There are a great many Bihar traffic fine tables on the internet. Not one of the ones we looked at names the notification it is reproducing or carries a date. A rate list without an instrument behind it is a rate list somebody typed, and it may have been typed from the Act rather than from Bihar’s own compounding schedule — which, as the Jharkhand figures show, can be a very different number.
We are not saying those figures are wrong. We are saying nobody can tell, including us, and that is a sufficient reason not to add another one.
Rather more than it had, and this is the context that makes the settlement scheme make sense. A state does not need to clear a mountain of pending challans unless it has first built something capable of generating a mountain.
An electronic detection system operating at toll plazas has produced 16,755 e-challans worth 9.49 crore rupees. Those are challans generated by equipment, not by an officer stopping a vehicle, which means the first you hear of one is usually a message or a portal entry.
That has two consequences. It is precisely the category the settlement scheme was written for — e-challans, pending, unnoticed. And it is the category where the national rules on electronic enforcement bite: what the notice must contain, how quickly it must be served, and what certification the authority owes for the device that produced it. On a toll plaza challan those are usually your strongest points.
The Bihar government has sanctioned 10,332 posts for the enforcement of traffic rules, of which 4,215 are for highway patrolling. Set against the five states in this series, that is a serious commitment of establishment, and it points one way.
A state that puts four thousand people on highway patrol is not planning to issue fewer challans. Read with the settlement scheme, the shape of the policy becomes legible: clear the old backlog cheaply, then enforce the new ones properly. If you drive in Bihar regularly, the second half of that sentence is the half that affects you going forward.
When the amended Act came into force on 1 September 2019 with much larger figures, several states hesitated. On 13 September 2019, with Gujarat having already decided to cut its figures, Bihar was reported to be considering a similar proposal.
On the same day, across the border, Jharkhand announced an actual three-month deferral with facilitation centres opened across the state. Two neighbouring states with a shared legal inheritance, the same day, one deliberating and one acting. Bihar did eventually arrive at a reduction — by a completely different route, under a High Court’s supervision, nearly seven years later.
Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar on 15 November 2000 and took the Bihar Motor Vehicles Rules 1992 with it. The base is therefore shared, and what has been built on top of it has diverged completely.
Jharkhand published its compounding schedule and little else we could read. Bihar published a settlement scheme under judicial supervision and not the schedule. Between the two pages you can assemble most of what a person in either state needs, which is an odd way to have to do it and the honest description of where things stand. Our Jharkhand page has the figures.
Five months after the Patna scheme was notified, the Supreme Court came at the same problem from the other side. Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan, sitting on 28 September 2026 in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007), looked not at how many challans were being written but at how few were being paid. The figures placed before the Bench were stark: roughly ₹49,194.05 crore still outstanding on e-challans across the country, with ₹26,175.05 crore collected. The Court’s response was that writing thousands of e-challans achieves nothing unless somebody ensures the money arrives.
“We also direct that let there be random checking of the vehicles and if it is found that the e-challan issued has not been abided or honored, necessary steps shall be taken to impound the vehicle itself.”
S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, 28 September 2026Alongside that: online services frozen for vehicles with outstanding amounts, renewal and duplicate registration certificates barred, fitness certificates denied until pending fines are entirely cleared, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal with no centre permitted to issue a pollution certificate, ownership transfer blocked, and the driving licence suspended from renewal where violations are multiple.
Put the two together and Bihar in late 2026 is an unusually clear place to be a vehicle owner with old challans. The High Court has been arranging counters where the amount is halved. The Supreme Court has directed that if you do not clear it, the vehicle itself is at risk.
Those are not contradictory instructions; they are the carrot and the stick applied to the same pile of paper. The sensible reading is that the cheap window is the exception and the expensive consequence is the rule, and that the order in which they arrived — discount first, enforcement after — is not an accident.
In September 2024 the Delhi government decided to allow compounding of traffic offences at fifty per cent of the challan amount, with the stated aim of encouraging commuters to settle fines and reducing the workload on the courts and the transport department.
Same percentage, entirely different route. Delhi arrived at it as an administrative decision of its own. Bihar arrived at it after a citizen’s writ petition, through a Cabinet-approved gazette notification, under continuing supervision by a Chief Justice who was still asking for disposal figures months later. Our Delhi page deals with the Delhi side of it.
If you operate goods vehicles in Bihar, this page reduces to four facts. Overloading is out of the settlement scheme. Overloading carries the largest figures in the Act. Unpaid challans now block a fitness certificate. A goods vehicle without a fitness certificate does not work.
That is a chain in which each link is reasonable and the end of it is a stopped vehicle. It is also the one situation described on this page where professional help is likely to repay what it costs, which is why the paper this page offers is a compounding or settlement petition rather than something smaller.
Everything above the base figure in an overloading matter is arithmetic performed on one number: the excess recorded at a weighbridge in the space of a few minutes. Change that number and the whole demand changes with it. Nothing else in the file has that property.
So treat the slip as the primary document and the challan as secondary. Ask for it on the spot, photograph it before it goes anywhere, and write down which bridge it was and at what hour. A challenge mounted that same afternoon, holding the measurement, sits on completely different ground from one begun a fortnight later holding nothing — and the gap between the two is not something anybody can close later.
Separate proceeding, national law, and the settlement scheme is irrelevant to it. Release runs on the criminal procedure provisions and is decided by a magistrate. Our page on vehicle release and superdari sets out the application and the time limits, which changed in the recent recasting of the procedural code.
Identify the route first, because there are now four. A court disqualifying on conviction. A licensing authority suspending administratively. An impoundment recorded under section 206. And, since September 2026, suspension from renewal where violations have accumulated. Our page on licence suspension covers the first two, which are the ones with an established route back.
Nothing in Bihar law helps you here; the material is all central. There is a prescribed content for an electronic notice, a window within which it has to reach you, and a certification the authority is obliged to hold for whatever device produced the reading. Those three are set out on our page on disputing a challan.
One Bihar-specific point to add. If you never received the SMS the High Court directed should be sent, that is a fact worth recording, because the state’s own process assumes you were told. It is not by itself an answer to the challan, and we are not going to pretend otherwise, but it belongs in any written objection you make.
The Bihar rules contain appeal provisions at rules 110, 111 and 112, and we could not read any of them. So, unlike Rajasthan, where the route is the Regional Transport Officer within thirty days, and unlike Uttar Pradesh, where it is the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the zone on stamp paper, we cannot tell you where a Bihar appeal goes or how long you have.
If that is your question, it is the one to put to the District Transport Officer in writing, or to an advocate who practises there. We would rather hand you a blank than a plausible guess, because a missed limitation period is not a mistake anybody can fix afterwards. For the written request itself, an application is the ordinary paper, and where an appeal does lie we draft appeals as well.
Five states, five fragments, and no state publishing the whole. That is the single clearest finding of this series so far, and it is the reason these pages exist rather than one national page with a table in it.
The High Court order of 4 May 2026 was read from the uploaded order itself rather than from a report of it, which is why the directions on this page are in the Court’s own words. The case history, the Bench composition and the notification number and date came from law reporting of the 12 March, 6 May and 8 May hearings. The scheme’s terms — the percentage, the ninety-day condition, the cut-off, the covered and excluded offences, the counters and the registration window — came from reporting of the September 2026 round.
The Bihar rules and their enabling clause came from a bare-act source, and the 2020 amendment from the same place. The enforcement figures came from a news report. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service with the citation given so you can find the order. Where a document defeated us — the text of Notification No. 3261, the seventh schedule, the appeal rules, the audit chapter, which is blocked to automated access — we have said so in the place where it would have gone.
Keep a single folder, physical or otherwise, and put seven things in it. The challan itself, showing its number, its date and the provision quoted. The registration number copied exactly as printed, errors included, since a wrong character is a point in your favour rather than a nuisance. Every text message the system has sent you about it. Proof of payment with its transaction reference. The confirmation that the challan was cancelled. In a weight matter, the weighbridge slip. And wherever the file has already reached a courtroom, the case number.
Anything identical in all thirty-six states and territories has been kept off this page on purpose. Had we included the statutory definitions, the trial process in a magistrate’s court, the camera rules, the licensing chapter and the law on seizure, the handful of things that genuinely belong to Bihar would have been lost somewhere in the middle of it. Each of those subjects has its own page on this site, and we have linked to them above wherever the question actually arises.
When your offence is excluded from the scheme, which in practice means overloading. When a fitness certificate has been refused or a transfer blocked and a vehicle is standing. When several challans have accumulated against one registration. When the matter is already before a magistrate. And when a figure is being demanded that nobody will source.
Not, in our view, when you have an ordinary pending e-challan that the scheme covers. For that the route is a counter, a registration and half the money, and you do not need anybody.
Two things, and the boundary between them is worth stating. The directory connects you to advocates at no cost, without showing anybody your number until one of them has taken the matter on, and without any commission reaching us from either side. Separately, we write documents. The one this page is built around is the compounding or settlement petition for the matter the scheme left out, and for the smaller jobs an application to the District Transport Officer or an RTI request asking whether the scheme is still open.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
The full text of Gazette Notification No. 3261 dated 30 April 2026. We have its number, its date and its terms as reported, not the instrument.
Whether the settlement scheme is still open, and if so until when.
What was filed on 22 June 2026 — the disposal figures and amounts collected — and what the Bench did with them.
Bihar’s ordinary compounding schedule under section 200, which is why there is no rate table here.
The text of rules 110, 111, 112 and 254 of the Bihar Motor Vehicles Rules 1992, and therefore where an appeal goes.
The seventh schedule introduced by the 2020 amendment for school vehicles.
The audit material on the Bihar transport department, which is blocked to automated access.
Whether the exclusion of overloading has any stated reason behind it.
Asking costs nothing and reaching an advocate through the directory costs nothing. Where there is a price it appears on the service page before you commit to anything, and none of it is a commission from an advocate. If your challan is inside the settlement scheme we would rather tell you to go to the counter than sell you a document.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Three state pages in we had to keep telling readers the amounts could not be printed, because the document fixing them was unreachable or a photograph. Jharkhand broke that. Its Transport Department memo Pari. Ayu.-192/2016 carries a five-column schedule — section, offence, penalty before 1 September 2019, penalty after, and the compounding fee — and we reproduce all twenty-five rows. Then the harder half: section 185 and a dozen others are not in it at all, section 194A has an empty compounding cell, and a second speeding offence carries a licence impoundment instead of a sum. Also here: three rows whose penalty columns appear transposed, the three-month deferral of September 2019, the state rules of 2001 that will not open, a Delhi address printed on the state enforcement page, and the Supreme Court order of 28 September 2026 that turns an unpaid challan into a blocked registration.
ReadAcross three state pages we kept asking the same question — who is actually allowed to stop you and write this — and Haryana is the first state that answers it. Rule 225 of its 1993 rules, substituted in 2021, appoints seventeen categories of officer and lists the sections each may challan under. We reproduce the whole schedule. The police floor is an ASI, their list is shorter than the transport list, and overloading under section 194 does not appear against the police at all — it is transport department work. Two provisos matter: five officers cannot touch private buses, and police powers widen outside municipal limits. Section 200 is missing from the enabling provisions for the third state running, so the amounts come from a notification we could not find — and we say so rather than copying a rate list.
ReadOur second state page, and the finding at the top of it is one the High Court only said out loud in August 2026: Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre, and the Bench asked the government to decide on creating one. The state’s own rules contain no compounding provision — section 200 is not even among their enabling sections — so the amount comes from a notification, dated June 2020, and the schedule everybody quotes online is older than the 2019 amendment. An appeal in a licensing matter goes to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone, not the RTO. Plus the High Court’s own Payment Setu portal across 74 district courts, the school-vehicle chapter nobody mentions, number portability, and why this page carries no compounding figures.
ReadA stay order is not a thing you can go and collect. It is an order made inside a suit, which is why the document that has to exist first is the plaint and not the application. The Supreme Court set three requirements, and most applications die on the third: irreparable injury means an injury that money at the end of the case cannot adequately repair — so “I will lose money” is usually not enough. Before any of that there is a gate: section 41 of the Specific Relief Act lists eleven situations where an injunction cannot be granted at all, including stopping a criminal proceeding, and one added in 2018 for infrastructure projects. Also the ex parte order and the thirty days in Rule 3A that people mistake for a result, what happens to somebody who breaks an injunction, and the appeal that runs both ways.
ReadAlmost nobody reading this chose arbitration. It was in the loan agreement, the builder agreement, the insurance policy — a clause nobody negotiated. So the first question is not how arbitration works; it is whether that clause can be used the way the other side says. On the two commonest versions the Supreme Court has said no. A party interested in the outcome cannot alone appoint the arbitrator (2019), and a Constitution Bench held in November 2024 that unilateral appointment clauses in public-private contracts violate Article 14. And if you are a consumer, the clause does not shut the consumer forum. Plus the twelve-plus-six month clock, the grounds for setting an award aside in the statute’s own words, the 2025 ruling on when a court may modify one, and why filing a challenge no longer freezes the award.
ReadThe one rule a court applies against you even if the other side never mentions it. Section 3 says a late suit shall be dismissed although limitation has not been set up as a defence, so hoping nobody notices is not a plan. We set out how the Schedule really works — and why the third column, saying when time starts, decides more than the number of years does. What restarts the clock (a signed acknowledgement, a recorded part payment) and the condition both carry. Why delay can be condoned in an appeal but never in a suit. The Covid exclusion of 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022, still worth nearly two years and still forgotten. And section 27, where losing the period does not just bar the suit — it extinguishes the ownership.
ReadEvery page on this subject opens by saying mediation is voluntary. That is true of one of the three mediations you can end up in. Before a commercial suit it is compulsory, and the Supreme Court has treated compliance as jurisdictional — skip it and the plaint is liable to be rejected. And a court can refer you without your consent at all, unlike arbitration. We also did the thing nobody seems to have done: checked how much of the Mediation Act 2023 is actually in force. The commencement notification we could find switched on the regulator and the rule-making power — not pre-litigation mediation, not confidentiality, not enforcement. Plus the section 12A judgments from 2022 to October 2025, what is privileged, and the four grounds on which a settlement can be undone.
ReadTwenty pages on this site mention it and none of them explained it, so here it is from the only angle that matters: the point of view of the person being asked to sign. A Lok Adalat cannot decide anything — the Supreme Court said so in 2008 — it only records what you agree to. And section 21(2) makes that record a civil decree against which no appeal lies to any court. Not a suit to set it aside, and not objections in execution: the Supreme Court shut both doors in November 2025, in a case where a man lost a property he had bought for four crore rupees through an award he was never party to. Also what can and cannot be referred, the divorce line nobody reconciles, the court fee refund, why the traffic challan discount has no instrument behind it, and the Permanent Lok Adalat, which can decide against you.
ReadThe words are not interchangeable in India and the difference has consequences. Who may appear for you, where notaries, legal consultants, document writers and “case managers” fit, and how to spot somebody who is not entitled to practise.
ReadA three-question test that does not depend on how frightened you are, an honest list of when the answer is no, what the Advocates Act actually restricts, why a power-of-attorney holder cannot argue your case, and who is entitled to free legal aid.
ReadHow to verify that somebody is really enrolled, why specialisation by forum beats seniority, the Bar Council rules that protect you before you sign anything, the conflict question to ask on day one, and the question almost nobody asks.
ReadWhy no honest Indian site publishes an advocate’s fee, the fee structures actually used, why “no win no fee” is not permitted here, what is a fee and what is an expense, and how to agree it so there is no argument later.
ReadWhat to take, in what order, what to say about the facts that hurt you, what a vakalatnama actually does and how long it lasts, what to write down before you leave, and what should happen in the first week afterwards.
ReadWritten for both sides. Why a single line at three thousand five hundred rupees decides which of two separate systems your tenancy is in, the closed list of grounds under Section 14, the first-default protection most tenants never hear about, the summary procedure under Section 25B that is lost by doing nothing, notice under Section 106, and why changing the locks is the worst thing a landlord can do.
ReadThree different suits wear one name. Whether you are asking for a share, for possession, or for a document to be undone — and why each has a different clock. Self-acquired against coparcenary, a daughter’s right by birth, why a mutation entry is not ownership, why GPA and will papers are not a conveyance, and the two decrees a partition suit ends in.
ReadOne “no” at the counter is not where the law ends. The three doors, in the order the law gives them — the police station, the DCP under Section 173(4), the Magistrate under Section 175(3) with its new affidavit condition — plus the complaint case where the accused is now heard first, and why the officer refusing you is sometimes right.
ReadThe distinction everything rests on, and why it is decided on the medical record by another doctor rather than by how bad the outcome was. Why the complete record is the first step and must be obtained before you complain, consent as a separate and often stronger ground, and the three roads — compensation, prosecution and professional discipline — of which only one pays.
ReadThe one law that can take back property you already signed away. Section 23 and what Urmila Dixit (2025) settled about eviction and possession, the Maintenance Tribunal before a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the ceiling on the monthly amount and the route that has none, whether you may actually bring a lawyer, and where a daughter-in-law’s right of residence fits.
ReadFees, transfer certificates, admission and expulsion — and why the door that opens is the Directorate of Education rather than a court. What the Delhi High Court held in May 2026 about a hike at the start of a session against one imposed mid-session, why a certificate cannot be held against your dues, and how to ask the regulator for something it can actually do.
ReadFive different papers, five different answers to “what if I do nothing”. A private legal notice against a civil summons, a criminal summons, a tribunal notice and a police notice; the thirty days that is directory and the hundred and twenty that is not; ex parte orders and the thirty days to undo one; and why complying with a Section 35(3) police notice now protects you.
ReadWhat a family does in the first twenty-four hours, and the two rights nobody will offer you: default bail under Section 187(3), which turns on sixty or ninety days rather than the merits and dies the day the chargesheet is filed, and release under Section 479 after half the maximum sentence — a third for a first-time accused. Plus sureties, conditions, and why a bail order is not release.
ReadThe court is not deciding which parent is right. It is deciding one thing — the welfare of the child — and that re-sorts every argument you were planning to make. Custody, guardianship and access are three different things; Section 6(a) gives a starting position for a child under five and not a rule; joint custody is a Law Commission recommendation and not a statute. Plus interim orders, access as the child’s right, parental alienation, passports and travel, and what to do when an order is broken.
ReadGetting the content taken down and getting the person acted against are two different cases, with different addressees and different clocks. The Grievance Officer’s twenty-four hours and fifteen days, the twenty-four hour rule for nudity and morphed images, the thirty-day appeal almost nobody uses, why Shreya Singhal explains the wall you hit, Zero FIR, preservation requests, and the Section 63(4) certificate that decides whether your screenshots count at all.
Read“The marriage is over” is not a ground — Parliament never made irretrievable breakdown one, and no Family Court can act on it. So the case turns on what you can PROVE. The Section 13 grounds as they actually read, what cruelty means after Samar Ghosh and what it does not, desertion and its two years, the one-year bar, and why Section 23(1)(a) destroys a manufactured ground.
ReadThe danger is rarely a confrontation — it is a false complaint at a police station, and from that moment the State does the family’s work for it. What answers it is her own statement before a Magistrate. Plus the protection petition, why consenting adults are covered married or not, the three-day rule when you move, and the honest Delhi position on the thirty-day notice. For adults only.
ReadThe paper in your hand picks your procedure — not the amount, and not how obviously you are in the right. On a cheque, a note, a written contract or a guarantee, Order XXXVII gives you a suit in which the defendant has no right to defend. Plus the three-year clock, the written acknowledgment that restarts it, why a cheque bounce complaint is not a recovery suit, the mandatory mediation that gets commercial suits rejected, and why winning is not the same as being paid.
ReadTwo questions come before the facts: which door, and how much time is left. Section 6(1) built the Local Committee for the two situations in which the office route is useless — fewer than ten workers, or a complaint against the employer himself. Section 9(1) starts a three-month clock from the last incident, extendable by three, and recent decisions treat the outer edge as a wall. Plus who counts as an employee, what counts as a workplace, the conciliation that may not end in money, the inquiry’s civil-court powers, and why Section 28 means the committee and the police are not an either–or.
ReadWhat your building legally IS decides the case, not what you are complaining about. Most Delhi RWAs sit under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 — a registration statute with no power to levy maintenance, fine a member or recover anything, so the charge rests on the bye-laws and is enforced only by suit. A co-operative society goes to the Registrar under Section 70, where an election challenge dies in thirty days. And a building under the Delhi Apartment Ownership Act, 1986 has a Deed of Apartment, parking inside the statutory definition of common areas, dues as a charge on the flat, and model bye-laws that make elections and audit compulsory.
ReadA challan is two different things wearing one name. Some can be paid and closed; the rest cannot be paid at all, because the compounding list takes in Section 184 only for handheld phone use and leaves Section 185 out altogether. The notice is not a bill either – it is issued under the section headed “Restriction on conviction”. Plus what paying on the Virtual Court actually means, why the “three challans” suspension rule does not exist, and what to do when challans keep arriving for a car you sold years ago. No penalty figures, and the page says why.
Read“Court” on a challan does not mean a trial. It means a Magistrate now holds the file, and that the next click is a plea rather than a payment. How to find the case – and why a driving licence number will never find it. Why the summons only appears after you act. What contesting actually does, and the published figure showing how few people do it. The Act’s own short route, why traffic offences are expressly NOT petty offences under the new code, when you must attend in person, what the court can do to your licence, and what five official sources say – and do not say – about ignoring it.
ReadA licence goes out of two different doors – a government office under Section 19 and Rule 21, or a courtroom on conviction – and the grounds, the appeal and the way back differ for each. The appeal is thirty days from RECEIPT, and we found no provision for condoning delay. A High Court has quashed a suspension that named no ground and recorded no satisfaction. The licence does not simply revive when the period ends: the Act wants a refresher course, or a fresh test and a medical certificate. And almost nobody knows you can apply to have a disqualification removed after six months. Plus why there is no three-challan rule and no points system in force.
ReadEverybody argues “it was not me”. The strongest ground is usually not your evidence at all – it is whether the challan complies with the rule the government wrote for issuing it. Rule 167A requires the camera to carry a yearly approval certificate, requires the challan to be accompanied by FIVE named things including a photograph showing the offence AND the plate, and requires the notice to be sent within fifteen days. And Rule 167A(10) gives an owner who was not driving an express right to say so – a right the portal does not implement. Plus Delhi’s own complaint form, the cloned-plate gap nobody fills, and why Section 209 is a far weaker shield than people think.
ReadWe read the registration chapter of the Act section by section, and the answer is not the one anybody wants: there is no provision by which a seller can take himself off the register without a transfer being completed. Transfer needs the buyer. Cancellation is about the vehicle – destroyed, beyond repair, removed out of INDIA, not out of the State. And the challans are the smallest part of it: the Supreme Court has held that a registered owner who purported to sell but still appears in the records is not absolved of liability for compensation. Form 29 is necessary and has not been shown to be sufficient. One rule prevents all of it.
ReadThe counter says clear the challans first, and nobody says under what. We went looking. The Act has no such provision at all – not in section 48, not in section 50, not in fitness or permits. The power is in a rule, and the rule is narrower than the practice: ninety days, the offender’s own licence or the vehicle named in the challan, and permit, fitness and tax expressly left out. A 2018 ministry circular goes further and cites no authority for doing so. Then on 28 September 2026 the Supreme Court directed much of it anyway. Plus the Kerala judgment holding that a transfer after a death is not a transaction at all.
ReadThe section is headed “offences by juveniles” and the person it makes guilty is an adult: the guardian of the child or the owner of the vehicle, and those can be two different people. ₹25,000 and up to three years, the registration cancelled for twelve months, and no licence for the child until twenty-five. The part nobody prints: Section 199A is not in the compounding list, so it cannot be paid at a counter and must go to court. Plus the complete exemption in sub-section (3), the written representation the Act requires before a registration is cancelled, and why the Pune case was not this section at all.
ReadTwo things are said everywhere about this and both are wrong. It cannot be paid online – Section 185 is absent from the compounding list, so a court challan is issued and a magistrate decides, which the Delhi Traffic Police has itself confirmed. And six months in prison is the maximum, not the outcome: the reported figures show custody in under a tenth of cases, for days. The consequence that is real, and that nobody prints, is the licence – on conviction, disqualification of at least six months, and the provision carries no “special reasons” escape at all.
ReadSince the transport strike of January 2024 every page on this subject has been built on a provision that has never been brought into force. The government’s own release excluded Section 106(2) when the new criminal laws commenced, and the Delhi High Court confirmed in July 2026 that it was still unnotified. The charge in practice carries five years and is classified as bailable. Plus the twenty-four hour reporting window almost nobody knows about, and the ₹2 lakh claim the Supreme Court found only 205 families in the whole country made in a year.
ReadAcross nine pages on challans and road cases we kept saying this is a court application and not something to settle at a police station, and kept not explaining how. This is that page. The old provision had no deadline at all – its replacement gives the court fourteen days to record and photograph the vehicle and thirty days to order its release, and a High Court enforced that in August 2026. Plus why the registration certificate is not the whole answer, how much the bond can lawfully be, and the special statutes where the Magistrate has no power at all.
ReadOur first state page, and the state-specific part is narrower and stranger than people expect. Rajasthan’s notification binds officers by rank and by area: a Head Constable may compound inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, an Assistant Sub-Inspector everywhere else. The state’s own motor vehicles rules contain no compounding provision at all. Plus the thirty-day appeal to the RTO, a quarter of every compounding fee going to a non-lapsable road safety fund, who really owns the highway cameras, and why a seized vehicle here is so often a mining matter.
ReadSearch “Punjab e-challan” and almost everything you get belongs to Pakistan — the Punjab Safe Cities Authority in Lahore, a row of .pk sites, and commercial services. Not one Indian government result. The reason is that Punjab publishes almost nothing: its Transport Department’s whole notifications page holds nine items, four of them single scanned pages 11, 12, 16 and 17 of one user-charges file, and no section 200 schedule at all — while its own menu sends you to the centre. One date does exist: 19 December 2019, so here alone you can ask for the notification by name. Plus three two-second tells, the Gurmukhi-versus-Shahmukhi check, and why Chandigarh — whose Administrator is Punjab’s Governor — wrote the best schedule in India.
ReadOne question put to thirty-four Indian states and union territories: have you published what a challan costs, and who may take it? Five published a schedule after the 2019 amendment, seven are still running documents older than it — the oldest from 2008 — and around twenty publish no amount at all. In the whole country only two schedules tell you that a helmet offence costs three months of your licence. The full comparison table with every jurisdiction linked, the four jobs a schedule actually does, the patterns we did not expect — and every correction we have had to publish about our own pages, in one place.
ReadThe only jurisdiction in this series that was created while the amended Act was already running. Two Union territories merged on 26 January 2020, but section 17 of the Merger Act kept both rulebooks alive in their own halves — so the real question is whether Daman runs on one schedule and Silvassa on another. Neither exists. The registration mark was unified in four days; the municipal regime in eight months; the compounding schedule not in six years. The Transport Department publishes four documents, the whole legal library two entries, the police force’s rules shelf one reservation roster — and the traffic police page never once uses the word challan.
ReadThe smallest jurisdiction in this series, and the first where we had to ask whether our own question is fair. No two inhabited islands are joined by a road. The police run seven coastal security stations and publish no traffic page. The Department of Road Transport names no Act and no Rules at all — the only one of thirty-three — and a single Motor Vehicle Inspector is Licensing Authority for the whole territory. No section 200 notification could be found. We argue it both ways and then say where we come down: the principle holds, the scale does not — and a one-page notification would settle it.
ReadThe A&N Police publish a ninety-seven row spot fines list — the largest and most current schedule in this series. It marks which offences go to court instead of a counter, notes where the licence is to be seized, and prices the one compoundable limb of section 184 at ₹3,000 while sending the other five to court in the same row. Its notification is dated 22 days after the 2019 amendment — faster than Assam, which we had called the fastest. And row 17 of it caught three wrong figures in our own tables, which this page sets out in full.
ReadOn 25 August 2026 Ladakh notified S.O. 250, directing twenty per cent of everything collected by compounding traffic violations into a road safety fund — non-lapsable, audited by the CAG, and spent on signage, black spots, driving test tracks and ambulances. Puducherry promised exactly this in 2015 and never did it. The same notification calls a compounding fee one taken by “the officers authorised under Section 200” — so that authorisation exists, and we still could not find it. A territory that has published where a fifth of your money goes, and not what the money is.
ReadIn 2023 this territory recorded 13,72,501 traffic challans — 4,28,609 compounded and 9,43,892 sent to court. That is sixty-nine per cent going to a magistrate, which is the opposite of what section 200 exists to achieve, and no other jurisdiction in this series publishes the split at all. We could find no compounding notification here. The Act itself only arrived on 31 October 2019 — sixty days after the amendment — so this is the one place in India that has never known the pre-2019 Act. And in Srinagar 835 cameras now issue challans with no published procedure, for the one offence that costs you your licence.
ReadSikkim publishes the region’s fullest compounding schedule — forty-four priced rows in four columns, graded by repeat offence and by vehicle class — made by Notification No. 121/MV/T dated 29 July 2010. Sixteen years on it still prices a general contravention at ₹100, has no helmet row at all because the section did not exist, and carries two figures now below the statutory minimum. Meanwhile the same department runs AI cameras with a ten-day cure window and a written promise to pay you double if the machine is wrong — the most citizen-protective provision we have found anywhere. The newest enforcement in India, pointed at the oldest price list.
ReadArunachal publishes no compounding schedule, and the only state statute its district transport office names is a taxation Act. But one district did something no government in this series has done: it published what it collected. Lohit reported 3,782 challans and ₹42,18,800 in 2025 — which divides into about ₹1,115 per challan, the first real figure we have had for what is actually being charged on a road rather than what a document says it should be. And behind it sits Article 371H, under which this State’s Governor alone carries a personal responsibility for law and order — a question we raise and deliberately leave open.
ReadTripura publishes twenty-six no-parking zones and twelve parking zones in Agartala, each with a notification number and date; a tax penalty scale; and eleven amendments to its Motor Vehicles Rules, the latest dated five days before the central compoundable list changed. It publishes no compounding amount at all — and its Notices link points at nothing while its Acts link points at a file that will not open. Then its accident figures changed our mind: deaths fell forty per cent in two years while crashes fell nine. That is survival, not prevention — and it forced us to say plainly what a published schedule is actually for.
ReadPuducherry left us asking who the “State Government” is in a Union territory. Chandigarh answers it in practice: its notification of 6 December 2019 says the section 200(1) power is exercised by the Administrator — who since 1984 is, ex officio, the Governor of Punjab. What follows is the best compounding notification we have read: 30 rows, five columns, a column naming the only three authorities who may compound, the three-month licence disqualification written in (the first schedule in the series to do it), section 206(4) on the speeding rows, and section 184 limited in brackets to handheld devices. One problem: the police website misquotes it in four places, including a date fourteen months in the future.
ReadSection 200 gives the compounding power to “the State Government”. Puducherry is a Union territory — and the General Clauses Act says that in a Union territory those words mean the Central Government, while a Council of Ministers advises an Administrator whose disagreements go to the President. We set the provisions out and leave the question open. Underneath: the territory’s rules are not made under section 200 (second jurisdiction proved on the instrument’s face), two different monthly rates sit under one ₹100 cap, the police table of 95 offences carries pre-2019 figures — and the territory’s own 2015 policy recorded a death rate double the national average and promised to notify penalties and fund road safety from compounding.
ReadA compounding arrangement has two halves — what an offence costs, and who may settle it for which offences. Most states publish one. Mizoram publishes both, and they do not match. Its penalties page, updated February 2025, is the only state document in this series that names section 177A, and the only government page that prints the three-month licence disqualification under 194C. Its compounding notification is from 1 August 2018 — still listing section 191, which 2019 removed, and listing nothing 2019 inserted. So a helmet is priced at ₹1,000 on one government page and absent from the other. Plus the only rank floor in India with a uniform condition on it.
ReadTwenty-one pages read a state’s schedule. Nagaland does not publish one — but it published something no other state government did: a notice telling the public that section 200 itself had been replaced. Serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023, commenced by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025, substituted section 200(1) and added 177A, 192B(3) and 201 to the compoundable list — so every schedule in this series is now under-inclusive, and the community service power may have been deleted before any state used it. Following 177A back led somewhere stranger: the regulations it punishes were superseded in 2017, and state departments are still publishing the 1989 version.
ReadTwenty pages built around a table. Meghalaya’s section 200 notification has no table at all — instead of figures it sets a rule: amounts “not lesser than fifty percent of the maximum fine prescribed”. So a 2011 document still works, while Telangana’s fixed schedule from fifteen weeks earlier went stale. But the formula only saved the money, not the scope — its list of nine sections is from 2011, and section 194D for helmets did not exist then. Chasing that took us to something twenty-one pages had never done: reading section 200 itself — which settles that the compoundable list is Parliament’s and not the states’, confirms why drink driving can never be compounded, and reveals a community service power no state has used.
ReadThree pages in this series quoted a state rule capping a composition amount at ₹100 and we treated it as a stale state figure. We were wrong, and Goa proves it. Its rule 54 names its own parent provision — section 50(3), which allows “not exceeding one hundred rupees” in lieu of action under section 177. The ceiling is Parliament’s, not the state’s. In 1988 section 177 also carried ₹100 — the two matched exactly. In 2019 Parliament raised section 177 to ₹500 and ₹1,500 and left that ceiling alone: a 31-year symmetry became a 15:1 gap by nobody doing anything. Also here: the four paperwork delays this reaches, and why the real exposure on a late transfer is never the fee.
ReadOn Shimla’s sealed and restricted roads the law that stops you is not the Motor Vehicles Act — it is a Himachal statute of its own, the Shimla Road Users and Pedestrians (Public Safety and Convenience) Act, 2007. And it contains what no section 200 schedule in India contains: a fifty per cent on-the-spot settlement written into the Act itself, twice. Also here: the RC and the licence impounded if you do not pay; a plea of guilty by money order; time limits that run against the prosecution rather than against you; two appeals with named officers and real deadlines — the first appellate route in nineteen states that is in a statute; and section 22, confirming the Motor Vehicles Act keeps running alongside all of it.
ReadSeventeen states chose their own numbers. Assam did not choose. It issued notification TMV.250/2019/67 twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment — the fastest in India — and across eighty-eight rows gave no discount at all: every figure is the Act’s own. It is also the only state in eighteen that publishes four separate schedules, one per class of officer. The price never changes between them; the permission does. Police cannot compound overloading in Assam, and the two ₹1,00,000 dealer rows are reserved to senior transport officers. On a second speeding offence the schedule offers no amount at all — it offers impounding of the licence under section 206(4). Then in June 2024 the cabinet replaced the two-wheeler document fine with a warning, which is generous and which settles nothing.
ReadThe state publishes its own price list and almost nobody has read it. Notification F 5-5/VIII-Trans/2021 of 25 October 2021, issued under sub-section (1) of section 200 and sitting on the department’s own gazette archive — one of only two post-2019 schedules in India. Forty priced entries, twenty-four kinds of officer down to a Head Constable, and a repeat-offence column used on nineteen of forty rows where Madhya Pradesh — same 1994 rulebook, same design — uses it on six of thirty-one. We measured every row against the Act: a tenth of it on one section, the whole of it on five, one row above the Act and one below its floor. Plus the three-month disqualification that no schedule in seventeen states has ever mentioned.
ReadFifteen pages of schedules answer one question — what does it cost. Kerala answers the one that matters after you have paid. Following the Supreme Court, the High Court has held that even after a section 194 offence is compounded, the excess load cannot be permitted to stay on the vehicle — and directed that the driving licence goes to the Licensing Authority under section 19(1) even where the offence is compounded under section 200. Paying ends the offence. It does not authorise the condition, and it does not stop the second track. Also here: ₹5,000 per light for after-market LEDs, and Kerala’s 726 AI cameras — 1.3 crore challans, ₹900 crore issued, ₹300 crore collected, and ₹34.8 crore of payments frozen over questions about which cameras can even read speed.
ReadEvery schedule in this series was drafted before Parliament rewrote the penalties in 2019 — Telangana’s 2011, Andhra Pradesh’s 2008, Maharashtra’s 2016. Madhya Pradesh issued one on 6 March 2023, superseding all others. It is the only post-amendment list in fifteen states. And it prices three ways at once: by section, by first or second offence, and by what you drive. We checked every row — the repeat column changes the figure on only six of thirty-one, and those six turn out to be a coherent set. Also here: ₹1,00,000 per vehicle aimed at dealers not drivers, ₹300 for a helmet (the lowest anywhere), a load-projection row priced by what you are carrying, and 19 categories of officer including District Magistrates.
ReadBoth states carry a “Compounding” link. Open Andhra Pradesh’s and it is a different law altogether — not section 200 but section 86(5), the money taken instead of suspending your permit. G.O. Ms. No. 332 of 2008, rule 217, priced by what the vehicle is and what it carries: overload ₹2,000 + ₹100 per 100 kg, ₹200 per hour for missing your timings, ₹500 per excess big animal. Medium goods pay half, light goods a third. And AP is the only state in fourteen that publishes the other half too — a prosecution table naming the eight offences no payment will ever close. Its note four is the sting: the published fees are minimums, not prices.
ReadThirteen states in, we finally have the document itself. Every page so far ended the same way — the amounts live in a notification under section 200 that nobody can open. Telangana publishes its own. G.O. Ms. No. 108 of 18 August 2011: eighteen offences, two columns by vehicle, the officers who may take the money — and a proviso that does what nothing else in this series does. It writes the state’s own ceiling: the compounding fee shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Odisha showed the floor; this is the roof. One problem: it is dated 2011 and the Act changed in 2019. Also here: the real 80–90% discount of December 2023, a half-rate for agriculturists, and why the police have had to call the yearly “discount” messages fake and fraudulent.
ReadTwelve states in, this is the one that shows you the line. Odisha’s One Time Settlement Scheme for e-challans pending on 31 July 2025 is not a flat discount. Six rows say “50%”. Eleven say a rupee figure — and that figure is always the exact statutory minimum the Act prescribes, never half. Seventeen rows, no exceptions. Where Parliament wrote “may extend to” the state halved it; where Parliament wrote “not less than” the state stopped dead at the floor. We reproduce all seventeen. Also: what the annexure leaves out — helmet, seat belt, insurance, licence, overloading — the notified speed limits under s.112, and a scheme that names no power and carries no legible date.
ReadThree states have now printed a composition rate in their own rules, and all three measure delay differently. Karnataka counts months. Tamil Nadu uses bands of days. Uttarakhand counts weeks — and sets the rate by what you drive. Rule 45: one rupee a week for an invalid carriage, five for a motor cycle, fifty for everything else — and a proviso capping the lot at ₹100. So a lorry hits the ceiling in a fortnight and an invalid carriage takes two years. Unlike Tamil Nadu, transport vehicles are in. Also here: the first appeal fee printed anywhere in eleven states (₹20 and ₹25), the Deputy Transport Commissioner (legal and tribunal), and a year in which challans rose 118.77% while collections rose 37.07%.
ReadTen states in, and this is the one that is open about exactly one half of itself. Tamil Nadu publishes no compounding amounts for road offences and no officer schedule — and then prints four composition rates inside its own rules, which almost nobody is ever shown. Rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113: a late registration, a transfer not reported, a new registration mark, a change of address. ₹40 up to thirty days, ₹75 to sixty, ₹100 after — and ₹150 in the top slab of rule 113 alone. Each rule says the money is taken in lieu of any action under section 177, which no other state spells out. Also here: the enabling clause cites a section 311 that does not exist in the Act, rule 98 quietly leaves transport vehicles out, the founding notification carries no date, and section 200 is absent for the seventh time in seven tests.
ReadNine states in, the range has turned out to be enormous — and Gujarat sits at the bottom of it. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani announced the cuts on 10 September 2019: triple riding at ₹100, where West Bengal takes ₹1,000 and three months of your licence. Helmet and seat belt ₹500. A pollution offence ₹1,000, where Bengal takes ₹10,000 with a disqualification. Ten times, for the same words in the same Act. Then on 4 December 2019 the Transport Minister announced helmets would be optional except on highways and panchayat roads — we print what was said, flag that we could not find the notification, and say plainly that this is no reason to ride without one. Also here: rule 107, the first appeal procedure we have been able to read in nine states, and rule 98A’s thirty-day grievance clock for app aggregators.
ReadTwo things, and the first one saves money today. Rules 37 and 45 of the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules still compose a late registration renewal and a late transfer intimation at twenty-five rupees a calendar month, capped at one hundred rupees — figures written in 1989 and never updated, and the two lapses vehicle owners get caught by most. We quote both rules in full. The second thing is bigger: Karnataka is where somebody asked out loud whether a state may cut a traffic fine. The Centre said yes on 11 September 2019, Karnataka took legal opinion, cut on 21 September, and the Centre then said states had no authority at all. Both were right about different things — a state cannot touch the fine a court imposes, but section 200 gives it the compounding amount. That distinction is the key to every other state page on this site, and this is where it surfaced.
ReadEvery state publishes what you can pay. Maharashtra is the only one that also published what you cannot — a list of nine non-compoundable offences. Two of them are things your neighbours let you settle for money: driving without a permit (₹10,000 in both Jharkhand and West Bengal) and overloading (₹20,000 plus ₹2,000 a tonne in Jharkhand). Here there is no amount at all — a court decides, both the driver and the owner are charged, and a repeat permit offence carries a minimum three-month sentence. The same document shows a Police Constable as the compounding authority for about 95 of 104 offences, the lowest rank floor of any state we have examined and the exact opposite of Bengal. Its money is from 2016 and stale, it is still sitting on a government server, and we say so.
ReadFive states in, every page had a hole — Haryana told us who may issue a challan but never what it costs, Jharkhand the reverse. Bengal prints both halves in one notification. Schedule I names who may compound, and for oversized vehicles under section 182B that is the Director of Transport alone, one officer for the whole state. Schedule II runs to twenty-six rows and six columns, because Bengal is the only state that prints the section you broke and the section you are charged under separately — which makes a challan testable on its face. We reproduce both schedules. Then overloading, which is deliberately left out: it runs on its own notification that suspends the permit on a second offence and cancels it on a third, with the registration suspended behind it. Also: a ₹10,000 figure where Jharkhand charges ₹1,000, three rows where a licence disqualification rides along with the payment, a rule 349 that may crack our five-state pattern, and a police page still quoting superseded notifications.
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