Seven state pages have printed figures without ever stopping to ask where a state gets the power to set them. In September 2019 Karnataka asked, in public, with the Centre answering one way and then the other. The answer turns on a distinction nobody drew at the time and it is the key to every other page in this series. And while we were in the Karnataka rules looking for it, we found two provisions still written in 1989 money that cap two very common problems at one hundred rupees.
We normally open a state page with the structural finding and leave the practical money until later. Not here, because two provisions in the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules 1989 are worth more to an ordinary reader than anything else on this page, and almost nobody is told about them.
They deal with the two administrative lapses that catch vehicle owners most often: a registration renewal that was not applied for in time, and a transfer of ownership that was not intimated in time. In each case the rule fixes a composition at twenty-five rupees per calendar month, and in each case it caps the total at one hundred rupees.
“Composition of offence for non-renewal of registration.—On a failure of the owner in making an application for renewal of certificate of registration, under sub-section (8) of section 41, the registering authority may in lieu of prosecution accept a compounding fee of rupees twenty-five per calender month or part thereof, provided that such amount shall not exceed rupees one hundred.”
Three things are doing work there. In lieu of prosecution — the alternative being contemplated is a court case, not a larger fee. Per calendar month or part thereof — a single day into a new month counts as a month. And the proviso, which stops the arithmetic at one hundred rupees no matter how many months have passed.
“Composition of offences under sub-section (3) of Section 50.— The amount payable by any person in lieu of action for failure to give timely intimation about transfer of ownership as required, shall be at the rate of rupees twenty-five per calendar month or part thereof by which the giving of such intimation is delayed by such person: Provided that the amount so payable shall not exceed rupees one hundred.”
Same rate, same cap, different lapse. This is the one that catches people who have bought or sold a vehicle privately and let the paperwork drift, which is a very large number of people.
Because of what they are. These are not traffic offences; nobody was stopped on a road. They are failures to file something on time, and a rule-maker in 1989 took the view that a late form should be composed for a nominal sum rather than prosecuted. That view is still law in Karnataka, and the sum is still 1989’s.
Compare what the same kind of lapse costs elsewhere once it stops being a filing question and becomes a road one. Using a vehicle without valid registration compounds at five thousand rupees in West Bengal and two thousand in Jharkhand. Those are different provisions answering a different question, and that is precisely why knowing which provision you are under matters so much.
In writing, and with the rule in front of you. A counter conversation about a rule from 1989 that caps a fee at a hundred rupees is not a conversation that goes well; a short application to the registering authority, quoting rule 37 or rule 45 by number, setting out the text, stating the months of delay and asking for composition under it, is a different kind of document entirely.
We are not promising an outcome, and anybody who does is guessing. What we can say is that the rule exists, that we have quoted it to you exactly as printed, and that asking for it properly costs very little. That application is the paper this page is built around, and it is deliberately the cheapest serious thing we draft.
Both rules are worded the same way and the wording repays a careful read, because two phrases in it decide what you owe.
The first is “per calendar month or part thereof”. That is not a pro-rata calculation. A delay of one day into a new calendar month counts as a whole month at twenty-five rupees, and a delay of twenty-nine days inside one month counts as the same single month. So the number that matters is how many calendar months the delay touches, not how many days it ran for.
The second is the proviso. Twenty-five rupees a month reaches one hundred rupees in the fourth month, and the proviso stops it there. A delay of four months and a delay of four years arrive at the same figure. That is unusual enough in a penal provision to be worth saying twice: after the fourth month, further delay adds nothing to the composition.
None of which is an argument for being late. It is an argument for not accepting that a long delay must mean a large number, because under these two rules it does not.
Both rules use that phrase, and it is doing more than decorating the sentence. It identifies what the composition replaces. The alternative on the table is not a bigger fee; it is a prosecution, with a court, a date and an outcome.
Read that way, the rules are an instruction to the registering authority about proportion: a person who filed late should ordinarily be composed at a nominal sum rather than taken to court. That is the spirit of them, and it is a reasonable thing to say, politely, in the application itself.
It also tells you what the composition is not. It is not a fee for the renewal, which is a separate charge with its own basis, and it is not a traffic compounding amount under section 200. Three different kinds of money can land on the same visit to an office, and keeping them apart on paper is how you avoid paying one of them twice.
We should be as clear about what rules 37 and 45 do not cover as about what they do, because the gap is where people get caught.
They cover the failure to apply in time and the failure to intimate in time. They do not cover driving the vehicle in the meantime. If a vehicle is used on a road while its registration is not valid, that is a different provision altogether — section 192, which other states in this series compound at two thousand rupees in Jharkhand and five thousand in West Bengal, with no hundred-rupee cap anywhere near it.
So the practical reading is narrow and worth getting right: the hundred-rupee cap is for the paperwork, not for the driving. A person who let a renewal lapse and parked the vehicle is in a very different position from one who let it lapse and kept driving.
There is a third composition provision, rule 46, dealing with delayed registration marking. It runs across several sub-rules — 46, 46-A, 46-B and 46-C — which also cover registration marks, reservation fees, weight particulars and what has to be painted on a vehicle. We could not extract its text cleanly enough to quote, so we are naming it rather than reproducing it. If your problem is a registration mark rather than a renewal, that is the rule number to ask about.
Across eight states this is only the second time we have found composition written into the rules themselves rather than left to a notification, and the two instances are not the same kind of thing.
Headed simply “Compounding of Offences”, sitting among the general provisions near the end of the rules.
Apparently general in scope. We could not read its text, so what it actually does remains open.
Three narrow provisions, each tied to one specific filing failure: renewal, transfer intimation, registration marking.
We could read two of them in full. They do not touch traffic offences at large, which still run on a notification here.
Since this page was written, a third has turned up. Tamil Nadu puts composition in its rules four times over — rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113 — and prices them in slabs rather than by the month: forty rupees for a delay up to thirty days, seventy-five to sixty, a hundred after that, and a hundred and fifty in the top slab of one of the four. Against Karnataka’s twenty-five rupees a month with a hundred-rupee cap, the two states arrive at almost the same money by different arithmetic, and Tamil Nadu goes one step further by naming the provision the payment replaces. Our page on a challan in Tamil Nadu sets out all four rules in full.
And a fourth state has since joined them. Uttarakhand’s rule 45 counts weeks rather than months or day bands, and does something none of the others do: it sets the rate by the vehicle, from a rupee a week for an invalid carriage to fifty for a lorry. Its ceiling is the same hundred rupees as Karnataka’s, reached in the third week for a car instead of the fourth month. Our page on a challan in Uttarakhand quotes it in full.
Everything above is Karnataka being quietly useful. The rest of this page is Karnataka being historically important, because this is where somebody finally asked the question that sits under every figure we have printed on eight state pages: where does a state get the power to set these numbers at all, and can it lower them?
Two different numbers were being discussed as though they were one.
What a magistrate may impose on conviction. Written into each section of the Motor Vehicles Act by Parliament.
A state cannot change it.
What the state will accept to close the offence without a trial. Fixed by state notification under section 200.
A state decides it.
Because the figure is in a central Act. Motor vehicles sits on the Concurrent List, which means both Parliament and a state legislature can legislate on it — but where a state law conflicts with a central one, the central law prevails unless the state law has received the President’s assent. That is ordinary constitutional arithmetic, set out in Article 254, and it applies here as it does anywhere else.
So a state announcement that the fine for some offence is now smaller, if it really meant the penalty a court imposes, would be doing something a press release cannot do. That is the point the Centre’s reported position was making, and as far as it goes it is correct.
Because section 200 of the same Act says so. It is the provision that allows certain offences to be compounded, and it leaves it to the State Government to specify, by notification, which offences and for what sum. Every schedule we have printed in this series — Jharkhand’s twenty-five rows, Bengal’s twenty-six, Bihar’s fifty per cent settlement — exists under that power and under nothing else.
A state exercising section 200 to set a lower figure than it had before is doing exactly what the section contemplates. There is nothing irregular about it, and no Presidential assent is involved, because no central provision is being contradicted.
Both, about different things, and neither said which. The minister saying states could reduce was right about compounding amounts. The Centre saying states could not reduce was right about fines. What was missing from the exchange, and from almost all the reporting of it, was the sentence that reconciles them.
The practical consequence for anybody reading a state figure today is the one to carry away. A number in a state notification is a compounding amount. The number in the Act is a ceiling for a court. If somebody quotes you the second as though it were the first, or the first as though it were binding on a magistrate, they have confused the same two things that confused everybody in September 2019.
Since this page was written, the document behind that sentence has turned up. Telangana publishes an actual section 200 compounding notification — the first this series has been able to read — and it settles the point without argument. It opens by citing section 200, it prices eighteen offences, and it ends with a proviso that the compounding fee shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. A state setting its own compounding figures, and acknowledging in the same breath that the Act’s maximum binds it. Our page on a challan in Telangana sets it out in full.
We have headlines and publication dates for the 11 September statement, the 19 September legal opinion and the 21 September cut, and a meta-description for the last of those giving its substance. We do not have the full text of any of those reports.
For the Centre’s reversal we have a Bengaluru report describing it, and a secondary account saying the transport ministry consulted its law counterparts and concluded that states would need the President’s approval. That second account carries no date and names no official. We could not find the underlying letter or circular at all.
So: the sequence is reported, the legal distinction above is ours and rests on the Act and the Constitution rather than on any of those reports, and the Centre’s exact words are something we have not read.
We do not know. The report we found describes officials waiting for official communication before deciding whether to restore the full amounts, which is a description of uncertainty rather than of an outcome. Nothing we could reach says what was eventually done.
That is a real gap and it has a practical edge: if you are looking at a Karnataka figure today you cannot tell from this page whether it sits above or below the 2019 cut. The only way to settle it is to ask the department for the notification currently in force.
Because the answer determines what every state page in this series is actually describing. When Jharkhand publishes a column headed “compounding fee to be realized”, that column exists because section 200 lets it. When Bihar halves its challans by gazette notification, that is section 200. When Maharashtra publishes a list of offences that cannot be compounded, it is exercising the same power by declining to exercise it.
And it explains the one thing that puzzles readers most, which is how the figure for a single section can vary tenfold between neighbouring states. It varies because Parliament set a ceiling and then handed each state the discretion to decide what it would settle for. Karnataka is where that architecture briefly became visible.
Read against the distinction, the scatter of September 2019 makes sense for the first time.
Every one of those is a compounding decision. Not one of them changed a fine, and not one of them needed to.
“State cuts traffic fines” fits in a headline. “State notifies reduced compounding amounts under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act” does not. We are not blaming anybody for the shorthand; every trade has one.
But the shorthand is what left officials, drivers and at one point apparently the Union government itself unsure whether something lawful had happened. Seven years later the clearest thing we can do on a page like this is use the two words separately, every time, and we have tried to.
Karnataka’s compounding notification of 21 September 2019 is held in the repository that collects these documents as a scanned image, and the text cannot be extracted from it. The state transport site did not yield a readable copy either.
We could have reproduced the handful of figures that appeared in news reports at the time and presented them as a schedule. We are not going to, for the reason that applies across this series: a number without an instrument behind it is a number somebody typed, and here there is the added problem that nobody can tell us whether the 2019 cut survived.
There are a great many, and they share the usual defect of naming no notification and carrying no date. In Karnataka that defect is worse than elsewhere, because of the open question above: a table could be showing pre-cut figures, post-cut figures, or restored figures, and nothing on its face tells you which.
We are not saying those tables are wrong. We are saying that for this particular state, at this particular moment, nobody including us can tell, and a table that cannot be dated cannot be relied on in an argument.
That third step is an RTI application and it is the only way to close the gap this page has about Karnataka’s current figures.
On every state page we open the same way: read the recital at the head of the state’s motor vehicle rules and look for section 200 in it. In Karnataka we could not, because the copy of the rules we worked from begins directly at Chapter I with no preamble of any kind — no notification number, no date, no recital of powers at all.
That is not a finding about Karnataka; it is a limitation of the copy we had. We are recording it rather than quietly leaving Karnataka out of the running count, because a test you could not run is different from a test that came back negative and the two should not be blurred.
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar (and therefore Jharkhand, which runs on Bihar’s rules), Maharashtra.
Six independently drafted recitals, visibly different from each other, none containing the compounding provision.
West Bengal, where the enabling clause was unobtainable and a general compounding rule exists at 349.
Karnataka, where the copy carries no preamble and three narrow composition rules exist.
The honest summary is that the pattern holds everywhere we could check it, and that the two states we could not check are also the two with composition provisions in their rules. Whether that is a coincidence we cannot say, and we would rather flag it than smooth it over.
“Appointment of Licensing Authorities—(1) The officers appointed as the Regional Transport Officers shall be the Licensing Authorities to exercise powers and discharge duties and functions under the Act within their respective jurisdictions. (2) All the Regional Transport Officers shall be under the administrative control of the Deputy Commissioner, Joint Commissioner and the Commissioner.”
Rule 3, Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989Short, clear and more useful than it looks. It tells you who decides a licensing matter in the first instance, and it tells you the chain of administrative control above that officer, which is who you escalate to when an application sits unanswered.
Rule 3 is the only provision on this page that tells you where to go when nothing happens, and that is a more common problem than a wrong decision. An application that sits unanswered is not a decision you can appeal against; there is nothing to appeal. What you have instead is an administrative chain, and rule 3 prints it: the Regional Transport Officer exercises the powers, and every Regional Transport Officer is under the administrative control of the Deputy Commissioner, the Joint Commissioner and the Commissioner.
So the escalation is a written reminder to the same officer first, then the same request addressed one level up with the earlier letter attached and its date on it. Dates are the whole of the technique. A sequence of dated letters is a record; three visits to a counter are not, and six months later the difference is everything.
We are describing an ordinary administrative route rather than a legal remedy, and we are not suggesting it always works. But it costs a stamp, it is the step that comes before anything expensive, and on a rule 37 or rule 45 application it is usually the only step needed.
The rules carry appellate provisions and we could identify them without reading them: rule 4 on the conduct and hearing of an appeal, rules 23 and 24 for conductor licences, rules 34 and 35 for registration matters. Rule 43 deals with authority for suspension of registration and with an inspector’s power to examine a vehicle on a public road or premises.
What we cannot give you is the forum or the limitation period, because the text would not extract. If an order has gone against you rather than a challan, that period is the first thing to establish and it is not something to estimate. An appeal is the document where one lies, and a petition where the matter has already reached a court.
Karnataka does not publish this the way Haryana publishes its seventeen officer categories or West Bengal its Schedule I. The rules identify licensing and registering authorities; they do not set out a table of officers against the sections each may compound, and the notification that might is the one we could not read.
So on the question that Haryana answers best and Maharashtra answers most surprisingly — a Police Constable for most offences there — Karnataka is a blank on this page. We would rather say so than infer a rank from practice.
Not compoundable, here or anywhere in India. Section 185 is outside the compounding scheme altogether, so no state notification could set an amount for it and none does. It goes before a magistrate and a conviction carries a disqualification the court must deal with. Our page on drink driving cases sets out the sequence.
We do not have Karnataka’s position on section 194, and after the other states in this series we are not going to assume one. The answers so far have been genuinely unpredictable: compoundable at twenty thousand plus two thousand a tonne in Jharkhand; compoundable in West Bengal with the permit suspended on a second offence and cancelled on a third; compoundable in Bihar but deliberately excluded from its fifty per cent settlement scheme; and not compoundable at all in Maharashtra.
Four states, four different answers to one section. Guessing a fifth would be exactly the kind of thing this site exists not to do.
Sitting on 28 September 2026 in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007), Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan addressed how little of what is challaned is ever collected. The figures before the Bench: roughly ₹49,194.05 crore still outstanding on e-challans nationally against ₹26,175.05 crore recovered.
“We also direct that let there be random checking of the vehicles and if it is found that the e-challan issued has not been abided or honored, necessary steps shall be taken to impound the vehicle itself.”
S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, 28 September 2026The rest of the directions attach the consequence to the vehicle rather than waiting for somebody to stop it. While money is outstanding the online services are to be frozen; a registration certificate is neither renewed nor issued in duplicate; no fitness certificate is granted until the pending fines have been cleared in full; the vehicle is blacklisted on Parivahan and no centre may issue it a pollution certificate; a transfer of ownership is blocked; and where the violations are multiple, the driving licence is suspended from renewal.
Neatly and unhelpfully, and it is worth seeing the trap before you walk into it. Rule 37 deals with a registration renewal applied for late. The Supreme Court direction bars renewal of a registration certificate while challans are outstanding.
So the two can arrive together: an unpaid challan prevents the renewal, the renewal becomes late, and rule 37 starts counting calendar months. The order that makes sense is to clear the challan first and then deal with the renewal, because the sequence cannot be run the other way round.
Two things, and both are cheap. Rule 45 means a late intimation of transfer is composed at twenty-five rupees a month capped at a hundred, so it is a small problem if it has already happened. And since September 2026 a pending challan against the registration number can block the transfer itself, so it is a large problem if you pay for the vehicle before checking.
Check the portal against the registration number before money changes hands. That costs nothing and it is the single most useful minute in a private vehicle sale.
The rules are state-wide and any compounding notification is state-wide, so what something costs does not change between Bengaluru and anywhere else. Nothing we found gives Bengaluru its own schedule or its own rank floor, which is a contrast with Rajasthan, where the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates have a different rank floor from the rest of that state.
What does differ is volume and the weight of camera enforcement, which changes how you are likely to learn about a challan rather than what it costs. An electronic challan arrives later and quieter than an officer at a barrier, and it is the kind that sits unpaid until it blocks something.
Nothing on this page reaches a seizure. It runs on the criminal procedure code, a magistrate decides it rather than any transport authority, and the periods changed when that code was recast. The application and those periods are on our vehicle release and superdari page.
Three different things wear the same name and only one of them has a court behind it. A magistrate can disqualify on conviction. A licensing authority can suspend as an administrative act. And since the September 2026 directions a licence can be held back at renewal where violations have piled up. Karnataka at least tells you who the second of those is: rule 3 names the Regional Transport Officer and sets out the chain above them, which is more than most of these pages can offer. Our page on licence suspension covers the court and administrative routes.
The general grounds are national and none of them is Karnataka’s: there is a prescribed content for an electronic notice, a period inside which it must reach you, and a certificate the authority must hold for the device. Our page on disputing a challan takes each in turn.
Karnataka adds one question that follows directly from this page. Ask whether the figure being demanded is a compounding amount under a notification somebody can name, or the maximum from the Act being quoted as though it were one. After September 2019 that is not a pedantic question here.
Compoundable traffic matters are taken up at National Lok Adalats across the country. A Lok Adalat records a settlement; it has no power to reduce a figure by itself, which is the thing most often got wrong about it. Where a reduction exists it comes from the state’s own notification — Bihar notified fifty per cent in 2026 and Delhi decided on fifty per cent compounding in 2024. We found no such scheme for Karnataka. Our page on Lok Adalats sets out what an award there actually is.
The two rules we have quoted came from a full copy of the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules 1989 and we read it twice: once to find what was there, and once to ask specifically whether anything was printed before Chapter I and to take rules 37, 45, 3 and 43 word for word. The answer to the first of those was that nothing precedes Chapter I, which is why the enabling test could not be run.
The September 2019 sequence came from news reporting, and we have been explicit above about how thin that is: headlines, publication dates and one meta-description, with no full article text and no official communication from the Centre. The legal distinction that reconciles the two positions is ours, drawn from section 200 and from ordinary constitutional principle rather than from any of those reports. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service with the citation given. Karnataka’s own compounding notification defeated us: it is a scanned image on a site that refuses automated access.
The challan with its section. The registration number exactly as printed. Dates above all, if a renewal or a transfer intimation is late, because rules 37 and 45 are counted in calendar months and the count is the entire calculation. The acknowledgement of any application you file. Any receipt. And the court name and date if the challan carries one.
Everything identical across the country has been kept off it — the statutory definitions, what happens once a magistrate has the file, the electronic enforcement rules, the licensing chapter and the law of seizure. Each has its own page here and is linked above where it arises. What is left is what belongs to Karnataka: two composition rules, one unanswered constitutional argument, and a notification we could not open.
When the matter has reached a court, because at that point no payment closes it. When an order about a registration or a permit has gone against you and a period is running. When a figure is being demanded that nobody will trace to a notification — which, in this state, is a question with real history behind it. And when a transport business rather than a single vehicle is exposed.
Two things. The directory introduces you to advocates for nothing, keeps your number out of sight until one of them accepts, and takes no commission from either side. And we draft. On this page the document is the written application to the registering authority invoking rule 37 or rule 45 — deliberately the cheapest serious paper we produce, because the rule it invokes caps the whole problem at a hundred rupees. Alongside it: an RTI request for the notification currently in force, an appeal where an order has arrived, and a petition where a court already has the matter.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Karnataka’s compounding notification of 21 September 2019 — its number and its schedule. It is a scanned image we could not extract text from.
Whether the 2019 cut was later reversed, and if so when and by what.
The enabling clause of the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules 1989, which is why the section 200 test could not be run here.
The text of rule 46 and its sub-rules, and of the appellate rules 4, 23, 24, 34 and 35.
The Centre’s actual communication saying states had no authority to reduce fines — we have reports of it and not the document.
The full text of the 11 September 2019 statement that states could reduce fines.
Who may compound an ordinary traffic challan in Karnataka, and at what rank.
Karnataka’s position on overloading under section 194.
Any Karnataka High Court decision dealing directly with traffic challan compounding, and any current state-level enforcement figures.
Questions are free. So is the introduction to an advocate through the directory, and no part of what we charge is a cut of anybody’s professional fee. Every document we write carries a figure you see on its own page before you commit. And where the whole problem is capped by rule at a hundred rupees, we think the honest thing is to tell you the rule exists first and keep the paperwork cheap — which is how the application on this page is priced.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Every state publishes what you can pay. Maharashtra is the only one that also published what you cannot — a list of nine non-compoundable offences. Two of them are things your neighbours let you settle for money: driving without a permit (₹10,000 in both Jharkhand and West Bengal) and overloading (₹20,000 plus ₹2,000 a tonne in Jharkhand). Here there is no amount at all — a court decides, both the driver and the owner are charged, and a repeat permit offence carries a minimum three-month sentence. The same document shows a Police Constable as the compounding authority for about 95 of 104 offences, the lowest rank floor of any state we have examined and the exact opposite of Bengal. Its money is from 2016 and stale, it is still sitting on a government server, and we say so.
ReadFive states in, every page had a hole — Haryana told us who may issue a challan but never what it costs, Jharkhand the reverse. Bengal prints both halves in one notification. Schedule I names who may compound, and for oversized vehicles under section 182B that is the Director of Transport alone, one officer for the whole state. Schedule II runs to twenty-six rows and six columns, because Bengal is the only state that prints the section you broke and the section you are charged under separately — which makes a challan testable on its face. We reproduce both schedules. Then overloading, which is deliberately left out: it runs on its own notification that suspends the permit on a second offence and cancels it on a third, with the registration suspended behind it. Also: a ₹10,000 figure where Jharkhand charges ₹1,000, three rows where a licence disqualification rides along with the payment, a rule 349 that may crack our five-state pattern, and a police page still quoting superseded notifications.
ReadA District Transport Officer in Patna wrote that traffic challans could not be taken up at a National Lok Adalat. Somebody took that letter to the High Court — and fourteen months later the State had notified a scheme letting old e-challans be closed at fifty per cent, with the Chief Justice directing where the counters should stand and that no money be taken in cash. This page traces the whole sequence from Rani @ Rani Tiwari v. State of Bihar to Notification No. 3261 of 30 April 2026, sets out exactly which offences the scheme covers — and the one it leaves out, which is overloading, the most expensive offence in the Act. Also: why the Lok Adalat did not reduce anything, a correction to our own earlier pages, section 200 missing for the fifth state running, and the Supreme Court order pulling from the other end.
ReadThree state pages in we had to keep telling readers the amounts could not be printed, because the document fixing them was unreachable or a photograph. Jharkhand broke that. Its Transport Department memo Pari. Ayu.-192/2016 carries a five-column schedule — section, offence, penalty before 1 September 2019, penalty after, and the compounding fee — and we reproduce all twenty-five rows. Then the harder half: section 185 and a dozen others are not in it at all, section 194A has an empty compounding cell, and a second speeding offence carries a licence impoundment instead of a sum. Also here: three rows whose penalty columns appear transposed, the three-month deferral of September 2019, the state rules of 2001 that will not open, a Delhi address printed on the state enforcement page, and the Supreme Court order of 28 September 2026 that turns an unpaid challan into a blocked registration.
ReadAcross three state pages we kept asking the same question — who is actually allowed to stop you and write this — and Haryana is the first state that answers it. Rule 225 of its 1993 rules, substituted in 2021, appoints seventeen categories of officer and lists the sections each may challan under. We reproduce the whole schedule. The police floor is an ASI, their list is shorter than the transport list, and overloading under section 194 does not appear against the police at all — it is transport department work. Two provisos matter: five officers cannot touch private buses, and police powers widen outside municipal limits. Section 200 is missing from the enabling provisions for the third state running, so the amounts come from a notification we could not find — and we say so rather than copying a rate list.
ReadOur second state page, and the finding at the top of it is one the High Court only said out loud in August 2026: Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre, and the Bench asked the government to decide on creating one. The state’s own rules contain no compounding provision — section 200 is not even among their enabling sections — so the amount comes from a notification, dated June 2020, and the schedule everybody quotes online is older than the 2019 amendment. An appeal in a licensing matter goes to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone, not the RTO. Plus the High Court’s own Payment Setu portal across 74 district courts, the school-vehicle chapter nobody mentions, number portability, and why this page carries no compounding figures.
ReadA stay order is not a thing you can go and collect. It is an order made inside a suit, which is why the document that has to exist first is the plaint and not the application. The Supreme Court set three requirements, and most applications die on the third: irreparable injury means an injury that money at the end of the case cannot adequately repair — so “I will lose money” is usually not enough. Before any of that there is a gate: section 41 of the Specific Relief Act lists eleven situations where an injunction cannot be granted at all, including stopping a criminal proceeding, and one added in 2018 for infrastructure projects. Also the ex parte order and the thirty days in Rule 3A that people mistake for a result, what happens to somebody who breaks an injunction, and the appeal that runs both ways.
ReadAlmost nobody reading this chose arbitration. It was in the loan agreement, the builder agreement, the insurance policy — a clause nobody negotiated. So the first question is not how arbitration works; it is whether that clause can be used the way the other side says. On the two commonest versions the Supreme Court has said no. A party interested in the outcome cannot alone appoint the arbitrator (2019), and a Constitution Bench held in November 2024 that unilateral appointment clauses in public-private contracts violate Article 14. And if you are a consumer, the clause does not shut the consumer forum. Plus the twelve-plus-six month clock, the grounds for setting an award aside in the statute’s own words, the 2025 ruling on when a court may modify one, and why filing a challenge no longer freezes the award.
ReadThe one rule a court applies against you even if the other side never mentions it. Section 3 says a late suit shall be dismissed although limitation has not been set up as a defence, so hoping nobody notices is not a plan. We set out how the Schedule really works — and why the third column, saying when time starts, decides more than the number of years does. What restarts the clock (a signed acknowledgement, a recorded part payment) and the condition both carry. Why delay can be condoned in an appeal but never in a suit. The Covid exclusion of 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022, still worth nearly two years and still forgotten. And section 27, where losing the period does not just bar the suit — it extinguishes the ownership.
ReadEvery page on this subject opens by saying mediation is voluntary. That is true of one of the three mediations you can end up in. Before a commercial suit it is compulsory, and the Supreme Court has treated compliance as jurisdictional — skip it and the plaint is liable to be rejected. And a court can refer you without your consent at all, unlike arbitration. We also did the thing nobody seems to have done: checked how much of the Mediation Act 2023 is actually in force. The commencement notification we could find switched on the regulator and the rule-making power — not pre-litigation mediation, not confidentiality, not enforcement. Plus the section 12A judgments from 2022 to October 2025, what is privileged, and the four grounds on which a settlement can be undone.
ReadTwenty pages on this site mention it and none of them explained it, so here it is from the only angle that matters: the point of view of the person being asked to sign. A Lok Adalat cannot decide anything — the Supreme Court said so in 2008 — it only records what you agree to. And section 21(2) makes that record a civil decree against which no appeal lies to any court. Not a suit to set it aside, and not objections in execution: the Supreme Court shut both doors in November 2025, in a case where a man lost a property he had bought for four crore rupees through an award he was never party to. Also what can and cannot be referred, the divorce line nobody reconciles, the court fee refund, why the traffic challan discount has no instrument behind it, and the Permanent Lok Adalat, which can decide against you.
ReadThe words are not interchangeable in India and the difference has consequences. Who may appear for you, where notaries, legal consultants, document writers and “case managers” fit, and how to spot somebody who is not entitled to practise.
ReadA three-question test that does not depend on how frightened you are, an honest list of when the answer is no, what the Advocates Act actually restricts, why a power-of-attorney holder cannot argue your case, and who is entitled to free legal aid.
ReadHow to verify that somebody is really enrolled, why specialisation by forum beats seniority, the Bar Council rules that protect you before you sign anything, the conflict question to ask on day one, and the question almost nobody asks.
ReadWhy no honest Indian site publishes an advocate’s fee, the fee structures actually used, why “no win no fee” is not permitted here, what is a fee and what is an expense, and how to agree it so there is no argument later.
ReadWhat to take, in what order, what to say about the facts that hurt you, what a vakalatnama actually does and how long it lasts, what to write down before you leave, and what should happen in the first week afterwards.
ReadWritten for both sides. Why a single line at three thousand five hundred rupees decides which of two separate systems your tenancy is in, the closed list of grounds under Section 14, the first-default protection most tenants never hear about, the summary procedure under Section 25B that is lost by doing nothing, notice under Section 106, and why changing the locks is the worst thing a landlord can do.
ReadThree different suits wear one name. Whether you are asking for a share, for possession, or for a document to be undone — and why each has a different clock. Self-acquired against coparcenary, a daughter’s right by birth, why a mutation entry is not ownership, why GPA and will papers are not a conveyance, and the two decrees a partition suit ends in.
ReadOne “no” at the counter is not where the law ends. The three doors, in the order the law gives them — the police station, the DCP under Section 173(4), the Magistrate under Section 175(3) with its new affidavit condition — plus the complaint case where the accused is now heard first, and why the officer refusing you is sometimes right.
ReadThe distinction everything rests on, and why it is decided on the medical record by another doctor rather than by how bad the outcome was. Why the complete record is the first step and must be obtained before you complain, consent as a separate and often stronger ground, and the three roads — compensation, prosecution and professional discipline — of which only one pays.
ReadThe one law that can take back property you already signed away. Section 23 and what Urmila Dixit (2025) settled about eviction and possession, the Maintenance Tribunal before a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the ceiling on the monthly amount and the route that has none, whether you may actually bring a lawyer, and where a daughter-in-law’s right of residence fits.
ReadFees, transfer certificates, admission and expulsion — and why the door that opens is the Directorate of Education rather than a court. What the Delhi High Court held in May 2026 about a hike at the start of a session against one imposed mid-session, why a certificate cannot be held against your dues, and how to ask the regulator for something it can actually do.
ReadFive different papers, five different answers to “what if I do nothing”. A private legal notice against a civil summons, a criminal summons, a tribunal notice and a police notice; the thirty days that is directory and the hundred and twenty that is not; ex parte orders and the thirty days to undo one; and why complying with a Section 35(3) police notice now protects you.
ReadWhat a family does in the first twenty-four hours, and the two rights nobody will offer you: default bail under Section 187(3), which turns on sixty or ninety days rather than the merits and dies the day the chargesheet is filed, and release under Section 479 after half the maximum sentence — a third for a first-time accused. Plus sureties, conditions, and why a bail order is not release.
ReadThe court is not deciding which parent is right. It is deciding one thing — the welfare of the child — and that re-sorts every argument you were planning to make. Custody, guardianship and access are three different things; Section 6(a) gives a starting position for a child under five and not a rule; joint custody is a Law Commission recommendation and not a statute. Plus interim orders, access as the child’s right, parental alienation, passports and travel, and what to do when an order is broken.
ReadGetting the content taken down and getting the person acted against are two different cases, with different addressees and different clocks. The Grievance Officer’s twenty-four hours and fifteen days, the twenty-four hour rule for nudity and morphed images, the thirty-day appeal almost nobody uses, why Shreya Singhal explains the wall you hit, Zero FIR, preservation requests, and the Section 63(4) certificate that decides whether your screenshots count at all.
Read“The marriage is over” is not a ground — Parliament never made irretrievable breakdown one, and no Family Court can act on it. So the case turns on what you can PROVE. The Section 13 grounds as they actually read, what cruelty means after Samar Ghosh and what it does not, desertion and its two years, the one-year bar, and why Section 23(1)(a) destroys a manufactured ground.
ReadThe danger is rarely a confrontation — it is a false complaint at a police station, and from that moment the State does the family’s work for it. What answers it is her own statement before a Magistrate. Plus the protection petition, why consenting adults are covered married or not, the three-day rule when you move, and the honest Delhi position on the thirty-day notice. For adults only.
ReadThe paper in your hand picks your procedure — not the amount, and not how obviously you are in the right. On a cheque, a note, a written contract or a guarantee, Order XXXVII gives you a suit in which the defendant has no right to defend. Plus the three-year clock, the written acknowledgment that restarts it, why a cheque bounce complaint is not a recovery suit, the mandatory mediation that gets commercial suits rejected, and why winning is not the same as being paid.
ReadTwo questions come before the facts: which door, and how much time is left. Section 6(1) built the Local Committee for the two situations in which the office route is useless — fewer than ten workers, or a complaint against the employer himself. Section 9(1) starts a three-month clock from the last incident, extendable by three, and recent decisions treat the outer edge as a wall. Plus who counts as an employee, what counts as a workplace, the conciliation that may not end in money, the inquiry’s civil-court powers, and why Section 28 means the committee and the police are not an either–or.
ReadWhat your building legally IS decides the case, not what you are complaining about. Most Delhi RWAs sit under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 — a registration statute with no power to levy maintenance, fine a member or recover anything, so the charge rests on the bye-laws and is enforced only by suit. A co-operative society goes to the Registrar under Section 70, where an election challenge dies in thirty days. And a building under the Delhi Apartment Ownership Act, 1986 has a Deed of Apartment, parking inside the statutory definition of common areas, dues as a charge on the flat, and model bye-laws that make elections and audit compulsory.
ReadA challan is two different things wearing one name. Some can be paid and closed; the rest cannot be paid at all, because the compounding list takes in Section 184 only for handheld phone use and leaves Section 185 out altogether. The notice is not a bill either – it is issued under the section headed “Restriction on conviction”. Plus what paying on the Virtual Court actually means, why the “three challans” suspension rule does not exist, and what to do when challans keep arriving for a car you sold years ago. No penalty figures, and the page says why.
Read“Court” on a challan does not mean a trial. It means a Magistrate now holds the file, and that the next click is a plea rather than a payment. How to find the case – and why a driving licence number will never find it. Why the summons only appears after you act. What contesting actually does, and the published figure showing how few people do it. The Act’s own short route, why traffic offences are expressly NOT petty offences under the new code, when you must attend in person, what the court can do to your licence, and what five official sources say – and do not say – about ignoring it.
ReadA licence goes out of two different doors – a government office under Section 19 and Rule 21, or a courtroom on conviction – and the grounds, the appeal and the way back differ for each. The appeal is thirty days from RECEIPT, and we found no provision for condoning delay. A High Court has quashed a suspension that named no ground and recorded no satisfaction. The licence does not simply revive when the period ends: the Act wants a refresher course, or a fresh test and a medical certificate. And almost nobody knows you can apply to have a disqualification removed after six months. Plus why there is no three-challan rule and no points system in force.
ReadEverybody argues “it was not me”. The strongest ground is usually not your evidence at all – it is whether the challan complies with the rule the government wrote for issuing it. Rule 167A requires the camera to carry a yearly approval certificate, requires the challan to be accompanied by FIVE named things including a photograph showing the offence AND the plate, and requires the notice to be sent within fifteen days. And Rule 167A(10) gives an owner who was not driving an express right to say so – a right the portal does not implement. Plus Delhi’s own complaint form, the cloned-plate gap nobody fills, and why Section 209 is a far weaker shield than people think.
ReadWe read the registration chapter of the Act section by section, and the answer is not the one anybody wants: there is no provision by which a seller can take himself off the register without a transfer being completed. Transfer needs the buyer. Cancellation is about the vehicle – destroyed, beyond repair, removed out of INDIA, not out of the State. And the challans are the smallest part of it: the Supreme Court has held that a registered owner who purported to sell but still appears in the records is not absolved of liability for compensation. Form 29 is necessary and has not been shown to be sufficient. One rule prevents all of it.
ReadThe counter says clear the challans first, and nobody says under what. We went looking. The Act has no such provision at all – not in section 48, not in section 50, not in fitness or permits. The power is in a rule, and the rule is narrower than the practice: ninety days, the offender’s own licence or the vehicle named in the challan, and permit, fitness and tax expressly left out. A 2018 ministry circular goes further and cites no authority for doing so. Then on 28 September 2026 the Supreme Court directed much of it anyway. Plus the Kerala judgment holding that a transfer after a death is not a transaction at all.
ReadThe section is headed “offences by juveniles” and the person it makes guilty is an adult: the guardian of the child or the owner of the vehicle, and those can be two different people. ₹25,000 and up to three years, the registration cancelled for twelve months, and no licence for the child until twenty-five. The part nobody prints: Section 199A is not in the compounding list, so it cannot be paid at a counter and must go to court. Plus the complete exemption in sub-section (3), the written representation the Act requires before a registration is cancelled, and why the Pune case was not this section at all.
ReadTwo things are said everywhere about this and both are wrong. It cannot be paid online – Section 185 is absent from the compounding list, so a court challan is issued and a magistrate decides, which the Delhi Traffic Police has itself confirmed. And six months in prison is the maximum, not the outcome: the reported figures show custody in under a tenth of cases, for days. The consequence that is real, and that nobody prints, is the licence – on conviction, disqualification of at least six months, and the provision carries no “special reasons” escape at all.
ReadSince the transport strike of January 2024 every page on this subject has been built on a provision that has never been brought into force. The government’s own release excluded Section 106(2) when the new criminal laws commenced, and the Delhi High Court confirmed in July 2026 that it was still unnotified. The charge in practice carries five years and is classified as bailable. Plus the twenty-four hour reporting window almost nobody knows about, and the ₹2 lakh claim the Supreme Court found only 205 families in the whole country made in a year.
ReadAcross nine pages on challans and road cases we kept saying this is a court application and not something to settle at a police station, and kept not explaining how. This is that page. The old provision had no deadline at all – its replacement gives the court fourteen days to record and photograph the vehicle and thirty days to order its release, and a High Court enforced that in August 2026. Plus why the registration certificate is not the whole answer, how much the bond can lawfully be, and the special statutes where the Magistrate has no power at all.
ReadOur first state page, and the state-specific part is narrower and stranger than people expect. Rajasthan’s notification binds officers by rank and by area: a Head Constable may compound inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, an Assistant Sub-Inspector everywhere else. The state’s own motor vehicles rules contain no compounding provision at all. Plus the thirty-day appeal to the RTO, a quarter of every compounding fee going to a non-lapsable road safety fund, who really owns the highway cameras, and why a seized vehicle here is so often a mining matter.
ReadSearch “Punjab e-challan” and almost everything you get belongs to Pakistan — the Punjab Safe Cities Authority in Lahore, a row of .pk sites, and commercial services. Not one Indian government result. The reason is that Punjab publishes almost nothing: its Transport Department’s whole notifications page holds nine items, four of them single scanned pages 11, 12, 16 and 17 of one user-charges file, and no section 200 schedule at all — while its own menu sends you to the centre. One date does exist: 19 December 2019, so here alone you can ask for the notification by name. Plus three two-second tells, the Gurmukhi-versus-Shahmukhi check, and why Chandigarh — whose Administrator is Punjab’s Governor — wrote the best schedule in India.
ReadOne question put to thirty-four Indian states and union territories: have you published what a challan costs, and who may take it? Five published a schedule after the 2019 amendment, seven are still running documents older than it — the oldest from 2008 — and around twenty publish no amount at all. In the whole country only two schedules tell you that a helmet offence costs three months of your licence. The full comparison table with every jurisdiction linked, the four jobs a schedule actually does, the patterns we did not expect — and every correction we have had to publish about our own pages, in one place.
ReadThe only jurisdiction in this series that was created while the amended Act was already running. Two Union territories merged on 26 January 2020, but section 17 of the Merger Act kept both rulebooks alive in their own halves — so the real question is whether Daman runs on one schedule and Silvassa on another. Neither exists. The registration mark was unified in four days; the municipal regime in eight months; the compounding schedule not in six years. The Transport Department publishes four documents, the whole legal library two entries, the police force’s rules shelf one reservation roster — and the traffic police page never once uses the word challan.
ReadThe smallest jurisdiction in this series, and the first where we had to ask whether our own question is fair. No two inhabited islands are joined by a road. The police run seven coastal security stations and publish no traffic page. The Department of Road Transport names no Act and no Rules at all — the only one of thirty-three — and a single Motor Vehicle Inspector is Licensing Authority for the whole territory. No section 200 notification could be found. We argue it both ways and then say where we come down: the principle holds, the scale does not — and a one-page notification would settle it.
ReadThe A&N Police publish a ninety-seven row spot fines list — the largest and most current schedule in this series. It marks which offences go to court instead of a counter, notes where the licence is to be seized, and prices the one compoundable limb of section 184 at ₹3,000 while sending the other five to court in the same row. Its notification is dated 22 days after the 2019 amendment — faster than Assam, which we had called the fastest. And row 17 of it caught three wrong figures in our own tables, which this page sets out in full.
ReadOn 25 August 2026 Ladakh notified S.O. 250, directing twenty per cent of everything collected by compounding traffic violations into a road safety fund — non-lapsable, audited by the CAG, and spent on signage, black spots, driving test tracks and ambulances. Puducherry promised exactly this in 2015 and never did it. The same notification calls a compounding fee one taken by “the officers authorised under Section 200” — so that authorisation exists, and we still could not find it. A territory that has published where a fifth of your money goes, and not what the money is.
ReadIn 2023 this territory recorded 13,72,501 traffic challans — 4,28,609 compounded and 9,43,892 sent to court. That is sixty-nine per cent going to a magistrate, which is the opposite of what section 200 exists to achieve, and no other jurisdiction in this series publishes the split at all. We could find no compounding notification here. The Act itself only arrived on 31 October 2019 — sixty days after the amendment — so this is the one place in India that has never known the pre-2019 Act. And in Srinagar 835 cameras now issue challans with no published procedure, for the one offence that costs you your licence.
ReadSikkim publishes the region’s fullest compounding schedule — forty-four priced rows in four columns, graded by repeat offence and by vehicle class — made by Notification No. 121/MV/T dated 29 July 2010. Sixteen years on it still prices a general contravention at ₹100, has no helmet row at all because the section did not exist, and carries two figures now below the statutory minimum. Meanwhile the same department runs AI cameras with a ten-day cure window and a written promise to pay you double if the machine is wrong — the most citizen-protective provision we have found anywhere. The newest enforcement in India, pointed at the oldest price list.
ReadArunachal publishes no compounding schedule, and the only state statute its district transport office names is a taxation Act. But one district did something no government in this series has done: it published what it collected. Lohit reported 3,782 challans and ₹42,18,800 in 2025 — which divides into about ₹1,115 per challan, the first real figure we have had for what is actually being charged on a road rather than what a document says it should be. And behind it sits Article 371H, under which this State’s Governor alone carries a personal responsibility for law and order — a question we raise and deliberately leave open.
ReadTripura publishes twenty-six no-parking zones and twelve parking zones in Agartala, each with a notification number and date; a tax penalty scale; and eleven amendments to its Motor Vehicles Rules, the latest dated five days before the central compoundable list changed. It publishes no compounding amount at all — and its Notices link points at nothing while its Acts link points at a file that will not open. Then its accident figures changed our mind: deaths fell forty per cent in two years while crashes fell nine. That is survival, not prevention — and it forced us to say plainly what a published schedule is actually for.
ReadPuducherry left us asking who the “State Government” is in a Union territory. Chandigarh answers it in practice: its notification of 6 December 2019 says the section 200(1) power is exercised by the Administrator — who since 1984 is, ex officio, the Governor of Punjab. What follows is the best compounding notification we have read: 30 rows, five columns, a column naming the only three authorities who may compound, the three-month licence disqualification written in (the first schedule in the series to do it), section 206(4) on the speeding rows, and section 184 limited in brackets to handheld devices. One problem: the police website misquotes it in four places, including a date fourteen months in the future.
ReadSection 200 gives the compounding power to “the State Government”. Puducherry is a Union territory — and the General Clauses Act says that in a Union territory those words mean the Central Government, while a Council of Ministers advises an Administrator whose disagreements go to the President. We set the provisions out and leave the question open. Underneath: the territory’s rules are not made under section 200 (second jurisdiction proved on the instrument’s face), two different monthly rates sit under one ₹100 cap, the police table of 95 offences carries pre-2019 figures — and the territory’s own 2015 policy recorded a death rate double the national average and promised to notify penalties and fund road safety from compounding.
ReadA compounding arrangement has two halves — what an offence costs, and who may settle it for which offences. Most states publish one. Mizoram publishes both, and they do not match. Its penalties page, updated February 2025, is the only state document in this series that names section 177A, and the only government page that prints the three-month licence disqualification under 194C. Its compounding notification is from 1 August 2018 — still listing section 191, which 2019 removed, and listing nothing 2019 inserted. So a helmet is priced at ₹1,000 on one government page and absent from the other. Plus the only rank floor in India with a uniform condition on it.
ReadTwenty-one pages read a state’s schedule. Nagaland does not publish one — but it published something no other state government did: a notice telling the public that section 200 itself had been replaced. Serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023, commenced by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025, substituted section 200(1) and added 177A, 192B(3) and 201 to the compoundable list — so every schedule in this series is now under-inclusive, and the community service power may have been deleted before any state used it. Following 177A back led somewhere stranger: the regulations it punishes were superseded in 2017, and state departments are still publishing the 1989 version.
ReadTwenty pages built around a table. Meghalaya’s section 200 notification has no table at all — instead of figures it sets a rule: amounts “not lesser than fifty percent of the maximum fine prescribed”. So a 2011 document still works, while Telangana’s fixed schedule from fifteen weeks earlier went stale. But the formula only saved the money, not the scope — its list of nine sections is from 2011, and section 194D for helmets did not exist then. Chasing that took us to something twenty-one pages had never done: reading section 200 itself — which settles that the compoundable list is Parliament’s and not the states’, confirms why drink driving can never be compounded, and reveals a community service power no state has used.
ReadThree pages in this series quoted a state rule capping a composition amount at ₹100 and we treated it as a stale state figure. We were wrong, and Goa proves it. Its rule 54 names its own parent provision — section 50(3), which allows “not exceeding one hundred rupees” in lieu of action under section 177. The ceiling is Parliament’s, not the state’s. In 1988 section 177 also carried ₹100 — the two matched exactly. In 2019 Parliament raised section 177 to ₹500 and ₹1,500 and left that ceiling alone: a 31-year symmetry became a 15:1 gap by nobody doing anything. Also here: the four paperwork delays this reaches, and why the real exposure on a late transfer is never the fee.
ReadOn Shimla’s sealed and restricted roads the law that stops you is not the Motor Vehicles Act — it is a Himachal statute of its own, the Shimla Road Users and Pedestrians (Public Safety and Convenience) Act, 2007. And it contains what no section 200 schedule in India contains: a fifty per cent on-the-spot settlement written into the Act itself, twice. Also here: the RC and the licence impounded if you do not pay; a plea of guilty by money order; time limits that run against the prosecution rather than against you; two appeals with named officers and real deadlines — the first appellate route in nineteen states that is in a statute; and section 22, confirming the Motor Vehicles Act keeps running alongside all of it.
ReadSeventeen states chose their own numbers. Assam did not choose. It issued notification TMV.250/2019/67 twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment — the fastest in India — and across eighty-eight rows gave no discount at all: every figure is the Act’s own. It is also the only state in eighteen that publishes four separate schedules, one per class of officer. The price never changes between them; the permission does. Police cannot compound overloading in Assam, and the two ₹1,00,000 dealer rows are reserved to senior transport officers. On a second speeding offence the schedule offers no amount at all — it offers impounding of the licence under section 206(4). Then in June 2024 the cabinet replaced the two-wheeler document fine with a warning, which is generous and which settles nothing.
ReadThe state publishes its own price list and almost nobody has read it. Notification F 5-5/VIII-Trans/2021 of 25 October 2021, issued under sub-section (1) of section 200 and sitting on the department’s own gazette archive — one of only two post-2019 schedules in India. Forty priced entries, twenty-four kinds of officer down to a Head Constable, and a repeat-offence column used on nineteen of forty rows where Madhya Pradesh — same 1994 rulebook, same design — uses it on six of thirty-one. We measured every row against the Act: a tenth of it on one section, the whole of it on five, one row above the Act and one below its floor. Plus the three-month disqualification that no schedule in seventeen states has ever mentioned.
ReadFifteen pages of schedules answer one question — what does it cost. Kerala answers the one that matters after you have paid. Following the Supreme Court, the High Court has held that even after a section 194 offence is compounded, the excess load cannot be permitted to stay on the vehicle — and directed that the driving licence goes to the Licensing Authority under section 19(1) even where the offence is compounded under section 200. Paying ends the offence. It does not authorise the condition, and it does not stop the second track. Also here: ₹5,000 per light for after-market LEDs, and Kerala’s 726 AI cameras — 1.3 crore challans, ₹900 crore issued, ₹300 crore collected, and ₹34.8 crore of payments frozen over questions about which cameras can even read speed.
ReadEvery schedule in this series was drafted before Parliament rewrote the penalties in 2019 — Telangana’s 2011, Andhra Pradesh’s 2008, Maharashtra’s 2016. Madhya Pradesh issued one on 6 March 2023, superseding all others. It is the only post-amendment list in fifteen states. And it prices three ways at once: by section, by first or second offence, and by what you drive. We checked every row — the repeat column changes the figure on only six of thirty-one, and those six turn out to be a coherent set. Also here: ₹1,00,000 per vehicle aimed at dealers not drivers, ₹300 for a helmet (the lowest anywhere), a load-projection row priced by what you are carrying, and 19 categories of officer including District Magistrates.
ReadBoth states carry a “Compounding” link. Open Andhra Pradesh’s and it is a different law altogether — not section 200 but section 86(5), the money taken instead of suspending your permit. G.O. Ms. No. 332 of 2008, rule 217, priced by what the vehicle is and what it carries: overload ₹2,000 + ₹100 per 100 kg, ₹200 per hour for missing your timings, ₹500 per excess big animal. Medium goods pay half, light goods a third. And AP is the only state in fourteen that publishes the other half too — a prosecution table naming the eight offences no payment will ever close. Its note four is the sting: the published fees are minimums, not prices.
ReadThirteen states in, we finally have the document itself. Every page so far ended the same way — the amounts live in a notification under section 200 that nobody can open. Telangana publishes its own. G.O. Ms. No. 108 of 18 August 2011: eighteen offences, two columns by vehicle, the officers who may take the money — and a proviso that does what nothing else in this series does. It writes the state’s own ceiling: the compounding fee shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Odisha showed the floor; this is the roof. One problem: it is dated 2011 and the Act changed in 2019. Also here: the real 80–90% discount of December 2023, a half-rate for agriculturists, and why the police have had to call the yearly “discount” messages fake and fraudulent.
ReadTwelve states in, this is the one that shows you the line. Odisha’s One Time Settlement Scheme for e-challans pending on 31 July 2025 is not a flat discount. Six rows say “50%”. Eleven say a rupee figure — and that figure is always the exact statutory minimum the Act prescribes, never half. Seventeen rows, no exceptions. Where Parliament wrote “may extend to” the state halved it; where Parliament wrote “not less than” the state stopped dead at the floor. We reproduce all seventeen. Also: what the annexure leaves out — helmet, seat belt, insurance, licence, overloading — the notified speed limits under s.112, and a scheme that names no power and carries no legible date.
ReadThree states have now printed a composition rate in their own rules, and all three measure delay differently. Karnataka counts months. Tamil Nadu uses bands of days. Uttarakhand counts weeks — and sets the rate by what you drive. Rule 45: one rupee a week for an invalid carriage, five for a motor cycle, fifty for everything else — and a proviso capping the lot at ₹100. So a lorry hits the ceiling in a fortnight and an invalid carriage takes two years. Unlike Tamil Nadu, transport vehicles are in. Also here: the first appeal fee printed anywhere in eleven states (₹20 and ₹25), the Deputy Transport Commissioner (legal and tribunal), and a year in which challans rose 118.77% while collections rose 37.07%.
ReadTen states in, and this is the one that is open about exactly one half of itself. Tamil Nadu publishes no compounding amounts for road offences and no officer schedule — and then prints four composition rates inside its own rules, which almost nobody is ever shown. Rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113: a late registration, a transfer not reported, a new registration mark, a change of address. ₹40 up to thirty days, ₹75 to sixty, ₹100 after — and ₹150 in the top slab of rule 113 alone. Each rule says the money is taken in lieu of any action under section 177, which no other state spells out. Also here: the enabling clause cites a section 311 that does not exist in the Act, rule 98 quietly leaves transport vehicles out, the founding notification carries no date, and section 200 is absent for the seventh time in seven tests.
ReadNine states in, the range has turned out to be enormous — and Gujarat sits at the bottom of it. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani announced the cuts on 10 September 2019: triple riding at ₹100, where West Bengal takes ₹1,000 and three months of your licence. Helmet and seat belt ₹500. A pollution offence ₹1,000, where Bengal takes ₹10,000 with a disqualification. Ten times, for the same words in the same Act. Then on 4 December 2019 the Transport Minister announced helmets would be optional except on highways and panchayat roads — we print what was said, flag that we could not find the notification, and say plainly that this is no reason to ride without one. Also here: rule 107, the first appeal procedure we have been able to read in nine states, and rule 98A’s thirty-day grievance clock for app aggregators.
ReadSearch enrolled advocates by practice area, court, city, experience and language. Alphabetical, no rankings. Free to search and free to send a request.
Open the directoryIt reaches the advocates on the directory together and whoever is free takes it up. Asking is free, your number stays hidden until one of them accepts, and nothing is payable in advance for work we do ourselves.
Two doors, both free. Clients search a factual directory of enrolled advocates. Advocates apply to be listed on it — no fee, no commission, nothing paid in either direction.
Search Bar Council enrolled advocates by what your matter is about, by court, or by city. Searching and sending a request are both free.
Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates