A traffic challan in Madhya Pradesh: the first schedule written after the Act changed.

Where this comes from, and what that means

We are putting that at the top rather than in a footnote because every other page in this series has been built on documents we opened ourselves. This one is not, and a reader is entitled to know which kind of page they are reading before the figures start.

The first schedule written after the Act changed

Here is what the notification is reported to say about its own standing:

Two things in that sentence. It specifies the compoundable offences, and it clears the ground behind it.

Why a 2023 date matters more than it sounds

Fourteen state pages have ended with a version of the same difficulty. The schedule we found was written before 1 September 2019, and the Act it was written against no longer exists in that form.

• Andhra Pradesh — 2008.
• Telangana — 2011.
• Maharashtra — 2016, and we declined to print its amounts for exactly this reason.
• Gujarat, Uttarakhand — figures reported in 2019 with no obtainable instrument.

Madhya Pradesh’s was written three and a half years after the amendment. Whatever else is uncertain about it, it was drafted by somebody looking at the Act as it now reads, with the new minimums and maximums in front of them. That is the first time in this series we can say that.

It shows in the figures. A thousand rupees for driving without a licence in a private vehicle would have been impossible under the old Act’s structure and sits comfortably inside the new one. The schedule reads like something built for the Act of 2019 rather than inherited from the Act of 1988.

Three dimensions at once

Most state schedules price by one thing: the section. A few add a second. Telangana splits motor cycles and light vehicles from everything else. Uttarakhand prices by vehicle class and by elapsed weeks.

Madhya Pradesh uses three dimensions in the same table:

1. The section — thirty-one of them, the index of the whole table.
2. First offence or second and subsequent — a separate column for each.
3. The class of vehicle — inside individual cells, and not consistently.

The result is that a single section can carry six different figures. Section 192 has three vehicle classes in each of two offence columns. That is not a complaint — a schedule that distinguishes is fairer than one that does not — but it is the reason the common dispute in this state is about which row applies rather than about whether the schedule is right.

All thirty-one rows

Reproduced as printed in the source, including its own spellings and spacing. Rows where the second-offence figure is higher are marked.

Where we have written “Same” the source repeats the first-offence wording in full in the second column. We have compressed that for readability and changed no figure.

The six rows that escalate — and the twenty-five that do not

The table has a column headed “for second or subsequent offence”. We went through all thirty-one rows to see how often it carries a different number.

Six. Sections 184, 186, 189, 190(2), 192 and 194F. On the other twenty-five rows the two columns are identical.

So a rider stopped without a helmet for the twentieth time pays three hundred rupees, the same as the first. An operator caught overloading repeatedly pays the same minimum each time.

What those six have in common

They are not a random selection, and reading them together tells you something about how the schedule was built.

Each of the six is a continuing problem rather than a momentary lapse. A driver who is unfit to drive is unfit tomorrow as well. A vehicle without fitness or registration remains without it. An unsafe or polluting vehicle is unsafe every day it runs. A cut silencer is cut until somebody repairs it. Dangerous driving and racing are patterns of behaviour.

Against that, a forgotten helmet, a missed seat belt, an overloaded trip or an expired permit are events. They repeat, but each repetition is its own event rather than the persistence of the first one.

Whether that reasoning is the drafter’s or merely ours, we cannot say — the notification as reproduced carries no explanation. What we can say is that the six form a coherent category and the twenty-five form another, which is more than you would expect from an arbitrary choice.

A column built and barely used

It is worth stating the oddity plainly. Madhya Pradesh is the only state in this series to build a repeat-offence column into its schedule at all, and having built it, it leaves it doing nothing on four rows out of five.

One lakh rupees, twice

Section 182A(1) and 182A(3) carry a hundred thousand rupees each. They are by a long way the largest figures in any schedule this series has read — ten times anything in fourteen other states.

They are also not aimed at drivers. 182A(1) applies to a manufacturer, importer or dealer who sells, delivers or alters a vehicle in contravention of Chapter VII of the Act, which is the construction and maintenance chapter. 182A(3) covers the sale of components in contravention.

That is a deliberate choice about where in the chain the money should sit. Most of this series describes states charging the person at the wheel. Here the heaviest figure by far is reserved for the business that put a non-compliant vehicle or part into the market in the first place.

“Per component”

Read 182A(3) again: a lakh of rupees per component.

For a dealer holding stock, that phrase does the real work. A consignment is not one offence at a lakh; on the face of the entry it is as many as there are components. We are not going to work an example, because the arithmetic is obvious and because this is precisely the figure we would want verified against the gazette before anybody acted on it.

It is the clearest case on the page for the caution at the top. A reproduction is good enough to tell you this provision exists and is severe. It is not good enough to be the basis of a reply to a lakh-rupee demand.

And five thousand per alteration, on you

Section 182A(4) brings the owner into the same family of provisions: five thousand rupees per alteration where a vehicle is altered in contravention of the Act or rules.

The word per matters here as well. A modified exhaust and a changed suspension are two alterations on the face of the entry, not one modified vehicle. For anybody who has had work done on a vehicle without checking whether it was permitted, that is the row to know about — and it does not escalate, so it costs the same every time it is found.

Fifty rupees, the smallest figure in the series

Row 4, section 178(3), for a two or three wheeler: fifty rupees. Fifteen states and nothing else comes close — the next lowest we have found is a rupee a week under Uttarakhand’s composition rule, which is a different kind of charge altogether.

The same row charges five hundred for any other vehicle. Ten times the figure for the same breach, decided entirely by what is underneath the driver. For an autorickshaw operator refusing a fare, the state has decided the answer is fifty rupees.

Three hundred rupees for a helmet

Section 194D, not wearing protective headgear: three hundred rupees, the same on a first offence and a twentieth.

Set against the rest of the series, that is the lowest helmet figure we have found:

The West Bengal line is the one to notice. Same offence, same central Act, and one state takes three hundred rupees while another takes a thousand and your licence for a quarter of a year.

More for a seat belt than for a helmet

Section 194B, not using seat belts: five hundred rupees. Section 194C, violation of safety measures for a motorcyclist and pillion rider: five hundred. Section 194D, no helmet: three hundred.

So on this schedule the helmet is the cheapest of the three personal-safety provisions, and it is the one protecting against the injury that is hardest to survive.

We are reporting that rather than accounting for it. There may be a reason in the drafting history that we have not seen. What a reader should take from it is narrower and worth saying out loud: the size of a compounding figure in any state is a statement about enforcement policy, not about how dangerous something is. Three hundred rupees is not the price of the risk.

Overloading, and the obligation to unload

Section 194(1), as printed: a minimum of ten thousand rupees, plus a thousand rupees per tonne for the load exceeding the limit, and with the obligation to unload the extra load.

That last clause is the part that costs money. Paying is one thing; being required to offload at the roadside, arrange storage or a second vehicle, and complete the journey short, is another. West Bengal attaches the same obligation. Several states do not mention it at all.

Five states, five answers, from a flat refusal to compound through to a figure ten times another state’s. Nothing in the central Act produced that spread.

And a court has since said what happens after you pay it. The Kerala High Court, following the Supreme Court, has held that even after a section 194 offence is compounded the excess load cannot be permitted to be carried in the vehicle concerned. Madhya Pradesh writes that obligation into its schedule; Kerala’s courts reach the same place without needing to. Our page on a challan in Kerala sets out the holding and what else survives a payment.

Refusing the weighbridge costs more than the overload

Section 194(2) — refusing to stop, refusing to be weighed, or refusing to unload before weighing — is twenty thousand rupees. The overload itself starts at ten.

On the minimum figures the refusal costs twice the thing being concealed, and it stays at twenty thousand however small the excess turns out to be. Only once the load is more than ten tonnes over does the per-tonne element overtake it.

That is a deliberate shape and most states that price both have chosen it. The sharpest version is West Bengal at forty thousand with cancellation and suspension following immediately.

The strangest row in fifteen states

Section 194(1A), load projecting beyond the permissible limit. Every other state that mentions projection treats it as one offence with one figure. Madhya Pradesh prices it by what you are carrying and by what kind of vehicle is carrying it.

A ten-fold spread inside a single section, decided by the cargo. The plain reading is that the state priced the hazard rather than the breach: a steel pipe projecting from an articulated trailer is a different thing on a road from a projecting load of fodder, even though the Act describes both in the same words.

Whether that is the reasoning we cannot tell you, because the notification as reproduced gives none. But it is the only row in fifteen states where the amount turns on what is in the vehicle, and it is worth knowing it exists before accepting a figure under this section.

A word we could not identify

The second column of that row reads, in the source, “open goods / Odyssey / Metal plate / Pipe / Channel”.

We do not know what “Odyssey” is. In the company it keeps — metal plate, pipe, channel — the likeliest explanation is that it renders ODC, over-dimensional cargo, which would fit the sense of the row exactly.

We have printed it as it appears rather than correcting it to what we think it means. Tidying a quotation on a guess is not something a page like this gets to do, and if you are relying on this row the original wording is what you need.

The row aimed at the authority itself

Row 13 is section 182B, and it is the one entry in fifteen states that does not describe something a member of the public did.

As printed: “Registration/fitness by the authority to manufactured vehicles in violation of the Act/Rules”, at ten thousand rupees.

Read plainly, that is a registering authority granting a registration or a fitness certificate to a vehicle it should not have. The person compounded is the official, not the owner.

The figure sits alongside the two ten-thousand-rupee entries for disqualified persons driving or acting as conductors, which suggests a drafter grouping the provisions about people who should not have been in that position at all.

Three rows about tickets, and who pays

Rows 2, 3 and 4 are the three limbs of section 178, and reading them together is more interesting than reading any one.

• 178(1) — travelling in a stage carriage without a ticket or pass: five hundred rupees, charged to the passenger.
• 178(2) — the conductor or driver not giving a ticket, giving an invalid one, or giving one of lower value: five hundred rupees, charged to the operator’s side.
• 178(3) — a contract carriage plied in contravention or refusing to carry passengers: fifty rupees for a two or three wheeler, five hundred for anything else.

The passenger who does not pay and the conductor who does not issue are charged identically. The state has taken no view that one side of that transaction is more culpable than the other, which is a choice and not an obvious one.

Then row 4 drops to fifty rupees for an autorickshaw refusing a fare — one tenth of what a passenger pays for travelling without a ticket. That is the single widest gap in the table between two things a reader might reasonably consider comparable, and the schedule offers no explanation for it.

Transport against non-transport

Seven rows turn on this distinction and some of them swing hard. Driving without a valid licence is a thousand rupees in a private vehicle and five thousand in a transport vehicle. Dangerous driving on a second offence is two thousand against ten.

Broadly a transport vehicle is one used to carry goods or passengers for hire or reward. The distinction matters because a vehicle can move between the categories in practice while staying the same vehicle on paper — a private car used for hire is the classic case, and in Andhra Pradesh that same situation points at suspension of the registration itself.

The cell that does not quite work

Row 5, section 179, reads in the source as three figures in a single cell:

The first two are a familiar class split. The third is not: “all vehicles” cannot sit alongside a split that already covers every vehicle.

The likeliest reading is that section 179 has two limbs — disobeying an order or obstructing the checking officer under 179(1), and refusing or falsifying information under 179(2) — and that the class split applies to one limb while the flat thousand applies to the other. The description column does set out both limbs. But the entry as reproduced does not say which figure attaches to which, and we are not going to assign them on a guess.

For a reader the practical point is narrow and useful. If a section 179 challan has been issued, ask which limb and which figure, because on the face of the entry a transport vehicle could be looking at two thousand or one thousand depending on an allocation the schedule does not make.

This is also the clearest illustration of why the caution at the top of this page matters. A cell that does not quite parse is exactly the kind of thing that can be an artefact of reproduction rather than a feature of the gazette.

Four different ways of dividing a vehicle

This is the part that makes the schedule hard to use, and it is worth setting out because nobody warns you about it.

• Transport / non-transport — rows 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 18.
• Two-three wheeler / light / heavy-medium — rows 19, 20.
• Moped-motorcycle / light / heavy-medium — row 30, which is nearly the same division but not quite.
• Rigid chassis / articulated / car carrier — row 22.
• Two-three wheeler / other — row 4.

Five divisions, used in different rows, none of them defined in the schedule itself. The difference between “two/three wheeler” in row 19 and “moped/motorcycle” in row 30 is not explained, and on the face of it a three-wheeler falls inside one and outside the other.

For a reader that is not pedantry. If an insurance challan under section 196 is quoted at a three-wheeler rate, there is no three-wheeler rate in that row — and that is exactly the kind of thing a written reply exists to point out.

Nineteen officers

The notification names nineteen categories of officer empowered to compound. It is the longest such list in this series; Haryana’s seventeen was the previous record.

• Transport Commissioner
• Additional Transport Commissioner
• Joint Transport Commissioner
• All Deputy Transport Commissioners
• All District Magistrates
• All Additional District Magistrates
• All Sub-Divisional Magistrates
• All Executive Magistrates
• All Superintendents of Police
• All Additional Superintendents of Police
• All Deputy Superintendents of Police
• All Regional Transport Officers
• All District Transport Officers / Assistant Regional Transport Officers
• All Transport Inspectors
• All Transport Sub-Inspectors
• All Assistant Transport Sub-Inspectors
• All Inspectors, traffic branch
• All Sub-Inspectors, traffic branch
• All Assistant Sub-Inspectors, traffic branch

The magistrates on the list

Four of the nineteen are not transport officers and not police. District Magistrates, Additional District Magistrates, Sub-Divisional Magistrates and Executive Magistrates are revenue and executive officers.

No other state in this series brings the magistracy into compounding at all. Rajasthan, Haryana and West Bengal all list officers by rank and territory and all of them stay within the transport department and the police.

We are not going to speculate about why. What it means in practice is that the authority to settle a traffic matter in Madhya Pradesh sits in more hands, and in a wider variety of offices, than anywhere else we have looked — and a reader who is used to thinking of this as something only a traffic policeman does should know that.

The rank floor, in context

The lowest ranks on the list are Assistant Sub-Inspector in the traffic branch and Assistant Transport Sub-Inspector.

Across fifteen states that floor has ranged widely: Police Constable in Maharashtra, which works about ninety-five of its hundred and four rows at that level; Assistant Sub-Inspector in Haryana and here; Sub-Inspector or Sergeant in West Bengal; Assistant Motor Vehicles Inspector on Telangana’s transport side. Madhya Pradesh sits in the middle of that range with an unusually wide ceiling above it.

What the list does not do

It does not say which officer may deal with which offence.

Haryana does exactly that — seventeen categories, each matched to the sections it may handle. Madhya Pradesh names nineteen and leaves the mapping out, at least in what we could read.

The practical consequence is that a reader cannot check, from the schedule, whether the officer who stopped them was entitled to compound that particular section. In Haryana you can. That is a gap and it is listed below.

The argument here is which row

On most pages in this series the practical question is what the amount should be. Here it is almost never that, because the schedule is detailed enough that the figure follows automatically once the row is settled.

What gets disputed is the row. Was this a first offence or a subsequent one? Is this a transport vehicle? Is a three-wheeler a light vehicle for the purposes of this particular entry? Was the load agricultural produce or open goods? Was the vehicle rigid or articulated?

Every one of those is a question of fact with a documentary answer, which is why a written reply works here. It does not argue that the state is wrong about the price. It establishes which row the facts fall in, and the price follows.

How a second offence gets established

On six rows this decides the money, and on one of them it triples it.

The record is the department’s, not yours, so the question to put in writing is specific: which earlier offence is being relied on, with its date and challan number? That is checkable. “Our records show a previous offence” is not.

And on the other twenty-five rows the answer does not change the figure at all, which is worth establishing before spending any effort on it.

No non-compoundable list

We did not find one for Madhya Pradesh. The notification lists what is compoundable and stops there.

Two states in this series publish the inverse: Maharashtra names nine offences that no payment will close, and Andhra Pradesh names eight. Six sections appear on both lists, which is the closest thing to a national core we have found.

For Madhya Pradesh the only inverse signal available is what is missing from the thirty-one. Section 185 is absent, and so are 187, 190(1), 190(3) and 193 — which between them are most of what the other two states say cannot be compounded. That is consistent, but it is an inference from an absence and we are flagging it as one.

Drink driving

Section 185 does not appear in the schedule and could not. It sits outside the compounding machinery everywhere in India, which means no state notification can set an amount for it and no counter can take one. It is prosecuted, a magistrate decides, and the licence consequence follows the conviction. Our page on drink driving cases follows that from the roadside test onwards.

No settlement scheme, and the messages that claim one

We found no discount or settlement scheme for Madhya Pradesh. Several states have run them — Telangana in 2023-24, Odisha in 2025, Bihar in 2026 — and nothing comparable surfaced here.

Messages claiming large discounts circulate every December and January and they do not respect state borders. Police elsewhere have had to call such claims fake and fraudulent in terms. The test is the same wherever you are: name the authority that announced it and find it on an official site, or treat it as false. And never pay a challan through a link that arrived with the message.

The Supreme Court, 28 September 2026

A three-hundred-rupee helmet entry sounds like something you can leave. Since S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, decided on 28 September 2026, that is no longer a safe calculation anywhere in the country.

The direction itself is the headline; the rest of what was approved is what actually bites. An entry left unresolved is now capable of standing in the way of a renewal, a duplicate document, a fitness test or a sale — none of which the Act calls a penalty, and all of which are worth more than any figure in the table above. Set that beside three hundred rupees for a helmet and the mismatch is the whole lesson: it stops being about what you owe and becomes about what the entry is holding up.

Fifteen states, and where this one sits

The running answer, restated now that a post-amendment schedule exists.

One out of fifteen. That is the honest measure of how hard this information is to get, and it is why we have been so careful above about the difference between a reproduction and a gazette.

If the vehicle has been impounded

Nothing in the schedule above touches a seizure. Those thirty-one rows belong to the officers listed earlier; a seized vehicle belongs to a magistrate under the criminal procedure code, whose timing was rewritten when the code was recast. Paying against a challan will not move it, and there is no counter that can hand it back. Our vehicle release and superdari page has the application and the periods that now apply.

If the licence has been suspended

Three different things get described in the same words and they go three different ways. The court may have ordered disqualification as part of convicting you. The licensing authority may have acted by itself, with no conviction behind it. Or nothing may have been suspended and a renewal is simply being withheld because violations have accumulated, which dates only from September 2026. Only the middle one is appealed to a transport officer, and which officer that is in Madhya Pradesh we could not establish — it is in the gaps list below. Our page on licence suspension handles the court route and the administrative one.

If the challan itself is wrong

The national grounds apply and each is a separate question: whether the electronic notice carries what the law requires, whether it reached you within the period for service, and whether the authority holds a valid certificate for the device that produced it. Our page on disputing a challan works through all three.

Add the question this state produces more often than any other: which row of the schedule was applied, and does the vehicle and the offence actually fall in it. A written reply is where that goes.

Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur

The schedule is state-wide and reads identically everywhere. What changes is who is likely to be applying it.

In the larger cities that is the traffic branch, where the floor is an Assistant Sub-Inspector. Elsewhere the transport department’s own officers do more of the work, and in a state that has also empowered the executive magistracy, the range of offices a matter can land in is wider than most people expect. Nothing we found gives any district its own schedule.

The other half of the 1994 rulebook

Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were one state until November 2000, and both still operate under rules titled the Motor Vehicles Rules, 1994. Chhattisgarh wrote its own post-2019 compounding schedule two years before this one, on 25 October 2021, and chose the same two-column design — first offence, second or subsequent.

It then used that column on nineteen of its forty priced entries, where this schedule uses it on six of thirty-one. Same inheritance, same instrument, opposite instincts about what a repeat offence should cost. Our page on Chhattisgarh sets the two documents side by side row by row — including overloading, where both states halved the Act’s base figure but only one of them halved the per-tonne rate as well.

It is also the page where the Chhattisgarh notification could be read from the government’s own gazette, with its number, date, signatory and enabling clause intact — which is the one thing this page has had to do without.

How we checked this

The schedule and the officer list come from SCC Online’s reproduction of the notification of 6 March 2023, and we have said so at the top of the page rather than in a footnote. The thirty one rows were transcribed individually rather than summarised, and the source’s own spellings have been kept.

The count of six escalating rows is ours. We compared the two offence columns on every row rather than relying on any statement about the table, and we have named the six so that anybody can check the count against the table above.

The comparisons with other states — helmet figures, overloading, rank floors, non compoundable lists — are drawn from the documents set out on those states’ own pages here, each of which says what its source was.

What to do, in order

1. Take the section from the challan; the schedule is indexed by section and nothing else.
2. Check whether that row is one of the six that escalate. On twenty-five of thirty-one it makes no difference.
3. Work out which vehicle division that particular row uses, because five different divisions appear across the table.
4. Read the figure for your row and your class.
5. If the amount demanded is different, ask in writing which row was applied.
6. If a second offence is being alleged, ask for the date and challan number of the earlier one.
7. For a large or dealer-level figure, get a certified copy of the notification before responding.
8. Keep the receipt, and check that it records the section it was taken under.

What to keep

The challan with its section, which is the key to the whole table. The registration certificate, because the vehicle class decides the figure on many rows. The weighment slip if overloading is alleged, since the charge is per tonne over. Anything in writing about an earlier offence being relied on. For a projection charge, what the load actually was. And the receipt, naming the section.

Deliberately not on this page

A great deal of motor vehicle law is identical in Bhopal and in Delhi, and repeating it here would only bury what is not. So the definitions sit elsewhere, as does the course a prosecution takes once a magistrate has the file, the machinery governing electronic notices, the licensing chapter and the law on seizure and release — each on its own page, linked above at the point it becomes relevant. Four things remain and all four are Madhya Pradesh’s alone: the only schedule in fifteen states drafted after the Act was rewritten, a repeat-offence column applied to six rows out of thirty-one, a lakh of rupees pointed at dealers rather than drivers, and nineteen categories of officer that reach into the revenue magistracy.

When this needs an advocate

When a 182A penalty is in play, because the per-vehicle and per-component arithmetic becomes serious faster than anything else in this series. When a prosecution has been launched rather than a challan left pending. When a commercial fleet is exposed rather than one vehicle. Not for establishing which row applies, which is a letter and a copy of the registration certificate.

What we do

Two things, neither of them practising law. We draft documents, and we run a directory in which describing a problem costs nothing.

On this page the document is usually a written reply, because the dispute here is which row applies and that is a matter of fact set out in correspondence. If the question is what the notification actually says, an RTI application for a copy of the 6 March 2023 notification is the cheapest way to close the gap this page has. If an order has already been passed, an appeal is the document.

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

• The gazette itself — so we cannot give the notification’s number or quote its enabling clause, and cannot confirm section 200 from the instrument.
• Whether anything has amended the 6 March 2023 notification since.
• Any non-compoundable list for Madhya Pradesh.
• Which of the nineteen officer categories may deal with which sections.
• The definitions the schedule uses for its five different vehicle divisions.
• What “Odyssey” in the section 194(1A) row refers to.
• Whether row 8 means a disqualified person or something else, given the source’s wording.
• The appellate authority for licensing matters under the Madhya Pradesh rules.
• Any settlement or discount scheme for the state.
• Any Madhya Pradesh High Court decision dealing directly with compounding of traffic offences.

What we charge

Asking costs nothing. So does being put in front of an advocate. Every document we prepare carries its price on its own service page where you can see it before committing, and we take no share of what an advocate charges. This page has an obvious case where our own interest and yours diverge, so we will put it plainly: against a three-hundred-rupee helmet entry, nothing we sell is worth what it costs. Pay it and move on.

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