A traffic challan in Maharashtra: the state that published the other list.

The question Maharashtra makes you ask first

On every page in this series the opening move has been the same: find the section, find the figure. Here that order is wrong, and getting it wrong costs people weeks. In Maharashtra the first question is not how much but whether there is a figure at all, because the state published a list of offences for which there is none.

Nobody else did. Six states gave us price lists of varying quality; one state also wrote down the other half, which is the set of things no amount of money will close. If your section is on that second list, every piece of advice about paying promptly and keeping the receipt is irrelevant to you, and the clock that matters is a court date.

The document, and where it still sits

It carries notification M.V.R.-0716/C.R.-343/T.R.A.-2, dated 4 August 2016, and it contains two tables under plain headings: “List of Compoundable offences & Penalties” and a list of non-compoundable ones. The first runs to 104 rows across six columns including an authority column; the second runs to nine.

It is hosted on a government content server and was uploaded there in June 2023, seven years after it was issued and nearly four years after the amendment that changed most of the numbers in it. Keep that in mind throughout: the structure of this document is still informative, and its money is not.

The nine offences with no price

The punishment columns are greyed because they are the pre-amendment figures and are no longer the law. The sections are the part of this table that matters.

No permit: a payment next door, a prosecution here

Rows one and two cover permit offences. Driving without a valid permit, and breaching the conditions of one. Both appear on the non-compoundable list, and both name the driver and the owner or person in charge, each.

Cross the border and the same section is a price. Jharkhand compounds section 192A at ten thousand rupees. West Bengal compounds it at ten thousand rupees. In Maharashtra, on this list, ten thousand rupees buys you nothing, because there is no transaction on offer.

Overloading: the end of a thread running through four states

Row seven is overweight vehicles under section 194, and it closes a thread this series has been following for four pages.

• Jharkhand prints a price: twenty thousand rupees plus two thousand for every extra tonne, and forty thousand for refusing the weighbridge.
• West Bengal prints the same money and adds a ladder: the permit is suspended on a second offence and cancelled on a third, with the registration suspended behind it.
• Bihar keeps it compoundable but deliberately excluded it from the fifty per cent settlement scheme notified in 2026.
• Maharashtra goes further than any of them. On this list there is no compounding of section 194 at all.

Four states, four positions, arranged almost as a spectrum — from a straightforward price, through a price with consequences, through a price with no discount, to no price at all. Nothing in the central Act compelled any of them.

The same section, four states, four answers

Only the last row is the same everywhere, and that is because the Act decides it rather than the states.

Why two states can treat one section so differently

Because section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act hands the choice to each state government. It lets a state specify which offences may be compounded and for how much, and it does not tell the state which ones to pick. That power was publicly questioned once, in Karnataka in September 2019, and our Karnataka page sets out both what was said and the distinction that resolves it: a state cannot alter the fine a court imposes, but the compounding amount is its own to set. That is a real discretion, exercised by different governments at different times for different reasons.

Which produces the single most practical fact in this whole series: the same vehicle, the same load, the same section of the same central statute, is a payment on one side of a state line and a prosecution on the other. Anybody selling you a national table of Indian traffic fines is selling you something that cannot exist.

Section 182A: a lakh next door, nothing here

Row three is section 182A, which the 2019 amendment rewrote to deal with manufacturers, dealers and unauthorised alteration. West Bengal compounds 182A(1) at one lakh rupees per vehicle; Jharkhand sets the identical figure. Those are the heaviest rows in both schedules.

Maharashtra’s list puts 182A among the offences that cannot be compounded at all. Two states price it at the top of their range; the third declines to price it. If you are in the trade rather than behind the wheel, that is the difference between a very large invoice and a prosecution.

Inside section 190 the answer changes by sub-section

This is the detail most likely to catch somebody out, and it is why we keep telling readers to copy the sub-section and not just the section. Maharashtra treats 190(1), driving a defective vehicle, and 190(3), carrying hazardous or dangerous goods, as non-compoundable. West Bengal compounds 190(2), the road safety, noise and pollution standards limb, at ten thousand rupees with a three-month disqualification.

So within one section of one Act, the answer to “can I pay this?” depends on a number in brackets. A challan that records only “190” has not told you what you need to know, and that is worth raising at the time rather than later.

The entries that charge the owner as well as the driver

Rows one and two say it expressly: the driver and the owner or person in charge of the vehicle, each. Not one prosecution with two names on it — two exposures, each carrying the stated punishment.

For anyone who owns vehicles that other people drive, that is the sentence on this page to remember. A permit lapse is not something the driver absorbs on your behalf. It reaches the owner directly, and it does so on a list where there is no payment available to either of you.

The imprisonment exposure on a repeat permit offence

Section 197: the entry that is not about traffic at all

Row eight is worth pausing on because most readers will never have heard of it and some of them need it. Section 197 covers taking custody of a motor vehicle without the consent of its owner, and removing a vehicle without legal authority. It sits on the non-compoundable list.

That is the provision behind a situation that comes up more often than the statute book suggests: a vehicle left at a workshop and not returned, a driver who keeps the keys after a dispute, a financier’s agent who takes a vehicle away without the process that entitles him to. The published punishment on the 2016 list — a fine up to five hundred rupees or imprisonment up to three months — is small and pre-amendment, and the fine is not the point. The point is that it is a criminal provision, it is not compoundable here, and it gives an owner something to point at. We are not telling you it is the right remedy in your case, because the right remedy in a repossession dispute is usually somewhere else entirely; we are telling you the section exists, which is more than most people in that position are told.

Section 201: the only penalty on these seven pages charged by the hour

Row nine is obstruction to vehicular traffic by a defective motor vehicle, and the punishment column reads: a fine of fifty rupees for each hour. Across seven state pages and several hundred rows of schedules, it is the only charge we have seen that runs on a clock.

Fifty rupees an hour is a 2016 figure and trivial today. The structure is not trivial, because it prices delay rather than the act, which is the correct design for the mischief it addresses — a broken-down vehicle left in a carriageway is a problem that grows the longer it sits. The practical reading for a driver is simple and it costs nothing to act on: when a vehicle fails in traffic, the time it takes you to get it moved is itself a measure of exposure, and the recovery call made in the first ten minutes is worth more than the argument about whose fault the breakdown was.

A second state has since turned up with its own list, and the overlap is the finding. Andhra Pradesh publishes a prosecution table whose first note says offences under sections 182-A, 185, 187, 190(1), 190(3), 192-A, 193 and 197 are not compoundable and only prosecution is possible. Six of those eight are on Maharashtra’s list too — 182-A, 185, 190(1), 190(3), 192-A and 197 — arrived at independently. Maharashtra adds overweight and section 201; Andhra Pradesh adds 187 and 193. Our page on a challan in Andhra Pradesh sets the two lists side by side.

What non-compoundable actually means for you

Three things, in order of how much they surprise people.

1. There is no counter. No amount, no receipt, no settlement. Anybody offering to make it go away for a figure is offering something the published list says does not exist.
2. The court is the only exit. The challan names a court and a date, and the matter ends in an acquittal or a conviction. That takes time and it produces a record.
3. Waiting is worse than elsewhere. Unpaid challans now block registry services nationally, and you cannot clear a non-compoundable entry by paying it even if you want to. The only thing that closes it is the hearing.

Who compounds the rest: a Police Constable

Turn to the other table, the 104 compoundable rows, and the interesting column is the last one — the authority. In roughly ninety-five of the 104 rows the authority is a Police Constable. A handful sit with a Police Sub-Inspector, one with an Assistant Police Inspector, one with an Assistant Sub-Inspector.

That is the lowest compounding floor we have found anywhere. In Maharashtra, for most ordinary offences, the officer in front of you is the officer empowered to settle it.

The rank floor across seven states

Maharashtra and West Bengal are the two ends of that range, and they are also the two states that bothered to publish the information at all. Whether a constable or a sub-inspector is the better answer is a policy question we have no standing to settle; that the range exists, across one country and one Act, is the fact worth carrying.

Eleven categories, and what they tell you

The compoundable table groups its rows into eleven categories: Document, Number Plate, Driving, Lamp, Horn, Signal, Over speed or Dangerous driving, Towing, Vehicle Condition, Public Service Vehicle, and Parking.

That is not a lawyer’s taxonomy; it is a roadside one. Somebody designed this table to be used standing up, by an officer looking for a category rather than a section number. It is a small window into how enforcement is actually meant to work here, and it is consistent with putting the authority at constable level.

Why we have not printed the amounts

Because they are from 2016 and the 2019 amendment rewrote almost every figure in the Act. A stale number printed beside a current section is worse than no number, because it looks authoritative and nobody checks the date on a table.

What we have printed from that document is the part that does not go stale the same way: which sections appear on which list, the authority column, and the category structure. Compoundability and competence are structural choices; the rupees are not.

One state has since done what this one has not. Madhya Pradesh issued a fresh compounding notification on 6 March 2023, superseding everything before it — the only schedule in fifteen states drafted after the Act was rewritten. It is worth reading next to this page, because it shows what a post-amendment list looks like when somebody sits down and builds one: thirty-one sections, a separate column for repeat offences, and figures that split again by class of vehicle. Our page on a challan in Madhya Pradesh sets it out in full.

A 2016 list on a 2023 upload

What we are and are not saying about that

We are describing a document and its date. We are not making a claim about anybody’s conduct, and we are not suggesting the file was left there to mislead. Government servers accumulate; a PDF uploaded in good faith does not announce the day it stops being current.

We print it for the same reason we printed a Delhi address on a Jharkhand page and a superseded notification on a West Bengal one: because somebody reading it could act on it, and a sentence from us costs nothing and might prevent that.

1 December 2019: three months late, and lower

The amended Act commenced nationally on 1 September 2019. Maharashtra brought it into effect on 1 December 2019, three months later, and set a number of its compounding amounts below the central figures. It was one of several states that paused after the public reaction to the new numbers.

The State Transport Commissioner, Avinash Dhakane, put the purpose this way when it came into force:

The figures Maharashtra published then

Reported at the time: five thousand rupees for driving without a licence; five thousand for an owner who allows an unlicensed person to drive; ten thousand for failing to give way to an ambulance; two thousand for driving without insurance; one thousand for unauthorised interference with a vehicle; five hundred for travelling without a ticket on a bus; five thousand for racing, rising to ten thousand on a repeat; one thousand for an incorrect registration plate; one thousand for driving without reflectors or tail lamps; and five hundred rising to fifteen hundred under section 177.

Those are reported figures from the implementation, not a schedule we read in full, and we are flagging them as such. They are useful for orientation and they are not a document you can cite.

One notification, two languages, two dates

A further Maharashtra notification on compounding was issued in English on 26 November 2021 and in Marathi on 1 December 2021. One instrument, two texts, five days apart.

We are printing that because it is unusual and because we cannot resolve it. Which version governs, and from which of the two dates, is a question with a real answer somewhere in Maharashtra practice, and we do not have it. If you are arguing about whether a particular figure applied to a challan issued in that week, it is a question worth putting to the department in writing.

The question this page cannot answer

We have thought about whether to print the list at all with that uncertainty attached, and the answer is yes. Several of its entries are structurally stable — section 185 is non-compoundable everywhere in India by force of the Act, and a state that has decided not to let overloading be bought off does not usually reverse that quietly. A dated document with its date attached beats nothing, provided the date is attached.

How to get that answered

Write to the Transport Commissioner and ask two things: for the compounding notification currently in force, with its number and date; and for the current list of offences that may not be compounded, citing notification M.V.R.-0716/C.R.-343/T.R.A.-2 of 4 August 2016 by number so the reply has to address it.

That is an RTI application and it is the cheapest thing we draft. If you are about to go to court on the strength of being told your offence cannot be compounded, it is also the most useful five hundred rupees on this page.

The enabling-section test, a sixth time

The same opening check as every state page: read the recital at the head of the state’s motor vehicle rules and look for the compounding provision in it.

Ten sections of the Act, and section 200 is not one of them. Six states tested, six absences.

The most distinctive recital of the six

Maharashtra’s is the least like the others, which is worth a paragraph because it shows how independently these instruments were drafted. It is the only one of the six to cite section 26. It is the only one to reach outside the Motor Vehicles Act altogether and invoke section 22 of the General Clauses Act 1897. And it cites both 159 and 213, where Bihar took 159 with 211 and Haryana took 213 without 159.

Six recitals, six different shapes, one shared omission. At six out of six the omission is not a drafting habit; it is how the scheme is built. You will not find the amount by reading the state rules in any of these states, and knowing that saves a long and fruitless afternoon.

No compounding rule here, unlike Bengal

We looked specifically, because West Bengal turned out to have a rule 349 headed Compounding of Offences and that cracked a conclusion we had been treating as settled. Maharashtra has nothing comparable. Its rules carry testing officers at rule 7 and performance of functions of an officer at rule 287, and no compounding provision.

So Bengal remains the single exception across seven states, and Maharashtra is the ordinary case: the power lives in a notification, and the notification is a separate document that can be amended, replaced and lost sight of without anybody noticing.

Where an appeal goes, and what we could not read

The Maharashtra rules carry appellate provisions at rules 8 and 9 for driving licences, 32 and 33 for conductor licences, 43 and 44 for registration, and rule 97 for appeals and revision applications against orders. We could identify the numbering and not the text.

So we cannot give you the forum or the limitation period, and we are not going to estimate either. If an order rather than a challan has arrived — a licence suspension, a permit decision — the period is the first thing to establish and a missed one cannot be recovered. An application to the authority, or an appeal where one lies, is the document; which of the two depends on the answer to that question.

The Supreme Court, 28 September 2026

A national direction now sits over all of this, and it was issued very recently. 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 looked at how little of what is challaned ever gets collected. The arithmetic put to the Bench: around ₹49,194.05 crore still outstanding on e-challans countrywide, with ₹26,175.05 crore actually recovered.

With it: online services frozen for vehicles with outstanding amounts, registration renewal and duplicate registration barred, fitness certificates denied until pending fines are cleared, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal with pollution certification refused, ownership transfer blocked, and the driving licence suspended from renewal for multiple violations.

Why that direction bites harder in Maharashtra

Because its whole mechanism assumes there is something you can pay. Freeze the services until the fines are cleared, and the ordinary driver clears them and moves on. The person holding a non-compoundable challan cannot do that. There is no payment available, so the entry sits there until a court disposes of it, and the registry consequences sit there with it.

That is not a criticism of the direction, which is addressed to a real problem. It is a consequence worth seeing in advance, and it is specific to the state that published a list of offences with no price on them.

What a court date actually involves

The challan should name the court and the date. You attend, or somebody attends for you if the court permits it. The matter is tried rather than negotiated, which means evidence, and it ends in an acquittal or a conviction with a sentence within whatever the section allows.

Two things people underestimate. It takes longer than they expect, often several dates. And it produces a record, which matters more for a commercial operator than the sum ever did, because a second offence under the permit entries is where the minimum sentence appears. The paper at that stage is a petition or application before the magistrate, and it is the document this page is built around.

If you run goods vehicles here

The short version is four lines. Overloading cannot be compounded. Permit offences cannot be compounded. Both charge the owner as well as the driver. And a second permit offence carries a minimum sentence rather than a maximum fine.

Put beside the other states in this series, Maharashtra is the one where a goods operation cannot buy its way back to normal, and that changes what compliance is worth. The money you would have paid in Jharkhand or Bengal is, here, a court file.

The weighment slip still decides it

Non-compoundable does not mean the measurement stops mattering; it means the measurement gets argued in front of a magistrate instead of at a counter. The recorded excess still drives everything, and the slip is still the document that either exists or does not.

Ask for it, photograph it before it leaves your hands, note the bridge and the time. In a state where the matter is going to be tried rather than settled, contemporaneous paper is worth more than it is anywhere else on these seven pages.

Crossing a state line with a load

This is the practical reason the comparison table above exists. A goods vehicle running from Jharkhand or Bengal into Maharashtra crosses from a regime where an overloading stop is priced into a regime where it is prosecuted, without anything on the road telling the driver that.

Nothing can be done about that except knowing it. If your routes cross that line, the briefing your drivers need is not about the size of the fine; it is that on one side there is a fine and on the other there is not.

Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur

The notifications are state-wide, so what is compoundable and for how much does not change between cities. The authority column does not carve out Mumbai either, which is a contrast with Rajasthan, where the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates have their own rank floor.

What changes by city is which court a non-compoundable matter reaches and how long the list is when you get there. For a commercial operator the court is usually where the vehicle was stopped, not where the business sits, and that is worth checking early.

If you have an ordinary compoundable challan

Then most of this page is not aimed at you, and we would rather say so than let the serious half alarm somebody holding a parking or lamp challan. Check your section is not among the nine, pay through something that produces a receipt, and keep it.

The one Maharashtra-specific thing to note is how low the compounding authority sits. With a Police Constable as the authority for most of the table, the officer in front of you is very likely the person empowered to close it, which is not true in Bengal.

If the vehicle has been seized

Neither Maharashtra list reaches a seizure. That runs on the criminal procedure code, the decision belongs to a magistrate rather than to any transport or police authority, and the periods involved were reworked when the procedural code was recast. We have set out the application and those periods on our vehicle release and superdari page.

If the licence has been suspended

Work out which of three routes it came by: a court disqualifying on conviction, a licensing authority acting administratively, or suspension from renewal under the September 2026 directions where violations have accumulated. Our page on licence suspension covers the first two. For the Maharashtra appellate route, see the gap noted above.

If the challan itself is wrong

Three national grounds do most of the work and none of them is Maharashtra’s: there are things an electronic notice is required to carry, a period inside which it has to reach you, and a certificate the authority must hold for the equipment that produced the reading. Our page on disputing a challan takes each in turn.

Maharashtra adds one of its own, and it is a good one. If a payment is being demanded for an offence the published list says cannot be compounded, that is a specific, documented question to put in writing. It is also worth checking that the sub-section is recorded, because under section 190 the sub-section is what decides whether a payment exists at all.

Lok Adalat, and the limit that matters here

A Lok Adalat can dispose of a compoundable traffic matter in bulk, and across the country it does. It cannot touch a non-compoundable one, because there is nothing for the parties to settle and a Lok Adalat records settlements rather than deciding cases.

Nor does a Lok Adalat reduce a figure anywhere on its own; where a reduction exists it comes from a state notification, as it did in Bihar in 2026. Our page on Lok Adalats sets out the distinction, which is the thing most often got wrong about them.

Seven states, and the one thing that held

Line them up and no two chose the same thing to disclose. Rajasthan disclosed rank and territory. Uttar Pradesh disclosed nothing, and turns out not to maintain a traffic police cadre in the first place. Haryana wrote seventeen officer categories into its rules with the sections against each. Jharkhand put its money on the table. Bihar, pushed by a writ petition, produced a half-price settlement and ran it under a Chief Justice’s eye. Bengal managed officers and money in one instrument. And Maharashtra alone wrote down the offences for which no instrument of any kind will help you.

Across all seven, one thing held: in the six where the enabling clause could be read, section 200 is absent from every one. Everything else diverged — the rank floor runs from constable to sub-inspector, one section’s figure varies tenfold between neighbours, and an offence that is a payment in one state is a prosecution in the next.

How we checked this

The two lists were read directly from the government-hosted document, and we read it more than once: first to establish what it was and how old it was, then to get the structure of each table and the distinct values in the authority and category columns, and only then to take the non-compoundable rows one per line. We put the date question first deliberately, because a stale table is the easiest way to get a page like this badly wrong.

The enabling clause and the appeal rule numbers came from a bare-act source. The December 2019 implementation, the Transport Commissioner’s words and the figures published then came from news reporting of the day, and are labelled as such rather than as a schedule. The two 2021 dates came from a discussion thread that quoted them, which is why we have printed them as an open question rather than a finding. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service with the citation given. Two routes defeated us entirely: the site carrying the 2021 notification declines automated access, and the government PDF of the Maharashtra rules failed on a certificate error.

What to do, in order

1. Copy the section and the sub-section off the challan. Under 190 the bracket decides everything.
2. Check it against the list of nine before you look for a figure.
3. If it is on that list, stop looking for an amount and find the court and the date instead.
4. If it is a permit entry, check whether the notice names you as owner as well as naming the driver, because both are charged.
5. If it is not on the list, note the rank of the officer compounding it and pay against a receipt.
6. Do not rely on any figure that traces to the 2016 notification.
7. If anybody offers to settle something the list says cannot be settled, ask in writing under which notification.
8. If you need certainty about whether your section is currently compoundable, send the RTI. It costs five hundred rupees and it is the only way to close the gap on this page.

What to keep

The challan showing the section and sub-section exactly as printed. The registration number character for character. The rank of the officer, which is checkable against the authority column. Proof of payment for anything paid. The weighbridge slip in a load matter, with the bridge and the hour noted. Any notice naming the owner separately from the driver. And the court name and date, which on a non-compoundable matter is the only deadline that exists.

Deliberately not on this page

Whatever is identical in every state has been kept off it: the statutory definitions, the conduct of a trial once a magistrate has the file, the camera and electronic enforcement rules, the licensing chapter and the law of seizure. Including them would have buried the two things that are genuinely Maharashtra’s — the list of nine and the constable — under material you can read on our national pages, which are linked above where they arise.

When this needs an advocate

When your section is on the list of nine, which is the whole purpose of this page. When a permit matter names you as owner as well as the driver. When a second permit offence is alleged, because of the minimum sentence. When a payment is being demanded for something the published list says cannot be compounded. And when a vehicle has been seized or a fitness certificate refused behind an entry you cannot clear by paying.

What we do

Two things, and the line between them is worth stating plainly. The directory introduces you to advocates for nothing, keeps your number hidden until one accepts, and earns us no commission from either side. Separately, we draft documents. The one this page is built around is the petition or application before the magistrate, because a non-compoundable offence has no counter and a court is the only exit. Alongside it: an RTI request to settle whether your section is currently compoundable, a written application to the authority, and an appeal where an order rather than a challan has arrived.

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

What we could not verify

What we charge

Asking costs nothing and the introduction to an advocate costs nothing. Anything we draft shows its price on its own service page before you order it, and none of it is a commission from an advocate. If your challan is an ordinary compoundable one there is nothing here for us to do, and we would rather tell you that.

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

Questions people ask