A traffic challan in Jharkhand: the first state where we can print the numbers.

Where Jharkhand’s own hand actually shows

Start with a subtraction, because it saves a lot of reading. The offence you were stopped for is defined by Parliament. The maximum penalty attached to it is Parliament’s. The procedure once a challan reaches a magistrate is Parliament’s. The rules about cameras, about what an electronic notice must contain, about licensing and registration — all central. A state is left holding a short list: the sum at which it will let an offence be settled without a trial, the officers it appoints to act, the forum for certain appeals, and whatever enforcement machinery it decides to build and pay for.

Of that short list, the first item is the one ordinary drivers care about, and it is the one almost no state publishes in a form a person can read. Jharkhand did. That single fact is why this page looks different from the three before it, and why it is longer in the places that matter and shorter in the places where we would otherwise have been apologising.

The document this page is built on

It is a memo of the Government of Jharkhand, Transport Department, issued from the F.F.P. Building at Dhurwa in Ranchi. The memo number is Pari. Ayu.-192/2016. It is signed by Perwaiz Ibrahimi, Joint Secretary. It sets out a schedule of offences under the Motor Vehicles Act with money against each, and the last of its money columns is headed “Compounding fee to be realized”.

We read it on the state’s own document server. That matters more than it sounds. Almost every figure circulating about traffic fines in India is a number somebody typed into a blog, and the blogs copy each other until the figure has no parent at all. This one has a parent, and we can name it.

What it cites, and a loose phrase in the citation

The operative sentence, as printed, runs: “In exercise of the powers conferred by section 200 of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 the Government of Jharkhand hereby specifies compounding fees as follows”.

That phrasing is slightly off, and it is worth knowing why rather than being puzzled by it later. Section 200 is a section of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 did not create it; it substituted it, with effect from 1 September 2019. So the power being exercised is the power under section 200 of the 1988 Act as substituted in 2019, and the notification has compressed that into a phrase that reads as though the amending Act had a section 200 of its own. Nothing turns on it. We mention it because this page is going to point out two or three things on the face of the document, and it would be odd to pass over the first one.

The thing we could not read on it

There is an obvious way to close that gap and it costs five hundred rupees: ask the Transport Department, in writing, for the compounding notification currently in force, with its number and its gazette date — an RTI application. That request is the only thing this page sells, and the reason it sells that and not something larger is set out further down.

Three money columns, not one

Most people reading a schedule like this assume there is one number per offence. There are three here, and confusing them is how arguments start at a barrier. The headings, as printed, are:

• Penalty prior to 1st September 2019 — what a court could have imposed under the Act before the 2019 amendment came into force.
• Penalty from 1st September 2019 Onwards — what a court can impose under the amended Act.
• Compounding fee to be realized — what the state will accept to settle the matter without a trial.

Only the third is a sum you might be asked for at the roadside. The first two describe what could happen if nobody settles anything, and they are usually larger, sometimes very much larger. Keeping that straight is the single most useful habit this page can give you.

The schedule, every row

Below is the schedule as we read it. We have kept the section numbers and the structure of the rows, shortened some of the longer descriptions for width, and left the compounding column exactly as printed. Where a cell is empty in the original it is empty here, marked so you can see it is an absence rather than an oversight on our side.

Twenty-five rows, twenty-three sections, two of them for section 194. That is the whole of it. Everything else on this page is about reading it properly.

How to read your own row

1. Find the section printed on your challan. Not the description — the number. Descriptions get paraphrased by whoever filled the form; the number is the thing the schedule is keyed to.
2. Look for that number in the first column above. If it is not there, stop and read the section of this page on what is missing, because your situation is a different one.
3. If it is there, go straight to the last column. Ignore the two in between unless you are trying to understand what you are being spared.
4. Check whether the cell distinguishes a first offence from a repeat, because many of them do and the gap between the two is sometimes a factor of ten.
5. Check whether the cell contains a sum at all. Two of them do not.
6. Compare it against what you are being asked to pay. If the two do not match, ask which notification the demand comes from and what date it carries.

The row with nothing in the last column

Section 194A covers carrying passengers in excess of the permitted number. The penalty columns both show two hundred rupees for each excess passenger — a figure the 2019 amendment did not change. The compounding column is blank.

We have thought about how to describe that without overreaching, and the honest description is the plain one: no compounding figure has been specified for section 194A in this notification. What follows from that in practice we do not know, and we are not going to perform a confident inference for the sake of a tidier page. If you have been challaned under 194A in Jharkhand, the sensible move is to ask the enforcement agency what sum it is relying on and under which instrument, and to note the answer.

The row where the last column is not money

Section 183 is over-speeding, and the compounding column treats the two offences entirely differently. For a first offence it gives a figure: one thousand rupees for a light motor vehicle, two thousand for the medium and heavy passenger and goods classes. For a second or subsequent offence it gives no figure at all. In place of a sum it records that the driving licence of such driver shall be impounded as provided by sub-section (4) of section 206.

This is the clearest illustration on the whole schedule of the difference between a fine and a consequence. A second speeding offence in Jharkhand is not a thing you make go away by paying. The state has written down, in the column where money would otherwise sit, that what happens instead is the loss of the licence. That is a materially different outcome for anybody who drives for a living, and it is invisible on every rate list we have seen.

The sections that are not in the schedule at all

Now the part that does the most work. Twenty-three sections appear. A great many do not.

That second column is not a list of things the state forgot. Some of those offences cannot be compounded under the Act at all, so no state could fix an amount for them. Others simply have no amount fixed here. Either way the practical outcome for a driver is the same, and it is the outcome the state’s own enforcement page describes: the challan is not settled at the roadside and you appear in the court named on it.

Section 185, and why its absence is the normal one

Section 185 is the one readers ask about, and its absence here is not a Jharkhand peculiarity. Driving under the influence is not compoundable anywhere in India. There is no sum, in any state, that disposes of it. It goes before a magistrate, and on conviction the court has a disqualification to deal with as well as the sentence.

If that is your challan, this page has given you the one thing it can, which is certainty that you are not looking for a number. What comes next is set out on our page about drink driving cases, which deals with the procedure, the evidence, and what the disqualification means for a licence you need for work.

Why an absent row decides more than a present one

Added later. Two of the rows that are in this schedule are missing from Maharashtra’s altogether, and not by accident: that state published a list of offences which cannot be compounded, and both section 192A and section 194 are on it. So the ten thousand rupees you can pay here for driving without a permit, and the twenty thousand plus two thousand a tonne for overloading, buy nothing at all there. Our Maharashtra page sets that list out.

Compounding is a permission, not a default. The Act allows a state to let certain offences be settled on payment and leaves it to the state to say which, and for how much. Where the state has named an offence and a figure, a payment route exists. Where it has not, the route does not exist to be used, however reasonable it would be.

So the absence of a row is a harder fact than the presence of one. A listed figure can be argued about — whether the right sub-section was applied, whether it was a first offence or a repeat. An unlisted section cannot be argued down to a payment, because there is nothing to argue with. It is the difference between a negotiation and a diary date, and nobody tells you which one you are in.

Where compounding sits far below the penalty

Read the second and third money columns side by side and a pattern appears. For a cluster of offences the compounding figure is a fraction of what a court could impose. That is the bargain the scheme offers, and it is a real one: certainty and a receipt today, against a larger exposure and a court date later.

The clearest example of that gap

Added after this page was written. Section 190 is also the sharpest divergence we have found between two states. West Bengal compounds the same provision at ten thousand rupees with a three-month disqualification, from the first offence — ten times the Jharkhand figure, with a licence consequence Jharkhand does not attach at all. Our West Bengal page reproduces that schedule. If you needed one fact to show that a national traffic fine list is worthless, this is it.

Section 190, using a vehicle in an unsafe condition. On the post-amendment penalty column, a first offence can draw up to ten thousand rupees, with imprisonment available and a three-month disqualification of the licence. The compounding column, for the same first offence, says one thousand rupees. On a repeat, the penalty column again runs to ten thousand with up to six months; the compounding column says two thousand.

Ten thousand against one thousand is not a rounding difference. It is the state saying, in effect, that it would rather have a small sum immediately from a great many people than a large sum eventually from a handful. Whatever one thinks of that as policy, as information it is useful: it tells a driver what is actually at stake in letting a compoundable challan go to court instead of settling it.

And where Jharkhand discounted nothing

The opposite pattern is just as visible, and less often noticed. In several rows the compounding figure is identical to the full post-2019 statutory amount. Section 180, allowing an unauthorised person to drive: five thousand in both columns. Section 181, driving without a licence: five thousand in both. Section 192A, no permit: ten thousand in both. Section 194(1) and 194(2): twenty thousand plus the per-tonne addition, and forty thousand, in both. Section 194E, failing to make way for an emergency vehicle: ten thousand in both.

Those are the offences where settling buys you finality and nothing else. There is no saving in the figure, so the only things you are purchasing are the absence of a court date and the absence of the imprisonment that sits alongside several of them in the penalty column. For some people that is worth a great deal; for others it changes the calculation entirely, and it is better to know which situation you are in before you reach for a wallet.

The section the 2019 amendment left alone

Section 192, using a vehicle without registration, is the curiosity of the schedule. Its pre-2019 and post-2019 penalty columns are word for word identical: two to five thousand for a first offence, five to ten thousand and up to a year’s imprisonment on a repeat. The 2019 amendment, which raised almost everything it touched, did not touch this. The compounding column settles it at two thousand first and five thousand on repeat, which is the floor of each range.

It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that tells you the schedule was compiled by somebody comparing the Act before and after rather than copying a circular. We mention it because it is one of the reasons we were willing to print these figures at all.

Three rows the schedule cannot be right about

We are reporting what is on the face of the document, not making an allegation. Schedules of this size get compiled under pressure, and a pair of adjacent columns is an easy thing to transpose. The reason to print it is that somebody reading only the penalty columns could draw an odd conclusion from those three rows, and we would rather they had the explanation in front of them.

What that slip does and does not touch

It does not touch the compounding column, which is the column that costs you money. In all three rows the compounding cell is filled normally and consistently with the amended Act: a lakh per vehicle and per component under 182A with five thousand per unauthorised alteration; a thousand each for the seat belt and child restraint offences under 194B; a thousand rising to two thousand for each limb of 194F.

So the schedule remains usable for the purpose anybody actually uses it for. What the slip costs is a little confidence, and the right response to that is the one we keep returning to: get the current notification, with its number and its date, from the department that issued it.

The three months Jharkhand gave itself

The two penalty columns exist because of something that happened in the second week of September 2019. On Friday 13 September, the Chief Minister, Raghubar Das, announced that the steeper penalties introduced by the amendment would not be enforced for three months, and that the older rates would apply until December. Transport officials were told to open facilitation centres across the state so that people could bring their documents up to date within the window, and to run awareness campaigns about what was changing.

Several states did something comparable in those weeks. The amended Act had come into force on 1 September, the increases were large, and the political reaction was immediate. Whatever view one takes of that, a compounding schedule drafted in or around that period has to be able to describe two regimes, and the five-column layout is the result.

What that deferral was, in form

It is worth being precise about what was and was not done, because this is the kind of thing that gets remembered wrongly. The Act was not amended. The penalties on the statute book did not change. What changed was the state’s enforcement practice, announced by its Chief Minister, for a stated period.

That distinction has a practical edge for anybody looking at an old challan. A challan issued in Jharkhand in, say, October 2019 sits in a period when the state had said it would apply the old rates. If you are dealing with something from that window, the figure on the paper is worth reading against both columns rather than assuming the post-amendment one applied.

Two enforcement agencies, in the state’s own words

The two are the enforcement wing of the Transport Department and the Traffic Police. That is less detail than Haryana gives, where the rules name seventeen categories of officer and the sections each may act under, and less than Rajasthan, where the notification fixes a rank floor that differs between the commissionerates and the rest of the state. Jharkhand names the two organisations and stops there.

Which means that on this page the question “was this officer allowed to write this challan” does not have a documented answer, the way it does in Haryana. In exchange you get something the Haryana page could not offer, which is the amount. Four states in, it is becoming clear that each publishes a different fragment, and no state publishes the whole.

Compounding at the spot, and the receipt

Roadside compounding is ordinary and lawful where the offence is compoundable. What turns it from a payment into a disposal is the receipt, and there are four things worth checking on it before you drive away: that the section printed on it is the section you are being charged under, that the sum corresponds to the compounding column for that section, that any document taken from you is recorded on it, and that it carries the officer’s name.

Without that paper you have handed money to somebody and have nothing that clears the vehicle on the national portal. Since September 2026 that is not a small risk, for reasons set out below.

The address printed on the state’s enforcement page

The address printed on the notification itself is different and is a Jharkhand one: the Transport Department at the F.F.P. Building, Dhurwa, Ranchi. Of the two, that is the one to start from, and the thing to do before travelling anywhere is to telephone and ask where the counter for your district actually is.

What we did about that, and what we did not

What we did was check it. An address that looks out of place is usually a misreading, so we looked up 5/9 Under Hill Road independently, found it to be the Delhi Transport Department’s own address, and only then wrote this section.

What we did not do is suggest why it is there, because we do not know and it does not matter to the reader. Government pages get built from templates and templates travel. The only thing a person standing in Ranchi with a challan needs from us is a warning not to plan a journey around that line, and that is what this is. If the page is corrected we will take this section down and say so.

What you may be asked to produce

The department’s list is the driving licence, the registration book of the vehicle, the insurance certificate and the pollution under control certificate; and for commercial vehicles, additionally, the permit, the certificate of fitness and the road tax receipt. In original.

The challan itself is supposed to record the name and address of the court where the offence will be tried, the details of the offence, the date of trial, the vehicle details, your name and address, the name and signature of the challaning officer, and the details of any documents retained. Those are the department’s own listed fields. A challan with half of them blank is a weaker document than one with all of them filled, and it is worth photographing before it leaves your hands.

If it is not compounded

That is the whole of the alternative, and it is why the missing rows in the schedule matter so much. For an offence with no compounding figure, this is not a choice between paying and going to court; it is the only route there is. The date on the paper is a real date and the court is a real court, and not attending has consequences of its own that are worse than the original challan.

Getting a retained document back

The split the department describes is simple and follows the logic of who is dealing with the matter: from the court, if the challan is to be disposed of in the court, and from the enforcement agency, if the challan is compounded. So the first question to settle is which of those two tracks your challan is on, and the receipt or the challan itself is what tells you.

A seized vehicle is a different thing entirely from a retained document, runs on criminal procedure rather than on the Motor Vehicles Act, and is dealt with further down this page.

The state rules nobody can open

There is a document called the Jharkhand Motor Vehicles Rules, 2001. We know it exists because the national code repository lists it by name, with a file attached. We could not read it. The file timed out three times and then returned a not-found error, and the mirror that holds the same file declines automated access altogether.

We are putting that on the page rather than leaving a silent gap, because it is a finding in its own right. The rules governing motor vehicles in a state of some thirty-eight million people are, so far as we could establish from outside, not reliably published in a form a citizen can open. Everything downstream of that — where an appeal goes, which officer may act, what a particular form requires — becomes something you have to ask about rather than something you can look up.

What Jharkhand inherited in November 2000

Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar on 15 November 2000, and like every new state it began with the laws and rules already in force in the territory. On the motor vehicles side that means the Bihar Motor Vehicles Rules, 1992, which remained the working base until and unless displaced.

Those rules we could read. They run to well over two hundred and fifty rules, with provisions on appeals at rules 110, 111 and 112, on the powers of officers of the Motor Vehicles Department at rule 254, on the uniform those officers wear at rule 256, and on powers of inspection at rules 129 to 131. We could not retrieve the text of any of those individual rules — one source truncated and another carried only headings — so we are naming them as places to look rather than quoting them.

The enabling-section test, a fourth time

On each of these state pages we run the same check, because it decides where the money rule lives. We read the preamble of the state’s motor vehicle rules and look for section 200 of the Act, which is the compounding provision. Here is what the Bihar rules recite:

Eleven sections. Section 200 is not among them. That is the fourth state in this series, after Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, where the same absence turns up.

Four lists, four shapes, one common gap

The four lists are not copies of one another, which is what makes the shared gap interesting rather than trivial. Bihar cites section 211 where Haryana and Uttar Pradesh cite section 213. Bihar is the only one of the four to cite section 159. Haryana cites section 93, which the others do not. Sections 28, 38, 65, 95, 96, 107, 111, 138 and 176 run through all of them.

So these are independently drafted instruments that happen to agree on one thing: the power to fix compounding amounts is not exercised through the rules. It is exercised through a standalone notification. Four out of four is no longer a coincidence; it is how the scheme is built.

What the absence of section 200 actually means

For a reader it means one practical thing: you will never find the amount by reading the state rules, however patiently. The amount lives in a separate document that can be issued, amended and replaced on its own, that is published separately, and that in three of the four states we have looked at could not be obtained at all.

Jharkhand is the exception, and it is the whole reason this page exists in the form it does. One state out of four has put the operative document where a person can read it. That is a low bar and it is worth saying plainly that the other three have not cleared it.

28 September 2026 changed what an unpaid challan costs

Until recently, the honest answer to “what happens if I just ignore it” was: for a while, often nothing, and then a problem when you next needed something from the registry. That answer is out of date.

On 28 September 2026, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, reported as 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, a bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan took up the gap between challans issued and money recovered. The Court was told that roughly ₹49,194.05 crore remained recoverable on e-challans across the country, against ₹26,175.05 crore already recovered, and observed that issuing thousands of e-challans serves little purpose unless the authorities ensure recovery.

What the Court directed, in its own words

Alongside that, the Court directed authorities to freeze online services for vehicles carrying outstanding amounts, barring renewal of the registration certificate and issue of a duplicate registration certificate; to deny a fitness certificate until pending traffic fines are entirely cleared; to blacklist the vehicle concerned on the Parivahan portal, with no centre permitted to issue a pollution under control certificate; to block ownership transfer; and, for multiple violations, to suspend the driving licence from renewal.

What that means for a vehicle registered here

The directions are not addressed to one state, and the systems they operate on are national ones. Registration, fitness, transfer of ownership and pollution certification all run through the same central platforms wherever your vehicle is registered. A Jharkhand vehicle with unpaid challans is therefore in exactly the position the Court described.

Read that against the schedule above and the arithmetic changes. A thousand-rupee compounding figure under section 190 or 194D is not a thousand rupees any more if leaving it unpaid blocks a fitness certificate on a commercial vehicle, or stops a sale going through because transfer is blocked. The small figures are the ones most likely to be ignored, and they are now the ones with the most disproportionate consequences.

The camera rule the Court pointed at

The Court also directed that electronic enforcement systems be capable of detecting the twelve categories of violation specified under rule 167A(3) of the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989. That rule is the national framework for automated enforcement: approved devices, body-worn and dashboard cameras, and placement at high-risk corridors and specified cities. It was inserted by GSR 575(E) dated 11 August 2021, with effect from 17 August 2021.

We could retrieve the insertion details and the opening sub-rules but not the enumerated list of twelve. Rather than reconstruct it from memory and risk giving you a list that is nearly right, we are leaving it as a gap and naming the rule so you can ask for it. If you are contesting a camera challan, rule 167A and the electronic-notice requirements are usually stronger ground than anything in a state schedule.

A dashboard that does not exist yet

One of the directions is forward-looking and worth watching. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways was directed to establish an online dashboard carrying state and union territory enforcement data, updated monthly, for the purposes of monitoring under section 136A of the Act. The Court also referred to a standard operating procedure dated 28 October 2025 and to the integration of VAHAN-4, SARATHI, the e-Challan system, e-DAR, IRAD and traffic control room data.

If that dashboard appears, a page like this one gets much easier to write, because state-level enforcement figures would stop being something you have to piece together from audit reports and press releases. It had not appeared when this page was written. We will revisit this section when it does.

If you drive for an app in Jharkhand

There is a separate state instrument, and it sits over the platform rather than over the driver. The Jharkhand On-Demand Transportation Technology Aggregator Rules, 2019 were notified as Pari Vi.(S.Su.)-38/18-832 on 22 August 2019, signed by Prawin Kumar Toppo, Secretary, and made under sections 74, 89(1), 93, 95(1) and 96(2)(xxviii) of the Act. They require an aggregator to hold a licence from the State Transport Authority, set a minimum fleet, require a bank guarantee, and impose tracking, safety and driver-verification obligations.

None of that alters the offences a driver can be challaned under, which remain the central ones in the schedule above. What it does mean is that some of what happens to you — verification, vehicle condition requirements, the consequences of a complaint — is governed by a document your platform holds and you may never have seen. It is worth asking for a copy of the obligations the platform has accepted on your behalf.

Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Dhanbad

The compounding schedule is a state notification, so the figures are the same in every district. There is no Ranchi rate and no Dhanbad rate, and anybody quoting one is quoting something other than the notification.

What does change by district is everything procedural. Which of the two enforcement agencies is likely to stop you depends on where you are and what you are driving; a state capital, an industrial township and a coalfield are policed differently and have different commercial traffic. And if the challan is not compounded, the district decides which court the date on your paper refers to. So: the amount is a state question, the day you lose is a district one.

Goods vehicles, and the two heaviest rows

If you run goods vehicles in Jharkhand, two rows on the schedule matter more than all the others combined, and they are the two under section 194.

• Section 194(1), overloading. Compounding at twenty thousand rupees plus two thousand rupees for every extra tonne. Before the amendment it was two thousand plus a thousand a tonne. The base figure went up tenfold and the per-tonne figure doubled.
• Section 194(2), refusing to stop and submit the vehicle for weighing. Compounding at forty thousand rupees. Before the amendment the penalty ceiling was three thousand.

Note the relationship between those two. Refusing the weighbridge costs twice the base overloading figure. Whatever the reasoning behind that, the practical message to a driver is unambiguous: being weighed is cheaper than declining to be weighed, in every case, before the tonnage is even counted.

The per-tonne arithmetic

The compounding cell reads as twenty thousand rupees and two thousand rupees per extra tonne, and nothing in it caps the second part. So the figure is open-ended in the only direction that matters, and the whole of it turns on a measurement taken at a weighbridge in a few minutes.

Which makes the weighment slip the most valuable piece of paper in an overloading matter — more valuable than the challan. Get it, keep it, photograph it, and note the time and the location of the bridge. An overloading dispute that starts a week later without the slip is a much weaker thing than one that starts the same afternoon with it.

If the vehicle has been seized

That is a separate proceeding and the schedule has nothing to say about it. Release runs on the criminal procedure provisions and is dealt with by a magistrate, not by the enforcement agency, and there are time limits that changed in the recent recasting of the procedural code. Our page on vehicle release and superdari covers the application and what has to go in it.

If the licence has been impounded

Work out which of three routes you are on, because the answer differs for each. A court may disqualify on conviction. A licensing authority may suspend administratively. And section 206(4) allows impoundment in the circumstances the schedule itself invokes for a second speeding offence. Our page on licence suspension deals with the first two.

Where an appeal against a Jharkhand licensing decision goes, and under which rule, we could not establish, because the state rules are the document we could not open. Compare Uttar Pradesh, where the rule names a Deputy Transport Commissioner of the zone concerned and even specifies the value of the stamp paper. Here we have nothing, and we would rather say so than invent a forum.

If the challan itself is wrong

Then the grounds are national rather than Jharkhand’s. What an electronic challan notice must contain, how quickly it has to be served, the certification an authority owes for the device that generated the image — those apply identically in every state, and our page on disputing a challan sets them out.

Jharkhand adds one line of enquiry the other states do not, and it is a direct product of the schedule being readable: whether the sum demanded matches the compounding column at all. If it does not, that is a specific, documented question to put in writing, and it is a better question than a general complaint about unfairness.

Lok Adalat

Compoundable traffic challans are listed in bulk at National Lok Adalats and large numbers are disposed of there. Whether the amount comes down is a separate question, and across four state pages we have not found a legal basis for a reduction in any of them. What an award there actually is — a settlement recorded as a decree, with no appeal against it — is set out on our page about Lok Adalats, along with the one route a court has said remains open against such an award.

One correction to that, added after this page was written. Next door in Bihar the amount genuinely does come down — but not because a Lok Adalat reduced it. The state notified a fifty per cent settlement scheme by gazette notification and used the Lok Adalat as the venue. We had been looking in the wrong instrument. Our page on a challan in Bihar sets out how that happened, and notes that overloading was left out of the scheme — which, on the schedule above, is the most expensive row there is.

Four states, four kinds of answer

It is worth putting the four side by side, because the differences are not details.

• Rajasthan publishes who may compound, by rank, and makes the rank floor depend on whether you are inside a commissionerate.
• Uttar Pradesh publishes neither amounts nor an officer schedule, has no separate traffic police cadre, and sends certain appeals to a zonal transport officer on stamp paper.
• Haryana publishes, in its rules, which officer may challan under which section — seventeen categories of them — and publishes no amounts we could find.
• Jharkhand publishes the amounts, with three money columns, and publishes almost nothing else that we could read.

The one thing all four share is the absence of section 200 from the enabling provisions of their rules. Every other part of the answer is different, which is why a national page about challans can only take you so far, and why these state pages exist at all.

How we checked this

The schedule was read directly from the Jharkhand government document server, and we read it more than once with different questions, because a table with five columns is easy to collapse into the wrong shape on a first pass. The first reading produced a single money column; the second established that there were three, which is why the first reading is not what you are looking at.

The Bihar rules and their enabling clause came from a bare-act source we have used before. The enforcement page is the state transport department’s own. The Delhi address was checked against an independent source before we wrote a word about it. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service, and we have given the citation and the date so that you can find the order itself. Where a document defeated us — the rules of 2001, the list of twelve categories under rule 167A(3), the date on the notification — we have said so in the place where that information would have gone.

What to do, in order

1. Photograph the challan, both sides, before it leaves your hands or your screen.
2. Read the section number off it and find that row in the schedule above.
3. If the section is not in the schedule, assume a court date and plan for it. Do not wait to be told.
4. If it is in the schedule, read the compounding column and check whether you are a first or a repeat offender for that section.
5. If you pay, pay against a receipt that names the section and the sum, and keep it.
6. If a document was retained, note whether the matter is going to a court or being compounded, because that decides who gives it back.
7. Check the vehicle on the national portal for anything else pending against it, because since September 2026 old challans have teeth they did not have before.
8. If the sum demanded does not match the schedule, or you need the current notification, put an RTI request to the Transport Department rather than arguing at a counter.

What to keep

The challan with its number and date. The section exactly as printed on it. The registration number exactly as printed, including any error in it, because an error there is itself a point. The officer’s name and post. The photograph, if it came from a camera. The receipt and transaction reference for anything paid. The weighment slip, in an overloading matter. And the case number, if it has reached a court.

Deliberately not on this page

We have left out the things that are the same everywhere, because repeating them here would pad the page and bury what is actually Jharkhand’s. The definitions of the offences, the procedure once a magistrate is seized of the matter, the electronic enforcement code, the licensing chapter and the rules about seizure and release are all central law and are covered on our national pages, which are linked at the points above where they become relevant.

When this needs an advocate

When your section is not in the schedule, because then there is no payment route and a court date is the whole of the matter. When a vehicle has been seized or a licence impounded. When the challan is against a commercial operation, since the permit and overloading rows carry the heaviest figures here by a wide margin. When several challans have accumulated against one vehicle and the registry consequences have started. And when the amount being demanded cannot be matched to any instrument anybody is willing to name.

What we do

Two things, and we would rather be clear about the boundary than vague about it. We put you in touch with advocates through the directory, which costs nothing, hides your number until one of them accepts, and pays us no commission. And we draft the paper: on this page, the RTI application that asks the Transport Department for the notification currently in force and for what is pending against your vehicle. Where the matter has moved past that — a written objection to the authority, a reply you have been asked for, or an appeal where one lies — we draft applications, replies and appeals as well.

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 could not verify

What we charge

Asking a question costs nothing. Reaching an advocate through the directory costs nothing. The RTI application has a price, it is shown on the service page before you commit to anything, and none 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