A traffic challan in Haryana: the one state that prints who may issue it.

What is actually state-specific

Very little of what will happen to your challan is Haryana law. Parliament writes the offences and the penalties; Parliament writes the procedure once a matter reaches a magistrate; Parliament writes the electronic enforcement code and the licensing chapter. A state is left with four things: what an offence may be compounded for, which of its officers may act, where certain appeals go, and what machinery it chooses to build.

On the second of those Haryana has done something unusual. It has written the answer down, by post and by section, in a rule you can open.

The rule that prints the answer

The instrument is the Haryana Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Rules 2021, notification No. 22/30/2021-3TI dated 22 July 2021, published in the Haryana Government Gazette Extraordinary No. 117-2021/Ext. It amends the Haryana Motor Vehicles Rules 1993.

What was substituted, and when

Rule 225 was substituted entirely, and sub-rule (1) of Rule 226 was substituted at the same time so that the officers in the schedule may exercise challan powers for the offences for which a penalty of fine is provided. Two rules, one schedule, and a question that is usually unanswerable becomes a matter of looking something up.

The seventeen categories

They fall into three practical groups.

Administration and transport authority: the Transport Commissioner, the Deputy Commissioner of the district, the Additional Deputy Commissioner, the Additional or Joint State Transport Commissioner, the Secretary of the Regional Transport Authority, the Assistant Secretary of the Regional Transport Authority, the Sub Divisional Officer (Civil) who is also the Registering Authority (Motors), and the City Magistrate.

Field enforcement: the Motor Vehicle Officer (Enforcement) and the Motor Vehicle Inspector (Enforcement).

State transport undertaking: the Director General or Director of State Transport, the Additional or Joint Director of State Transport, the General Manager of Haryana Roadways, the Flying Squad Officer and the Traffic Manager.

Police: the Superintendent of Police, and a police officer not below the rank of Assistant Sub-Inspector.

And which sections go with which

The schedule does not give every officer the same powers, and that is the whole point of it. In outline:

We have set this out in groups rather than reproducing seventeen near-identical strings of section numbers, because the groups are what you actually need and the full schedule is in the notification, which we have cited so you can check it.

The schedule, all seventeen

Because the value of this page is that the answer exists, here is the schedule in full, in the order the notification gives it. Check your own challan against the row for the officer who issued it.

Two provisos sit under that schedule and are dealt with below: one narrowing entries 2, 7, 11, 12 and 13, and one widening police powers outside municipal limits.

What those section numbers mean

A table of numbers is useless if you cannot read it, so here is a working key to the ones that come up most. These are the central provisions, identical in every state, and our national pages cover them in detail.

• 177 and 177A — the general penalty, and breach of road regulations. The catch-alls.
• 178 — travelling without a ticket, and refusal to pay a fare. A transport provision, and not on the police list.
• 179 — disobedience of orders and obstruction.
• 180 and 181 — allowing an unauthorised person to drive, and driving without a licence.
• 182, 182A, 182B — driving while disqualified, and offences about vehicle alteration and construction.
• 183 — speeding.
• 184 to 184F — dangerous driving, including the newer provisions on using a handheld device and jumping a red light.
• 185 — drink driving. Note that this is not compoundable, so no payment disposes of it whoever issues the challan.
• 186 to 189 — driving when mentally or physically unfit, racing and speed trials.
• 190 — using an unsafe vehicle, and the emission and overload provisions in 190(2) and (3).
• 192, 192A, 192B — using a vehicle without registration, without a permit, and the registration and permit offences for owners.
• 193B — offences relating to construction and maintenance.
• 194, 194A — overloading, the provisions reserved to transport officers on this schedule.
• 194B to 194F — seat belts, helmets, carrying children, failing to make way for an emergency vehicle, and use of a horn or silence zones.
• 196 — driving without third-party insurance.
• 197 and 198 — taking a vehicle without authority, and tampering.
• 199A — offences by a juvenile, which our page on a minor driving deals with in full.
• 201 — obstruction caused by a disabled vehicle left on the road.

Read the schedule and the key together and the design is obvious: the police carry the behaviour provisions and the documents provisions, and the transport officers carry everything about the commercial operation of a vehicle.

Why appointment is under section 213

Rule 225 appoints these officers under section 213 of the Motor Vehicles Act, which is the provision allowing a state government to appoint officers of a Motor Vehicles Department and to prescribe their duties and powers.

That is worth noticing for two reasons. It explains why the schedule exists at all: Haryana is exercising a power the central Act gives it, and section 213 is among the enabling provisions recited in the rules, unlike section 200. And it explains the shape of the schedule: this is a list of departmental appointments with powers attached, not a list of compounding authorities. Who may challan and who may compound are different questions, and Haryana has answered the first and not published the second where we could find it.

And what Rule 226(1) actually permits

Those last words are a limit, and they repay reading. The power conferred is to challan for offences carrying a fine. It is not a power to compound, it is not a power to decide, and it is not a general power over anything in the Act.

Where an offence does not carry a fine as its penalty, or carries consequences beyond one, the machinery is a court rather than a challan counter — which is why drink driving ends up before a magistrate regardless of who stopped the vehicle.

The police floor is an ASI

The seventeenth entry is a police officer not below the rank of Assistant Sub-Inspector. That is the floor in Haryana.

Compare the other two states we have written up. Rajasthan sets the floor at Head Constable inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates and at Assistant Sub-Inspector in the rest of the state, and also authorises Head Constables attached to mobile traffic units anywhere. Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre at all. Same central Act; three different answers to the first question anybody actually asks.

And the police list is shorter

Overloading is transport work, not police work

Of everything on this page, this is the one to remember, because overloading challans carry the heaviest amounts in the Act and are the most commonly disputed.

If you operate goods vehicles in Haryana, that is worth knowing before the next check post. If a police officer has issued an overloading challan, the question of competence is a real one, and it is a question for a written objection rather than a conversation on the shoulder of a highway.

The proviso that widens police powers outside town

The schedule carries a proviso allowing a police officer of the rank of Assistant Sub-Inspector and above to issue challans outside municipal limits for a specific set of sections: 180, 182(1), 184, 186, 190(2), 194C to 194E and 194F.

So geography matters in Haryana too, just differently from Rajasthan. There the geography decides the rank; here it extends a particular list of powers beyond the municipal boundary. Note what is still not in that list: the overloading provisions.

The proviso that narrows five officers

The other proviso runs the opposite way. Five of the seventeen — the Director General or Director of State Transport, the Additional or Joint Director, the General Manager of Haryana Roadways, the Flying Squad Officer and the Traffic Manager — cannot issue challans for private contract buses, private service vehicles or stage carriage permit violations.

Those are the state transport undertaking's own officers, and the restriction keeps them from enforcing against operators who are, in commercial terms, their competition. Whatever one thinks of the arrangement, it is a deliberate and published one, and if you run private buses in Haryana it is the first thing to check on a challan.

Who is not on the list

A schedule of seventeen is also a statement about everybody else, and this is worth reading carefully rather than quickly.

The seventeen are departmental officers appointed under section 213, plus two police entries. The schedule does not name traffic wardens, home guards, civil defence volunteers, contractor staff or any of the other people who are, in practice, present at junctions in Haryana directing traffic and sometimes stopping vehicles.

There is a related and more common situation worth separating from it. Somebody directing traffic is not necessarily the person issuing the challan; the paper may be signed by an officer who is on the list. That is why the post on the document matters more than the uniform you spoke to, and why the first thing to do is read the challan rather than remember the encounter.

How to use this

• Read the section quoted on the challan. It will be a number like 177, 184 or 194.
• Note the post of the officer who issued it, not just the name.
• Check the two against the schedule to Rule 225.
• Check whether either proviso applies — were you outside municipal limits, and is the vehicle a private bus or service vehicle?
• If the section does not appear against that officer, put the objection in writing, citing the rule and the notification number and date.
• Keep a copy of what you sent and of the acknowledgment.

And how not to

What it is not

It is not a guarantee that the challan falls. We are not going to tell you that an objection on competence automatically succeeds, because that depends on the facts, on the record and on what the authority or the court makes of it.

What it is, is a documented point that exists in Haryana and does not exist in most states, and that is a meaningful difference. There are two further cautions. The schedule we read is the one substituted in July 2021, and rules get amended, so check the current rule. And the proviso about municipal limits may answer the objection before it starts.

Section 200 is missing again

The 2021 amendment recites the provisions under which the Haryana rules were made: sections 28, 38, 65, 93, 95, 96, 107, 111, 138, 176 and 213 of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988.

So in Haryana too, the amounts do not come from the state rules. They come from a notification issued separately, and the rules deal with who may act rather than with what it costs.

Three states, the same gap

This is now the third state page we have written and the third time we have found this. Rajasthan’s rules of 1990, Uttar Pradesh’s of 1998 and Haryana’s of 1993 all omit section 200 from their enabling provisions.

Three is not a survey, and we are not going to claim it holds everywhere. But it is enough to make a rule of thumb worth carrying: if somebody cites you a state motor vehicles rule as the authority for a compounding amount, ask them to show you the enabling provisions, because in all three states we have checked, the compounding section is not there.

The camera challan, and a question the schedule raises

Everything above assumes a person stopped you. A great many challans in Haryana now arrive because a camera recorded something and a notice followed, with nobody present at all.

That raises a question the schedule invites and does not answer. Rule 225 appoints officers and the schedule lists the sections each may act under. An automatically generated challan is issued under somebody’s authority — so whose, and is that post on the schedule for that section?

What is national, and does apply, is the procedural code for electronic enforcement: what the notice must carry, the period within which it must be sent, and the requirement that the device be an approved one. Those are on our page on disputing a challan, and they are usually the stronger ground on a camera challan anywhere in India.

Check posts, and the overloading point in practice

For goods vehicle operators the overloading finding is not academic, because overloading is enforced at fixed points and weighbridges rather than opportunistically, and the amounts under section 194 are the heaviest in the Act — a base amount plus a further amount for every excess tonne.

Three practical consequences follow from the schedule.

• Note the post of whoever signs the challan, not merely the department named on the paper. Overloading sits with the transport officers on this schedule.
• The proviso extending police powers outside municipal limits does not extend to the 194(1), 194(1A) or 194(A) overloading provisions — the sections it names are 180, 182(1), 184, 186, 190(2), 194C to 194E and 194F.
• Keep the weighment slip and anything recording how the weight was arrived at, because an overloading challan stands or falls on the measurement as much as on who wrote it.

If you run vehicles for a living, that combination — a published schedule plus the heaviest amounts in the Act — makes Haryana the state where checking the authority on a challan is most likely to be worth the half hour it takes.

Why there are no amounts here

The rate lists

Search for Haryana challan rates and you will find several pages with complete-looking tables. None of the ones we saw says which notification it reproduces or what date that notification carries.

We are not saying those figures are wrong. We are saying that neither we nor you can tell, and a figure you cannot trace is a figure you cannot rely on when somebody disputes it. That is the whole reason this cluster of pages cites instruments and dates.

How to find what you owe

From the challan itself, from the national challan portal where it is pending, and from the court where it has gone to court. If an amount is quoted verbally, ask which notification it comes from and what date it carries.

In Haryana you have a second question that nobody else gets to ask: whether the officer was listed for that section. Asking both, politely and in writing, is a stronger position than arguing about either.

The High Court’s virtual court, and where it runs

The Punjab and Haryana High Court launched a virtual court for traffic challans, e-launched by the Chief Justice together with an RTI portal, as reported in September 2023. Cases can be found by vehicle number, registered mobile number, owner name or case number, fines paid digitally and receipts generated electronically.

Gurugram and Faridabad

The rules are state-wide, so the officer schedule applies in Gurugram exactly as it does in Hisar. What differs is volume and practice: Gurugram and Faridabad are where most National Capital Region commuters collect their Haryana challans, and where enforcement is heaviest.

Our pages on courts in Gurugram and courts in Faridabad cover the district side — which court, what changes across the border, and the licence question.

Three systems in one week

For somebody who lives in Gurugram, works in Delhi and visits Noida, this is the practical summary of everything we have written.

The offences are identical in all three. Haryana publishes which officer may challan under which section. Delhi has its own notice practice and courts, covered on our Delhi page. Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre and sends a licensing appeal to a zonal transport officer, covered on our Uttar Pradesh page.

The mistake to avoid is assuming that what worked on one side of a border is the right move on the other. In the NCR that assumption is made constantly, because the drive takes forty minutes and it does not feel like crossing into a different legal machinery.

Commercial vehicles, and the division of labour

The officer schedule is the clearest statement we have seen anywhere of how a state divides traffic enforcement from transport enforcement.

The sections reserved to the transport officers are the commercial ones: fares and ticketing, permit offences, construction and maintenance, and overloading. The sections the police carry are the behaviour-on-the-road ones: speeding, dangerous driving, drink driving, documents, helmets and seat belts. Add the proviso excluding five state transport officers from challaning private buses, and the design becomes visible.

If you run goods vehicles or buses in Haryana, that division is the single most useful thing to internalise, because it tells you which department a given challan is really coming from and therefore where any objection or representation has to go.

If the vehicle has been seized

Seizure is not a challan question at all. It belongs to the criminal procedure code and to a magistrate, it runs to its own clock, and the Haryana rules have nothing to say about it. If that is your situation, start at our page on getting a seized vehicle released, where the current timetable is set out.

If the licence has been suspended

Two routes, both national: a licensing authority acting administratively, or a court disqualifying on conviction. Our page on licence suspension covers both, including what a lawful order must contain.

Which rule of the Haryana rules carries the appeal, and to which officer, we could not establish from the material available to us, so we are not guessing. Rajasthan sends it to the Regional Transport Officer and Uttar Pradesh to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone; Haryana may well differ from both. Ask at the Regional Transport Authority before anything is drafted.

If the challan is wrong

The familiar grounds belong to central law: what has to appear on an electronic challan notice, how long the authority had to send it, whether the device used was an approved one and what has to be producible about it. Those are collected, with sources, on our page on disputing a challan.

Haryana hands you one extra ground that most of the country does not have: competence, with a published schedule behind it. Run it alongside the procedural grounds rather than in place of them. An objection resting on two independent legs survives losing one of them.

Lok Adalat

Challans that can be compounded do get listed at National Lok Adalats, in Haryana as anywhere. The discount everybody expects is the part we could not source: no state, including this one, produced an instrument allowing a Lok Adalat to cut a statutory compounding amount. What an award there actually is — a deemed decree, with no appeal to any court against it — is on our page on Lok Adalats.

Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh compared

Three states, same Act, and almost nothing else in common.

What they share: all three omit section 200 from the enabling provisions of their motor vehicles rules, so compounding rests on a notification in each.

Who may act: Haryana publishes it by post and by section, in the rules. Rajasthan publishes it by rank and by area, in the notification. Uttar Pradesh publishes neither, and does not have a separate traffic police cadre.

Geography: Rajasthan changes the rank by area — Head Constable inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, Assistant Sub-Inspector elsewhere. Haryana extends a specific list of police powers outside municipal limits. Uttar Pradesh does neither.

Appeals: Rajasthan to the Regional Transport Officer within thirty days. Uttar Pradesh to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone. Haryana we could not establish.

Amounts: none of the three on our pages, for three different reasons — Rajasthan because a later notification was unreadable, Uttar Pradesh because the notification is a scan, and Haryana because we could not find the notification at all.

And then a fourth. Jharkhand publishes the one thing none of these three does: the compounding amounts, in a readable schedule with three money columns. It publishes almost nothing else we could open, which is the mirror image of Haryana. Section 200 is absent from its enabling provisions as well — four out of four.

How we checked this

The officer schedule, the two substituted rules, the enabling provisions and both provisos come from the text of the Haryana Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Rules 2021, with its gazette number, notification number and date given above. The virtual court and RTI portal come from a report of September 2023 of the High Court’s launch. The comparisons with Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh come from our own pages on those states, each of which cites its own instruments.

Where we have a document we say what it is; where we have a report of one we say that; and where we have neither there is a blank on this page with an explanation beside it.

What to do, in order

• Take the challan and note the section and the officer’s post at the time.
• Work out whether the offence is compoundable at all, because if not, no payment disposes of it.
• Check the section against the schedule for that officer, and check both provisos.
• If an amount is quoted, ask which notification and what date.
• Type a payment address in yourself rather than tapping a link, and save both the receipt and the transaction reference.
• If the competence point is open, make it in writing, early, with the rule and notification cited.

What to keep

The challan with its number, date and the section printed on it. The post and name of the officer — in Haryana this is worth more than anywhere else we have looked. The registration number exactly as printed. The photograph if it was a camera challan. The payment receipt and transaction reference. The case number if it has gone to a court. And a note of where you were, because the municipal limits proviso can turn on it.

Deliberately absent from this page

Anything that would read identically for a reader in Kerala. That covers the offences themselves and what each costs under the Act, everything that happens once a magistrate is involved, the procedural code behind an e-challan notice, how a licence comes to be suspended and how it comes back, what a conviction leaves behind, seized vehicles, frozen registration services, and the three heavy ones — drink driving, a minor at the wheel, and leaving the scene.

Each of those has its own page on this site, written once and linked below. A state page that repeats them with the state’s name dropped in is longer, not better, and length is how an unchecked page passes for a researched one.

What an unpaid challan costs since 28 September 2026

This is newer than most of the material on this page and it changes the arithmetic of ignoring a challan. On 28 September 2026, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007), Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan were told that roughly ₹49,194.05 crore remained unrecovered on e-challans across the country against ₹26,175.05 crore collected, and observed that issuing e-challans in bulk achieves little unless somebody ensures recovery.

The remaining directions attach the consequence to the vehicle rather than waiting for an officer to stop it. While an amount is outstanding: online services frozen; no renewal and no duplicate of the registration certificate; no fitness certificate until the pending fines are entirely cleared; the vehicle blacklisted on the Parivahan portal with no centre permitted to issue it a pollution certificate; transfer of ownership blocked; and, where violations are multiple, the driving licence suspended from renewal. Those are national systems and they take no notice of which state issued the challan.

When this needs an advocate

Five situations. The offence is one that cannot be compounded, so a magistrate is going to see it regardless of what was said at the barrier. The competence objection is live and has to be drafted so that it survives being read quickly. The vehicle is commercial, which puts the permit and overloading provisions in play — the heaviest in the Act and the ones this schedule keeps away from the police. Something has been seized, or a licence has gone. Or a figure is being quoted that nobody can trace to a document.

Outside those, an ordinary compoundable challan with a receipt does not need anybody, and we would rather say so than find you something to buy.

What we do

The paper that is genuinely Haryana’s own: a written objection or application putting the competence point on the record — the section quoted, the officer’s post, the schedule to Rule 225, the notification number and date, and the provisos dealt with rather than ignored.

That document only works because Haryana publishes the schedule. In Rajasthan the equivalent paper is an appeal to the Regional Transport Officer; in Uttar Pradesh it is an appeal to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone. Each state gives you a different piece of paper, which is the argument for state pages in the first place.

The directory is the other half of it: one request, sent to the advocates on it together, free, and your number stays out of sight until somebody takes it up.

The other half, and the state next door

Rule 225 answers the question most states leave alone: who is allowed to stop you. Seventeen categories of officer, the sections each may act under, the police floor at assistant sub-inspector, overloading kept away from the police entirely. What it does not give is the money.

Haryana shares a High Court and a capital with Punjab, and the three administrations meeting at Chandigarh have between them produced three different answers to the same statutory requirement.

The full count across every jurisdiction we have written up is on our state-by-state page: ten governments publish something about the officer half, and Haryana is one of only two that publish it instead of the amounts rather than alongside them.

What we could not verify

What we charge

Asking costs nothing and reaching an advocate through the directory costs nothing. The written objection has a price, it is printed on the service page before you commit to anything, and no part of it is a commission from an advocate.

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

Questions people ask