A traffic challan in Chhattisgarh: the state publishes its own price list, and almost nobody has read it.

What is on this page, and why it took some looking

Chhattisgarh has a current compounding notification. It was issued under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act on 25 October 2021, it is written in both Hindi and English, it carries a notification number and a named signatory, and it sits as a PDF on the Transport Department’s own website.

That sentence should be unremarkable. After sixteen states it is not. Most of what this series has collected came from rules written before the 2019 amendment, from orders reproduced by other people, or from pages that give figures without saying where they came from. Chhattisgarh has the thing itself, published by the government that issued it, and almost nobody seems to know.

It is not on the department’s circulars page — that page has nothing newer than November 2017. It is in a separate gazette archive, several clicks away, listed by a filename rather than a description.

Where it was not

It is worth saying plainly how close this page came to being another one that reports a dead end, because the lesson is reusable.

The Transport Department has a page headed circulars and notifications. It is the obvious place to look and it is the page a search engine will hand you. Its newest entry is dated 10 November 2017, and nothing on it concerns compounding at all. Read only that page and the honest conclusion is that Chhattisgarh has published nothing in nine years.

The gazette notifications live somewhere else entirely, under a different link in a different menu, in a listing that runs to more than two hundred entries. The compounding notification is in there, identified by a filename.

The document

Eight lines, and every one of them is something a reader can use. Compare that with the state pages where we had to write that the date could not be read, or that no power was cited anywhere in the document, or that we were working from somebody else’s reproduction.

The enabling clause, and why the wording matters

Read it twice. Sub-section (1) of section 200, not section 200 at large. That is the most precise enabling clause this series has found.

It matters because section 200 has two halves that do different jobs. Sub-section (1) is where a state government names the offences that may be compounded and fixes the amounts. Sub-section (2) is about who collects and what happens to a prosecution once the amount is paid. A notification that cites sub-section (1) is doing the first job and saying so.

Only one other state in this series has produced an actual section 200 notification at all. Telangana’s, from 2011, says “the powers conferred by Section 200” without narrowing it. Chhattisgarh narrows it. That is a drafter who knew which sub-section he was using.

It is also worth noticing what the clause does not do. There is no recital about road safety, no statement of policy, no explanation of why these figures and not others. It is a bare exercise of a bare power. Every question this page raises later about why a figure is what it is runs into that silence.

The other half of section 200, which the notification does not touch

Since the notification is careful to cite sub-section (1), it is worth knowing what sub-section (2) does, because it is the half that affects you after you have paid rather than before.

Broadly, sub-section (2) is the machinery: who the amount is paid to, and the consequence of paying it. Where an offence has been compounded, a prosecution for that offence does not proceed, and if one has already started it comes to an end. That is the whole value of a compounding receipt — it is what stops the same offence going to a magistrate.

Two things follow, and they are the two most commonly misunderstood points about compounding anywhere in India.

• It covers that offence. Not the incident, not the day, not the vehicle. If two sections were charged and one was compounded, the other is untouched.
• It covers the prosecution. It is not a clearance, not an authorisation to continue, and not an answer to anything that is not a prosecution for that offence — which is where the disqualification point later on this page bites.

Two notifications it replaces

The notification supersedes two earlier ones: R-966/VIII-Trans/2014 of 21 November 2014 and 644/966/VIII-Trans./2014 of 9 May 2016.

That is a documented chain, and it is rarer than it sounds. Most states in this series produced a single document with no ancestry visible on its face, leaving us to guess whether anything came before. Here the history is written into the instrument: a 2014 schedule, an amendment or replacement in 2016, and then a complete rewrite in 2021 after the Act changed.

The 2019 amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act came into force at the end of August 2019 and multiplied most penalties. Chhattisgarh replaced its schedule about two years later. That is a lag, but it is a lag that ended. Fourteen of the seventeen states in this series are still working from documents written before the amendment.

The practical consequence for a reader: if somebody quotes you a Chhattisgarh figure from a 2014 or 2016 list, it has been superseded in terms, by name and number, and you can say so.

Twenty-four kinds of officer

The notification names the public servants who may compound. There are twenty-four categories, which is the longest list this series has found — longer than Madhya Pradesh’s nineteen and Haryana’s seventeen.

The floor is a Head Constable

The lowest rank on the list is a Head Constable of the Transport Department. On the police side it is an Assistant Sub-Inspector of the traffic branch.

Across the series the rank floor has been one of the more revealing numbers, because it tells you how routine a state considers the act of settling a criminal offence for money. Maharashtra went down to a Police Constable. Madhya Pradesh and Haryana stop at Assistant Sub-Inspector. Telangana will not go below an Inspector on the police side. Chhattisgarh sits with the low group, and on the transport side it goes lower than any state except Maharashtra.

There is a reason that is not a criticism. A compounding counter that only a senior officer can staff is a counter that is closed most of the time, and a closed counter means a prosecution that did not need to happen. The trade-off is the obvious one: the more people who can settle, the more variation there is in how the settling is done.

District Magistrates again

Three categories on the list are not transport officials or police at all: District Magistrates, Additional District Magistrates and Sub-Divisional Magistrates. That is the revenue magistracy, and finding it inside a traffic compounding notification is unusual.

It is also familiar. Madhya Pradesh’s 2023 list does exactly the same thing, and adds Executive Magistrates. Two states, the same odd inclusion, and — as the next section explains — the same rulebook behind both of them. This is the first visible sign on this page that these two documents are relatives.

We have not found anything explaining what a District Magistrate is expected to do with a traffic challan, and we are not going to invent a reason. It is on the list in both states, it has been on the list in Chhattisgarh since at least 2021, and nobody has written down why.

What the list does not do

It names twenty-four kinds of officer and stops. It does not say which officer may compound which offence.

Haryana maps rank to section, so a reader can check whether the officer who stopped them was authorised for that particular offence. Chhattisgarh does not, and neither does Madhya Pradesh. On the face of this notification, an Assistant Transport Sub-Inspector and the Transport Commissioner have identical powers, including over the one lakh rupee rows.

That may well be the intention. But it means one of the few real checks a citizen can run — was this person allowed to do this? — cannot be run here. We have put it in the list of things the document does not answer.

Fifteen rows that are really forty

The schedule has four columns and fifteen numbered rows. That count is misleading and it is worth getting straight before reading it, because the serial numbers do not correspond to offences.

Serial 6 carries six separate provisions: sections 182(1), 182(2), 182A(1), 182A(3), 182A(4) and 182B. Serial 13 carries ten: sections 194(1), 194(1A), 194(2), 194A, 194B(1), 194B(2), 194C, 194D, 194E and 194F. Several other serials split by vehicle class.

Counted properly, fifteen serial numbers hold forty separately priced entries. We have counted them one by one and the whole of the rest of this page works from forty, not fifteen.

The four columns, as printed

The headings are given in Hindi and English together:

• (1) serial number
• (2) “Section of the Motor Vehicle Act, 1988”
• (3) “Amount for compounding in Rupees For First Offence”
• (4) “For second or Subsequent offences whichever Applicable”

Column four is the interesting one, and it is the same design Madhya Pradesh used two years later. Two states, the same two-column idea. What they did with it turns out to be very different, and that comparison is the spine of this page.

The schedule

Every figure below is from the notification. Where a cell is identical in both columns we have printed it twice rather than leaving a blank, because the document prints it twice.

Forty priced entries. The highlighted cells in the last column are the ones that actually rise on a repeat offence — nineteen of the forty.

One lakh rupees, twice

The two largest figures in the schedule are both a lakh, and neither of them is aimed at a driver. Section 182A(1) is one lakh per motor vehicle for offences relating to the construction, maintenance, sale and alteration of motor vehicles. Section 182A(3) is one lakh per component for selling a part notified as a critical safety component.

Those are manufacturer, importer and dealer provisions. A workshop selling a hundred counterfeit brake parts is not looking at a lakh; on the face of that wording it is looking at a lakh a hundred times over.

Madhya Pradesh carries the identical pair of figures. Both states have simply adopted what the Act itself prescribes, which is the reason the numbers match — and also the reason there is no discount on them. More on that below.

A hundred rupees, and what it is for

The smallest figure in the schedule is a hundred rupees, and it appears twice: refusing to carry a passenger in a two or three wheeler under section 178(3), and a hundred rupees per excess passenger under section 194A.

The second of those is worth pausing on. A hundred rupees per head means an auto carrying four extra passengers settles at four hundred rupees. Andhra Pradesh charges a hundred rupees per excess passenger in heavy goods vehicles too. The Act itself sets two hundred. Chhattisgarh has taken half.

One row that uses the two columns perfectly

Section 182B is contravention of section 62A. The Act prices it as a range: not less than five thousand rupees, but may extend to ten thousand.

Chhattisgarh prices it at five thousand for a first offence and ten thousand for a repeat.

Which makes the rest of the schedule more puzzling rather than less. Whoever drafted row 6 plainly understood what the column was capable of. Twenty-one of the forty entries print the same number twice.

Section 190(2), priced four ways

Section 190(2) is the vehicle-condition offence: using a vehicle in breach of standards for road safety, noise control and air pollution. Chhattisgarh splits it by vehicle class more finely than any state in this series splits anything.

Three hundred rupees against a ten thousand rupee ceiling is the lowest fraction anywhere in this schedule, and probably the lowest we have measured in the series. A pollution or silencer offence on a two wheeler in Chhattisgarh is priced at three per cent of what a magistrate could impose.

There is a defensible logic to scaling by vehicle — a smoking truck does more harm than a smoking scooter, and a scooter rider can pay less. There is also a less comfortable reading, which is that the class most responsible for urban air at the roadside level is the class priced lowest. The document does not choose between them and neither will we.

Five vehicle classes, none of them defined

The schedule sorts offences by vehicle class in four different places, and the classes are not the same each time.

• Section 178(3): “two or three wheeler” and “any other case”.
• Section 183(1): “light motor vehicle” and “medium goods or medium passenger and heavy goods”.
• Section 190(2): two wheeler, three wheeler or auto or tempo, light, medium and heavy — four classes.
• Section 192(1): two and three wheeler, light, medium and heavy — three classes.

None of them is defined in the notification. “Auto” and “tempo” are not statutory terms at all; they appear once, in row 11, and nowhere else.

Mostly this does not matter, because most vehicles are obviously one thing. It matters at the edges, and the edges are where disputes live: a goods autorickshaw, a quadricycle, an e-rickshaw, a light goods vehicle at the boundary of medium. On section 190(2) the difference between the three wheeler row and the light motor vehicle row is three hundred rupees; on section 192(1) it is a thousand. If your vehicle sits on a line, that line is worth establishing in writing before the figure is fixed rather than after.

A hundred rupees a head

Section 194A prices carrying more passengers than permitted at a hundred rupees per excess passenger. The Act sets two hundred. Chhattisgarh has taken half.

The per-head structure is worth understanding because it behaves differently from every other row. There is no base amount and no cap printed. Four extra passengers is four hundred rupees; fourteen is fourteen hundred. On a school van or a shared auto that is how the number gets large, and it gets large arithmetically rather than by anyone deciding it should.

It is also the row where a driver and an officer are most likely to disagree about a fact rather than a figure, because the count depends on the permitted seating capacity, which is on the registration certificate. That document is the answer to the argument, and it is worth having it to hand.

Section 198, and a tenfold difference

The last row in the schedule is section 198, unauthorised interference with a vehicle: somebody meddling with your vehicle. Chhattisgarh prices it at a thousand rupees, which is the full statutory amount.

Telangana prices the same section at a hundred. That is a tenfold difference on a provision that exists to protect a vehicle owner rather than to punish one.

The practical point is the same in both states and almost nobody knows it: section 198 is compoundable, which means a challan is a real option. If someone has interfered with your parked vehicle, there is a provision for it, it is in the schedule, and it does not require a court.

Five thousand rupees per alteration, a third time

Two state schedules and a High Court, independently, on section 182A(4), with the same amount and the same two words doing the work: per such alteration.

The reason they agree is that the Act fixes it: five thousand rupees per such alteration, with no range and nothing to exercise discretion over. But the agreement is still useful to a reader, because it settles the question people actually argue about at the roadside. Four fitted lights are four alterations. The Kerala judgment spells that out in terms, and our page on what compounding does not settle goes through it.

And the second half of the Kerala holding applies here too: paying for the alteration does not authorise the alteration. The lights still come off.

We measured every row against the Act

A compounding figure means nothing on its own. Five hundred rupees is lenient against a ten thousand rupee maximum and harsh against a fifty rupee one. The only way to read a schedule is to put each figure next to what the Act allows for that section — and nobody publishes that comparison, so we did it ourselves, row by row.

Before the results, the honest caveat. The notification is primary: we read the government’s own PDF. The Act figures are not ours from the bare statute; they come from published renderings of the 2019 amendment. On one section — section 177, the most important one in the whole schedule — two reputable sources give different wording, and we say so below rather than picking the one that makes a better story.

The answer: there is no policy fraction

We expected to find a rule. Most schedules behave like one — a state takes roughly half the maximum, or settles at the minimum, or sits at the ceiling. Chhattisgarh does all of those things in the same document.

A tenth at one end, the whole of it at the other, inside one notification signed on one day. There is no visible arithmetic connecting them.

What a reader should take from that

Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.

First, on the sections where Chhattisgarh sits at the full statutory figure — racing, uninsured driving, the horn, interference with a vehicle, and the one lakh dealer rows — there is no discount to be had. The schedule and the Act agree. Anyone suggesting a lower settlement on those is not reading the same document.

Second, on the sections where the state has taken a tenth or a fifth, the gap between what you will be asked for and what a court could impose is enormous. Section 182(1) is a thousand rupees across a compounding counter and up to ten thousand in front of a magistrate. That is the actual bargain compounding offers, and on those rows it is a very good one.

Which is the real argument for paying promptly where the charge is correct, and for arguing carefully where it is not. “Carefully” here means on paper, with the section and the notification number in front of you — an application to the compounding authority rather than a conversation at a counter, because a counter has no record and a letter does.

Section 177, and a disagreement we are not going to hide

Section 177 is the catch-all. If the Act or a rule is broken and nothing else prices it, 177 is what you are charged under, which makes it the single most frequently used provision in Indian traffic enforcement. Chhattisgarh prices it at ₹300 first, ₹900 second.

What the Act says depends on which published text you read.

We have seen both renderings in sources that are normally reliable. We have not read the authenticated bare Act text for this section, so we are not going to declare which is right.

What we will say is why it matters. Odisha’s settlement scheme refused, on eleven rows out of seventeen, to go a rupee below the statutory minimum — and the pattern was so exact that it can only have been deliberate. Telangana’s notification writes the other boundary into a proviso: the compounding fee for an offence shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Between them, two governments have described the range a compounding figure is supposed to live inside.

If reading two is correct, Chhattisgarh’s busiest row sits outside it. That is worth knowing and worth checking, and it is a question for somebody with the gazette in front of them rather than for us.

Two rows that do not sit where you would expect

Leaving section 177 aside, our row-by-row comparison threw up two more that are worth putting in front of a reader. Both are stated as what we measured, not as a conclusion about validity.

Section 178(3): a hundred rupees where the Act appears to say fifty

Section 178(3) covers a driver of a contract carriage refusing to carry a passenger. The published text splits it: fifty rupees for a two or three wheeled vehicle, five hundred rupees in any other case.

Chhattisgarh’s schedule prices the other case at five hundred, matching exactly. For the two or three wheeler it prices a hundred.

Section 192(1): below the Act’s own starting point

Section 192(1) is driving an unregistered vehicle. The published text gives a range for the first offence: not less than two thousand rupees, up to five thousand.

Chhattisgarh splits the row by vehicle class — two and three wheelers a thousand, light motor vehicles two thousand, medium and heavy three thousand. The first of those three sits below the bottom of the statutory range.

Read alongside section 178(3), the schedule therefore contains, on our measurement, one row that appears to go above what the Act provides and another that appears to go below it. Both involve small vehicles. Neither is explained anywhere in the document.

The charitable reading — and it may well be the right one — is that a drafter pricing forty entries by vehicle class rounded a two-wheeler figure down to something an enforcement officer could actually collect, and rounded another up to the nearest hundred. That is how real documents get written. It is still worth a reader knowing which rows they are.

The thing no schedule in seventeen states mentions

This is the most useful paragraph on the page and it is about something that is missing from the table rather than in it.

Sections 194C and 194D — motorcycle safety measures, and not wearing a helmet — do not carry only a fine in the Act. Each carries a fine and a disqualification from holding a licence for three months.

Chhattisgarh’s schedule prices both at five hundred rupees and says nothing about the disqualification. Nor does Madhya Pradesh’s. Nor, as far as we have been able to read them, does any of the seventeen state documents in this series.

We want to be careful. We have not found evidence that Chhattisgarh in practice disqualifies licences for helmet offences, and we would be surprised if it routinely did. What we have found is that the Act attaches it, the schedule is silent about it, and a reader paying five hundred rupees has no way of knowing from the schedule that anything else exists.

If a disqualification does surface after you have paid, the receipt is not an answer to it — the two run on separate tracks, as our Kerala page sets out at length, and our page on licence suspension explains the routes available.

The repeat-offence column, and what Chhattisgarh does with it

Column four exists to make a second offence cost more. Whether a state uses it is a choice, and we have now measured that choice in the only two states that built the column at all.

In Chhattisgarh, nineteen of the forty priced entries rise on a second offence. The other twenty-one print the same figure twice.

Section 177 is the only entry in the whole schedule that triples, and it is the busiest row in the document. A state that wanted one deterrent signal and only one would put it exactly there.

Helmet, belt, and an inconsistency worth noticing

The seat belt rows rise — five hundred to a thousand, for both the adult belt and the child restraint. The helmet row does not: five hundred, and five hundred again however many times you are stopped.

The same document therefore treats a repeated seat belt offence as worth escalating and a repeated helmet offence as not. Two-wheeler riders are the people most likely to be killed in a road crash in India, and the helmet row is the one that stays flat.

We cannot tell you why. Nothing in the notification explains any figure. We can tell you that it is there, because it is the kind of thing that is invisible until somebody reads the two rows next to each other.

One rulebook, two states

Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh on 1 November 2000. It did not write its own motor vehicle rules from nothing; it took the ones it already had. Both states operate under rules titled the Motor Vehicles Rules, 1994, and Chhattisgarh’s amendments to this day are amendments to that 1994 text.

So here is a comparison that exists nowhere else in this series: two governments, the same inherited rulebook, the same federal Act, the same 2019 amendment landing on both desks — and two separately drafted post-2019 compounding schedules to put side by side.

The same column, used twice as hard

Both states built a repeat-offence column. Madhya Pradesh then used it on six rows out of thirty-one, which is under a fifth. Chhattisgarh uses it on nineteen out of forty, which is nearly half.

That is not a small drafting difference. It is two governments with the same legal inheritance taking opposite views of what a second offence should cost, and neither of them explaining itself.

There is a shape to each choice. Madhya Pradesh escalates only where the conduct suggests an ongoing condition — dangerous driving, unfitness, racing, a cut silencer. Chhattisgarh escalates across ordinary everyday offences too, including the catch-all. One state treats the repeat column as reserved; the other treats it as the default.

Overloading: the same base, twice the tonnage rate

Section 194(1) is the row the whole series keeps returning to, and here the two sibling states part company in a way that shows up as real money.

Both states halved the base. Only one of them halved the per-tonne rate as well, and on a large overload the per-tonne rate is what dominates. The fifteen tonne figure is not hypothetical: it is close to the 15,090 kilogram excess recorded in the Kerala judgment our Kerala page is built on.

What Chhattisgarh’s overload row leaves out

Madhya Pradesh’s overloading entry ends with the words “with the obligation to unload the extra load”. Chhattisgarh’s does not.

The obligation exists anyway. It does not come from a state schedule. It comes from the Act and, as the Kerala High Court put it following the Supreme Court in Paramjit Bhasin v. Union of India, even after an offence punishable under section 194 is compounded the excess load cannot be permitted to be carried in the vehicle concerned.

So a Chhattisgarh lorry driver who pays forty thousand rupees has settled the offence of having carried the excess. He has not bought permission to drive on with it. The silence in the schedule is not an exemption; it is just silence.

Why two neighbours price the same conduct differently

People assume these figures reflect how seriously a state takes an offence. Sometimes they do. Often they reflect what the previous document said, what the enforcement machinery can actually collect, and what somebody decided in a meeting nobody minuted.

The helmet row is the clearest example. Chhattisgarh five hundred, Madhya Pradesh three hundred, Gujarat five hundred, Jharkhand and West Bengal a thousand. The risk of riding without a helmet does not change at a state border. The number does.

Which is the honest answer to the most common question we get about these pages: a compounding figure is not a measure of danger. It is a statement of enforcement policy, and it is negotiable only in the sense that it can be checked.

A state that runs on the central system

One more thing is visible from the department’s own website, and it changes what the rest of this page means in practice.

Chhattisgarh does not operate its own challan portal. The Transport Department’s “e-Challan payment” link goes straight to the national echallan.parivahan.gov.in. Licensing goes to Sarathi, registration to Vahan, pollution certificates to the central PUC directory. The state writes the schedule; the Union runs the plumbing.

Compare Telangana, which has its own portal and had to issue a public warning about fake discount schemes circulating alongside it, or Kerala, which built its own AI camera network and its own disputes to go with it. Chhattisgarh has taken the opposite route, and it is a defensible one: fewer moving parts, fewer places for a fake link to look convincing.

Why that matters a great deal from September 2026

On 28 September 2026, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India [2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007], the Supreme Court addressed unpaid e-challans nationally. The figures it was working from were about ₹49,194 crore recoverable, of which roughly ₹26,175 crore had been recovered.

Alongside that: steps to impound the vehicle where a challan has not been honoured, refusal of fitness certificates, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal, blocking transfers of ownership, suspension of licence renewal for repeat violations, and withholding pollution certificates until pending amounts are cleared.

Now put that next to the previous section. Every one of those services, in Chhattisgarh, is delivered on the central platform. A state with its own portal has at least a local conversation to have. A state that has handed registration, licensing, fitness and pollution to Vahan, Sarathi and the central PUC directory has placed all of them inside the same system the Supreme Court has now told authorities to use as leverage.

That is not a reason for alarm, and nothing here is new law about whether your challan is correct. It is a reason to deal with a pending challan rather than letting it sit, because in this state the consequences of letting it sit arrive through a single door.

If the figure you were asked for is not in the schedule

This is where the page becomes useful rather than interesting. Chhattisgarh has a published schedule with forty priced entries and a notification number. That makes a quoted figure checkable, which is not true in most of the country.

1. Get the section you have been charged under. Not the row, not the description — the section. It will be on the challan or the receipt.
2. Find that section in the table above and note the first-offence figure.
3. Establish whether it is being treated as a first or a repeat offence, because on nineteen of the forty entries that changes the amount.
4. If it is being treated as a repeat, ask what the earlier offence was and when. A repeat figure needs a first offence behind it, and that is a matter of record.
5. If the amount asked for is higher than the schedule, say so in writing, citing notification F 5-5/VIII-Trans/2021 of 25 October 2021 and the section.
6. Keep the receipt and read what it says the amount was taken for.

Steps one to four cost nothing and are worth doing before anything else. If step five is where you end up, an application addressed to the compounding authority, attaching the notification and asking for the figure to be brought to the schedule, is the document for it — and it is the cheapest document we make, because at this stage there is no order to appeal against and no notice to answer.

Two different debts, constantly confused

Search for a Chhattisgarh settlement scheme and you will find one. It is not what you think it is, and getting this wrong wastes people’s time every year.

Different statute, different liability, different consequence if ignored. Unpaid tax leads to registration being terminated — the department publishes lists of vehicles whose registration is being cancelled for arrears. An unpaid challan leads, now, to the Supreme Court’s list of withheld services.

We looked specifically and found no settlement, amnesty or discount scheme for traffic challans in Chhattisgarh. If somebody tells you one is running, ask which statute it is under and for the notification number. A scheme that cannot produce either is not a scheme.

What a compounding receipt is, and is not

It is proof that one named offence was closed on a date for an amount. That is genuinely valuable: it is what prevents the same offence being charged again, and it is what you produce if it is.

It is not a clearance for the vehicle, not an authorisation to carry on doing the thing, and not an answer to anything running on a different track. Three things on this page illustrate that: the excess load that still has to come off, the alteration that still has to be removed, and the three-month disqualification the schedule never mentions.

So read the receipt for what it actually says — the section, the date, the amount — and keep it. The section is the part that matters, because the section is what it closes.

A state that answers two of this page’s complaints

Two things above are criticisms of this notification rather than of Chhattisgarh: that it names twenty-four officers without saying which may compound which offence, and that the figure on section 178(3) looked wrong against the Act but we had only one source for the Act.

Assam settles both. Its notification of 23 September 2019 publishes four separate schedules, one for each class of officer, so that the one-lakh dealer rows are reserved to District Transport Officer rank and above and the police cannot compound an overloading charge at all. That is what the missing check looks like when a state builds one.

And Assam, which copied the Act’s figures exactly on all eighty-eight of its rows, prints fifty rupees on section 178(3) for a two or three wheeler — corroborating the statutory figure we had, and making the hundred rupees here worth asking about. It also prints five hundred and fifteen hundred under section 177, which tells us what the numbers in that section are even though it does not settle whether they are floors or ceilings.

Where Chhattisgarh sits after seventeen states

This is the seventeenth state page in the series, which is enough to say something about the country rather than about one government.

Chhattisgarh scores better than almost every state on the things that make a document usable, and no better than any of them on the two things that would make it complete. That is not a criticism of one state. It is a pattern: governments publish what they charge, and almost never publish the limits on their own power to charge it.

The states we have covered so far are Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and this one.

What this page will not help with

It will not help you argue that you did not do it. The schedule prices offences; it says nothing about proof. If the dispute is whether it was your vehicle, whether the reading was accurate or whether the notice reached you in time, that is a different set of grounds and our page on disputing a challan takes them in turn.

It will also not help with section 185. Drink driving is outside the compounding machinery everywhere in India — it is not in Chhattisgarh’s forty entries and it is not in any other state’s. There is nothing to settle and a magistrate decides. Our page on drink driving cases sets out what follows.

What is not in the forty rows

Reading a schedule for what it leaves out has been one of the more productive habits of this series. Chhattisgarh’s omissions are mostly principled.

• 185 — drink driving. Not compoundable anywhere. Correctly absent.
• 187 — a driver’s duties after an accident. Andhra Pradesh states expressly that it is not compoundable and only prosecution is possible.
• 190(1) and 190(3) — unsafe vehicles and dangerous goods. Absent in most states that publish a non-compoundable list.
• 193 — unlicensed agents and canvassers. Not a driver’s offence.
• 197 — taking a vehicle without authority.
• 183(2) — the owner or person in charge who causes or allows speeding. Chhattisgarh prices 183(1) only. Telangana priced both.
• 199A — offences by juveniles, inserted by the 2019 amendment, where the guardian or owner is deemed guilty. Not in the schedule.

The absence of 185, 187, 190(1), 190(3), 193 and 197 is almost certainly deliberate and matches what other states say out loud. The absence of 183(2) and 199A is harder to read, and we are not going to pretend we know which it is.

Added later: the disqualification question has an answer, and the list has changed

Two later findings reach back onto this page.

The three-month disqualification. We noted here that sections 194C and 194D carry a three-month disqualification of the driving licence which no schedule in seventeen states mentions, and asked what happens to it when the money is paid at a counter. Section 200(2) answers it: compounding does not exempt the offender from proceedings under sub-section (4) of section 206, which is the power to seize and retain a licence. Paying does not displace the licence consequence. Assam is the only state in this series whose schedule says so on its face, in two rows that print the section number instead of an amount.

The compoundable list is no longer the one this schedule was written against. On 13 January 2025, serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 substituted sub-section (1) of section 200 in its entirety, commenced by S.O. 227(E). Sections 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B and section 201 became compoundable for the first time. Chhattisgarh’s notification of 25 October 2021 cannot price them, and its absence of section 177A — which we had recorded as a gap — was correct drafting rather than an omission. The substituted sub-section is printed word for word on our Nagaland page.

It also confirms that this page’s row for section 184, which prices “driving dangerously” without limitation, reaches further than section 200(1) allows: the Act makes only clause (c) of the Explanation to that section compoundable. We flagged that possibility on our Meghalaya page from a secondary rendering. It is now from the Act.

Added later: a government page finally states the disqualification

This page recorded that sections 194C and 194D carry a three-month disqualification of the driving licence that no schedule in seventeen states mentioned, and asked what becomes of it when somebody pays a thousand rupees at a counter and leaves.

One state does state it. The Mizoram Transport Department’s penalties page prints section 194C as ₹1,000 plus three months’ disqualification, and prints section 190(2) as ₹10,000 with the licence cancelled for three months and imprisonment for three months, rising to six months’ imprisonment on a repeat. It is the first government page in this series to put the licence consequence beside the money.

Worth comparing with what this page found here: 190(2) priced across four vehicle classes at ₹300 to ₹2,000 against a ₹10,000 ceiling, with no indication anywhere on the schedule that a licence is at stake.

And the answer to the question this page asked is in the Act, as our Nagaland page sets out: section 200(2) provides that compounding does not exempt an offender from proceedings under section 206(4). Paying does not make the disqualification go away.

Added later: a schedule that finally writes the disqualification in

This page asked what becomes of the three-month licence disqualification under sections 194C and 194D when somebody pays a thousand rupees at a counter and drives off, and recorded that no schedule in seventeen states mentioned it.

It has now been answered twice. The Mizoram Transport Department’s penalties page states it — but that is a statement of the Act’s penalties, not a compounding schedule.

Chandigarh’s section 200 schedule of 6 December 2019 writes it into the table itself, on three rows: section 194C, section 194D and section 190(2), each carrying “Driver shall be disqualified for holding driving license for period of three months”. Its speeding rows add that the licence “shall be impounded as per provision of sub-Section 4 of Section 206 of Act”.

Worth setting against what this page found here: section 190(2) priced across four vehicle classes at ₹300 to ₹2,000 against a ₹10,000 ceiling, with nothing on the schedule to suggest a licence is at stake. Chandigarh prices the same provision at ₹2,000 and ₹5,000 and prints the disqualification in both columns.

In twenty-six jurisdictions, Chandigarh is the first compounding schedule to do it.

What we could not establish

The usual honest list, because a page that only tells you what it found is not telling you enough to judge it by.

• The text of the superseded 2014 and 2016 notifications, so we cannot show what changed.
• Any Chhattisgarh non-compoundable list.
• Which officer may compound which section.
• The appellate authority and the period for a compounding or licensing decision in the state.
• Whether any settlement, discount or one-time scheme for traffic challans has run in Chhattisgarh. The department’s one-time settlement notifications we could find are about tax arrears under the state’s own Motor Vehicles Taxation Act, 1991, not about compounding offences — a distinction worth holding on to, because the two get confused.
• Any state figures for challans issued, amounts demanded or amounts recovered.
• Any Chhattisgarh High Court decision on compounding under section 200.
• The authenticated bare text of section 177 as amended, which is the one gap that would settle the question raised above.

Most of that list is answerable, and cheaply. The superseded notifications, a non-compoundable list, the officer-to-section mapping and the appellate authority are all documents the department either holds or does not, and asking costs the price of a stamp. An RTI application addressed to the Transport Department would close most of these at once, and we would put the answers on this page.

How this page was put together

The schedule, the officer list, the enabling clause, the notification number, the date, the signatory and the supersession come from one document: the PDF published by the Chhattisgarh Transport Department in its gazette archive. We read it three times, counting the columns and then the rows separately, because a first pass at a scanned bilingual table is reliably wrong.

The comparison figures for the Act come from published renderings of the 2019 amendment, not from the authenticated statute, and where two renderings disagree we have printed both. The Madhya Pradesh figures come from our own page on that state, which declares its secondary source at the top. The Kerala holding comes from the judgment itself.

Everything on this page was written here. Nothing in it is copied from a commercial challan website, and where we could not establish something we have said so rather than filling the gap.

When this needs an advocate rather than a document

Most of what is on this page does not. Checking a figure against a published schedule is something you can do yourself in five minutes, and a letter asking for a figure to be corrected is a document.

An advocate is the right answer when a prosecution has actually begun rather than a challan being pending; when a permit or a fleet is exposed, because the money stops being the point; when a licence proceeding has started; and when an accident is involved, where section 187 is outside compounding altogether and nothing on this page applies.

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

What we charge

Asking costs nothing, and so does being put in front of an advocate. Each document’s price sits on its own service page before anything is ordered, and no part of what we earn comes out of an advocate’s fee. If the honest answer is that a hundred rupee row is not worth your afternoon, we will say that, and there is no charge for being told.

Questions people ask