A traffic challan in Meghalaya: no rate table at all, and a percentage that never went stale.

A notification with no schedule in it

Twenty state pages in this series have been built around a table. Section, offence, amount, sometimes a column for a repeat. Meghalaya’s notification under section 200 does not have one.

It is a single page. It names the officers who may compound, it names the sections they may compound, and then — instead of a figure for each — it states a rule for working the figure out.

No table. No per-section amount. A floor expressed as a fraction of whatever the Act happens to say.

That one drafting decision is why this page exists, and why a notification written in 2011 still works when another one written fifteen weeks earlier does not.

The document

The enabling words, quoted as printed from a poor scan:

And the sections it reaches, as printed: “section 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183 (1), 190 (2) and 194 of the aforesaid Act”.

A file number from 1982

Look at the notification number again: TPT. 115/82/Pt/164.

The 82 is the year the departmental file was opened. A 2011 notification, superseding a 2007 notification, is the hundred-and-sixty-fourth part of a file begun in 1982 — six years before the Act it is issued under was passed.

That is not a criticism of anybody. It is a useful piece of context for a reader who assumes these documents are produced fresh. They are not. They are the latest page in a file, and the file is older than the statute.

Who may compound, and the rank floor

Five categories, and the list is short by the standards of this series — Chhattisgarh names twenty-four and Assam names them in four separate schedules.

• Commissioner of Transport
• Assistant Commissioner of Transport
• District Transport Officers
• Enforcement Inspectors of the Transport Department
• Police Officers and Head Constables

The last entry is the interesting one. It does not set a rank floor for the police the way most states do — it says “Police Officers and Head Constables”, which reads as including Head Constables rather than stopping at them.

Across the series the floor has been a useful indicator of how routine a state treats settling a criminal matter for money. Maharashtra goes to Police Constable, Assam and Chhattisgarh to Head Constable on the transport side, Himachal’s Shimla Act to Sub-Inspector, Telangana no lower than Inspector on the police side. Meghalaya sits with the low group.

About the scan, and what we reconstructed

The copy we read is a poor scan and the text layer is badly damaged. “Exercise” comes out as “exercis~”, “conferred” as “~onferrccl”, “Meghalaya” as “l’vleghalaya”, “Transport” as “TrunsporL”, “Officers” as “Ofliccrs”, “aforesaid” as “aroresaid”, and — the one that matters most — “fifty” as “fi fly”.

We take the same approach on Assam, whose notification is also a damaged scan, and for the same reason: a tidy version is one a reader cannot check.

A formula does not go stale

This is the heart of it, and the cleanest demonstration this series has produced of why drafting choice matters more than drafting date.

Two notifications were issued in 2011, fifteen weeks apart, by two state governments with the same problem and the same power.

Telangana’s schedule prices speeding under section 183(1) at four hundred rupees. The 2019 amendment set a minimum of a thousand for that offence. The figure did not move, because a figure cannot move.

Meghalaya wrote no figure. Its floor is half the maximum, so when Parliament multiplied the maxima in 2019, Meghalaya’s floor multiplied with them. Nobody had to do anything. No amendment, no fresh notification, no meeting.

What it actually costs, then

If there is no table, the question becomes arithmetic. The floor is half the maximum fine for the section charged, and the ceiling is the maximum itself.

Those are our calculations from the statutory figures, not Meghalaya’s published amounts, because Meghalaya has not published any. We have shown the working so you can check it.

One of those rows is worth pausing on. Half of the overloading figure is ten thousand plus a thousand a tonne — which is, to the rupee, exactly what Madhya Pradesh wrote into its 2023 schedule as a fixed figure. One state halved the Act by hand in 2023; another had a rule that halved it automatically from 2011.

A floor means the discretion runs upward

Every other schedule in this series fixes the amount or caps it. Meghalaya does the opposite: it tells the officer the minimum and leaves the rest to the statutory maximum.

Read as a citizen, that is a less comfortable position than a table. With a table you can say “the schedule says eight hundred”. Here you can only say “it cannot be less than half and it cannot be more than the maximum”, and anything inside that band is a matter of judgement.

• What you can check: that the amount is not above the statutory maximum for the section. That is a hard limit and it is checkable.
• What you cannot check: why a particular figure inside the band was chosen, because nothing published explains it.
• What follows: the section number matters more in Meghalaya than anywhere else in this series, because the section is the only thing that fixes the band.

It also places Meghalaya at a new point on a spectrum this series has been assembling without planning to.

“The maximum fine prescribed” — but some sections now have a minimum too

There is a problem hiding in the formula, and it is the kind that only appears after 2019.

In 1988 most penalties were expressed as a single ceiling: a fine “which may extend to” some amount. Half of a ceiling is an unambiguous thing. But the 2019 amendment gave several sections a range — a minimum and a maximum — and for those, half the maximum could in principle fall below the minimum Parliament set.

If that happened, Meghalaya’s floor would sit under the statutory floor, which is exactly the problem Odisha navigated by hand across seventeen rows, refusing on eleven of them to settle a rupee below the minimum.

So we checked the one section in Meghalaya’s list where it matters.

And on section 183(1) the arithmetic lands exactly on the minimum

Section 183(1) is speeding, and it is the only range-based provision among Meghalaya’s nine. After 2019 it carries a minimum and a maximum, by vehicle class.

Fifty per cent of the maximum is, on both classes, precisely the statutory minimum. Not close to it — the same figure, to the rupee.

We are not claiming foresight for a drafter in 2011. Parliament, drafting in 2019, plainly tended to set minima at half the maxima — and a rule pegged to half the maximum therefore tracks them. That is the real lesson: a proportion follows the shape of the statute, not just its numbers.

It also means that on the one section where the formula could have collided with a statutory minimum, it does not.

Six states, six answers to the same question

Six governments, none of them trying to make a point, between them using every part of the range and every way of describing it. Meghalaya is the only one that described it as a proportion rather than as money.

Why a percentage made sense in 2011

It is worth being fair to the drafter, because in 2011 this was a tidier idea than it looks now.

Before the 2019 amendment most penalties in the Act were small and uniform — a hundred rupees here, five hundred there — and expressed as simple ceilings. A state writing a schedule in that world would be copying out twenty near-identical low figures and committing itself to revising them whenever Parliament moved. A single sentence pegged to half the maximum does the same job in one line and never needs touching.

Seen from 2011 it is the efficient choice. Seen from 2026 it is the only instrument in this series whose amounts are still coherent. The cost — that a citizen cannot be told a figure — was a much smaller cost when the figures were all around a hundred rupees than it is now that some of them run to a lakh.

Half of “two thousand rupees per tonne”?

One section in Meghalaya’s list does not halve cleanly, and nothing published explains how it is done.

Section 194(1) carries twenty thousand rupees plus two thousand rupees per tonne of excess. Half of that could reasonably mean ten thousand plus a thousand a tonne — halving both limbs — or ten thousand plus the full two thousand a tonne, halving only the base.

Fifteen thousand rupees of difference on a single lorry, turning on how one sentence is read. The both-limbs reading produces exactly Madhya Pradesh’s figure and exactly Chhattisgarh’s base, which is at least some comfort that it is the natural one.

If you are facing a large overload in Meghalaya, ask how the arithmetic was done. That is a polite, answerable question and the answer is worth fifteen thousand rupees.

But the formula only saved the money

Here is the other half, and it is the part that costs Meghalaya.

The notification lists nine provisions: 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183(1), 190(2) and 194. That list was written in 2011, and a list of section numbers cannot update itself the way a percentage can.

In 2019 Parliament rewrote the compoundable universe. It inserted new offences — section 182A for manufacturers and dealers, 182B, and the whole 194A to 194F family covering excess passengers, seat belts, child restraints, pillion riders, helmets, emergency vehicles and horns — and it substituted the list in section 200 itself.

On the face of that notification, a helmet offence under section 194D is not among the provisions its officers are empowered to compound, because 194D did not exist when the list was written. Nor is a seat belt, nor a child restraint, nor the one lakh rupee dealer offence.

We are not saying nobody in Meghalaya is charged for riding without a helmet. We are saying that the instrument we read does not reach it, that we could find no later notification, and that this is the single most useful question a reader in Meghalaya can ask: under which notification, and of what date, is this amount being taken?

Which sent us back to section 200 itself

To say that Meghalaya’s list is narrower than it could be, we had to know what it could be. So we went and read section 200.

Twenty-one state pages in, we had never quoted it. We had quoted twenty-one notifications issued under it and never the provision itself, which in hindsight is a strange omission — and closing it answered questions we had left open on four earlier pages.

That single fact reframes a great deal. On Chhattisgarh we inferred a non-compoundable list from what was absent from a table and warned that inference from absence is weak. On Andhra Pradesh we quoted the state saying that certain sections “are not compoundable. Only prosecution is possible”, and treated it as a policy statement. It was not a policy statement. It was the state reciting the central provision.

And then the sources disagreed, again

We found three published renderings of section 200(1) and they do not match. Rather than choose, here is what each says.

This is the third time in this series that we have gone looking for a central provision and found the published texts at odds — it happened with section 177 on Chhattisgarh and with section 50(3) on Goa. The honest response is the same each time: print the divergence, say what the consequences would be either way, and name what would settle it. The authenticated bare Act would settle it. We have not read it.

Section 200(2), which is what makes a receipt worth keeping

While we were there, we read sub-section (2), and it explains something this series has asserted across twenty-one pages without ever quoting the authority for it.

Two things in one sentence, and both are practical.

“If in custody, shall be discharged.” Compounding is not only a way of avoiding court later; where somebody has been taken into custody for a compoundable offence, settling it requires their release. That is a limb of section 200 we have never seen reproduced in any state notification.

“No further proceedings… in respect of such offence.” This is the authority for what we have been telling readers since the Kerala page: a compounding receipt bars a prosecution for that offence and nothing wider. The words “in respect of such offence” are doing the limiting, and they are the reason the Kerala High Court could hold that an excess load still cannot be carried and a licence still goes to the Licensing Authority. Those are not proceedings in respect of the compounded offence.

You can compound after a prosecution has started

One rendering of sub-section (1) carries words we had not registered in twenty-one pages: offences may “either before or after the institution of the prosecution” be compounded.

That is worth knowing, because the assumption almost everybody makes — and which we have not corrected until now — is that once a case has gone to court the chance to settle has gone with it. On that wording it has not.

It squares with things we found earlier and could not place. Odisha’s settlement scheme excludes “challans in respect of which Prosecution Reports have been submitted to designated Courts” — which is a state choosing to exclude them, not the Act requiring it. And Himachal’s Shimla Act builds a separate summary-disposal route for exactly the post-prosecution stage.

If a compoundable matter of yours is already before a magistrate, the question of whether it can still be compounded is therefore a real one rather than a hopeless one. It will turn on the state’s own instrument and on the court, and it is worth asking rather than assuming.

What section 200 does not say, which explains most of our gaps

Reading the parent provision also explains why the same three things are missing from almost every page in this series.

• No appellate authority. Section 200 creates no appeal against a compounding decision. That is why we have had to write “appellate authority not established” on page after page — there is nothing in the parent provision to establish. Himachal has two appeals because its Shimla Act created them, not because section 200 did.
• No receipt requirement. Nothing in section 200 requires a receipt in any particular form. So when we tell readers to keep the receipt and read the provision on it, that is practical advice rather than a statutory entitlement.
• No record of repeat offences. Section 200 says nothing about how a “second or subsequent offence” is established, which is why that question hangs over the repeat columns in Chhattisgarh and Assam and over the counting problem in Himachal.

None of those is a drafting failure by any state. They are gaps in the central provision, and no state notification can fill them.

What all three agree on, which is the useful part

The disagreements are at the edges. The core is the same in every rendering, and the core is where the findings are.

• All three include 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 190(2), 192, 194, 196 and 198 — and section 184 in some form.
• All three exclude 185.
• All three exclude 187, 190(1), 190(3), 193, 197 and 199A.

Drink driving: twenty-one pages, and now the parent provision

Every state page in this series has said that section 185 is outside the compounding machinery everywhere in India. We said it from absence — it was not in any schedule we read — and once from Assam’s own enforcement table, which writes “Sent to Judiciary” in the column where money would go.

Now we can say it from the provision that creates the power. Section 185 is not in section 200(1)’s list in any of the three renderings we read. There is no amount, there is nothing to settle, and no officer anywhere in India is empowered to compound it, because Parliament did not put it on the list.

That is the firmest statement this series has been able to make about anything, and it is worth knowing if somebody offers to make a drink driving matter go away. Our page on drink driving cases sets out what actually follows.

Section 184, and a row in Assam that suddenly makes sense

One of the three renderings limits section 184 to “only to the extent of use of handheld communication devices”. Section 184 is dangerous driving generally; on that reading only its mobile-phone limb may be compounded, and the rest must be prosecuted.

We would normally flag that as unverified and move on. But there is a piece of corroboration sitting in our own earlier work.

When we wrote the Assam page we noted that it priced section 184 by limb and that no other state did, and we could not explain why. The explanation is that Assam, drafting twenty-five days after the amendment, priced exactly the limb the amendment permits and left the rest alone. It was not being inventive. It was being precise.

Which makes two other rows worth a second look. Chhattisgarh prices section 184 as “driving dangerously”, unqualified, at two thousand rising to five thousand. Madhya Pradesh does the same. On the limited reading those rows reach further than section 200(1) allows.

We are reporting a measurement, not asserting that anything is invalid. The limitation rests on one of three renderings, the corroboration is circumstantial, and the question is for somebody with the authenticated Act in front of them. But if you have been offered an on-the-spot settlement for dangerous driving that had nothing to do with a phone, that is a fair question to ask in writing.

A power Parliament gave in 2019 that no state has used

The same rendering carries a proviso we have not seen anywhere else:

So since 2019 a state may attach community service to a compounding, on top of the money.

Not one of the twenty-one state instruments we have read mentions it. Not Assam’s eighty-eight rows, written three weeks after the amendment. Not Chhattisgarh’s forty, from 2021. Not Madhya Pradesh’s thirty-one, from 2023 — the three most recent schedules in the country. Not Meghalaya’s percentage rule.

That is a striking thing to find at the end of twenty-one pages: a tool handed to every state government in India seven years ago, and no sign of any of them picking it up. We are not saying they should. We are saying it exists, we went looking, and we found nothing.

And section 191, which explains an earlier puzzle

Section 191 concerns selling a vehicle in a condition that contravenes the Act. It is in the pre-2019 list and absent from the 2019 substitution.

On the Assam page we flagged a discrepancy we could not explain: the Transport Commissionerate’s website lists section 191 among the compoundable sections, and section 191 appears in none of the four schedules in Assam’s own 2019 notification. We reported it as a mismatch between a department’s web page and its gazetted instrument.

If the 2019 substitution dropped 191, that mismatch has a tidy explanation. The website predates the amendment and the notification postdates it. The web page is not wrong so much as out of date, and the notification — drafted three weeks after the Act changed — was already working from the new list.

That is the kind of thing that only becomes visible after twenty-one of these, and it is the reason we keep the earlier pages linked rather than finished.

What Meghalaya chose not to empower

Setting the 2019 additions aside, there is a second gap and this one was a choice. Of the sections that were compoundable in 2011, Meghalaya’s notification reaches nine and leaves several out.

Those seven were available to Meghalaya in 2011 and it did not take them. Which means that on the face of this notification, driving an uninsured vehicle or an unregistered one is not settled at a counter in Meghalaya — it goes to a magistrate, while in Assam next door it is two thousand rupees and five thousand rupees respectively.

We cannot tell you why, because the notification gives no reasons for anything. What we can tell you is that the pattern is coherent: the nine it took are the everyday roadside offences, and most of what it left out either involves a vehicle’s legal status or a degree of danger. A state may quite deliberately want those in front of a court.

The one that is hardest to read

Section 194 is on the list, unqualified. In 2011 that was simply the overloading provision. After 2019 the number sits at the head of a family — 194, then 194A to 194F — which are separate sections, not sub-sections.

So “section 194” in a 2011 document means the overloading provision and nothing else. It does not carry 194D forward by implication, because 194D is a different section that did not exist.

That is the whole helmet problem in one paragraph, and it is why we keep saying the question to ask is which notification is being applied rather than what the amount is.

Two neighbours, two opposite answers

Meghalaya and Assam share a long border and most of a road network. Their compounding instruments could hardly be less alike.

Cross that border and the same conduct moves between a counter and a courtroom, and the same offence moves between half the maximum and all of it. Neither state is doing anything wrong. They were simply drafting eight years apart with different instincts about what a notification is for.

Why a government might choose a percentage

Having now read twenty-one of these, the trade-off is clear enough to set out.

So the honest verdict is split. A percentage is better engineering and worse transparency. It solves the problem that has wrecked most of the documents in this series — figures that stopped making sense — and creates a different one, which is that a citizen cannot be told what anything costs.

And the last row is the one nobody has solved. Neither approach keeps the scope current, because a list of section numbers is a list of section numbers however the amounts are expressed.

What the receipt has to do here

In a state with a table the receipt confirms the table was followed. In Meghalaya there is no table, so the receipt is doing more work: it is the only record of what was taken and under what provision.

Read it for the provision first. Section 200(2) bars further proceedings “in respect of such offence”, so the provision named on the receipt is the exact extent of what has been closed. If the receipt names no provision, you have paid and have no record of what you paid for — and nothing in section 200 requires a receipt to name one, which is why it is worth asking at the counter rather than afterwards.

Then the amount and the date. Those are what let you check the figure against the statutory maximum later, which is the one check that works in this state.

If you have been charged in Meghalaya

1. Get the section, in writing, on the challan or the receipt. In a state with no schedule the section is the only thing that fixes the band.
2. Ask which notification the amount is being taken under, and its date. If the answer is the 2011 notification, the next two steps apply.
3. Check the section is one of the nine in that notification. If it is 194D, 194B, 182A or anything else from 2019, it is not.
4. Work out the band: not less than half the statutory maximum for that section, and not more than the maximum itself.
5. If the amount is above the statutory maximum, say so in writing. That is a hard limit and it does not depend on any of the uncertainties on this page.
6. Keep the receipt and read the provision printed on it. The provision is what records which offence was closed.

Steps one to four cost nothing. Where a document earns its place is step five, or where you have been charged under a section that is not in the notification — and in both cases what is needed is a written reply setting out the section, the maximum and the band, rather than an argument at a counter. A reply is that document.

What we would actually tell most readers

That the amount is probably right, or close enough that arguing is not worth the morning.

Half of the statutory maximum is, by the standards of this series, a reasonable outcome. Assam charges the full maximum on every one of its eighty-eight rows. A Meghalaya floor at fifty per cent is better than its neighbour’s ceiling, and if you are asked for something in the lower half of the band you are being treated better than you would be across the border.

The reasons to put something in writing are narrow and specific: an amount above the statutory maximum, a section that is not in the notification, or a fleet where the same question repeats. Outside those, pay it and keep the receipt.

Three fifty per cents, and only one is a formula

This series has now met “fifty per cent” three times, in three completely different legal shapes. They are worth setting side by side, because anybody offered a half-price settlement anywhere in India should know which kind they are being offered.

The last row is the one people get wrong. In Odisha and Himachal fifty per cent is a discount — the lower figure you may pay. In Meghalaya it is a floor — the lowest figure that may be taken from you. Same number, opposite direction.

So “fifty per cent” in Meghalaya is not an offer being made to you. It is a limit on how little the officer may accept, and the ceiling above it is the statutory maximum.

No published enforcement figures

We looked for what Meghalaya actually collects and found nothing: no table of cases detected and disposed, no annual figure, no district breakdown.

That is the usual position. Assam is the only state in twenty-one that publishes it — a table of about 1,89,827 cases detected and ₹29.19 crore realised, which let us work out averages per case and find that two of its four categories came out at suspiciously round numbers.

Without data there is nothing to check a percentage against. We cannot tell you whether officers in practice sit at the floor, the ceiling or somewhere between, and that is the single most useful thing a reader would want to know. It is on the list of things worth asking for.

Five categories of officer, no mapping

The notification names five categories and never says which of them may compound which of the nine sections. Everyone on the list can apparently do everything.

Only Assam and Haryana solve this, and Assam solves it best by publishing four separate schedules so that, for instance, the police may not compound an overloading charge at all and the one lakh rupee dealer rows are reserved to senior officers.

Here the consequence is specific. Section 194(1) overloading, with its per-tonne arithmetic and its potential fifty-thousand-rupee exposure, sits in the same undifferentiated list as section 177 at a few hundred rupees — and a Head Constable appears on that list. We are not suggesting anybody is misapplying it. We are saying one of the few checks a citizen can run cannot be run here.

What is left in this series

Twenty-one states and union territories are done. Meghalaya is the first of the north-eastern states apart from Assam, and the remaining list is mostly small jurisdictions: Manipur, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Chandigarh, Puducherry, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Punjab.

We mention it because the pattern of this page is likely to repeat. Smaller jurisdictions tend to have fewer documents, older documents, and documents that are harder to obtain — and the useful finding is often not the figure but the shape of the instrument. Meghalaya has no schedule and turned out to be the most interesting page in the series on how these documents age.

What is worth asking Meghalaya for in writing

• Whether any notification under section 200 has been issued after 30 November 2011, and if so its number and date.
• Under which notification helmet, seat belt and the 194A to 194F offences are being compounded, given that they post-date the 2011 list.
• Whether the community service power in the proviso to section 200(1) has ever been exercised in the state.
• How the fifty per cent floor is applied in practice — whether there is an internal circular or rate card, and if so its number.
• The number and date of any instrument empowering compounding of 192 and 196, which are absent from the 2011 list.

Five questions, one application. An RTI application is the cheapest way to put them, and the first two would answer the biggest open question on this page for everybody in the state rather than only for you.

Where Meghalaya sits after twenty-one states

Meghalaya is the only state in the country, on this evidence, that solved the hardest problem in this field — keeping amounts current — and the only one that declined to publish a figure at all. One decision did both.

What this page will not help with

It will not give you a number for your challan, because no number exists to give. It will give you the band and the method, and that is the most this state’s own documents allow.

It will not help you argue that you did not do it. A compounding provision prices offences and says nothing about proof; our page on disputing a challan covers identity, device readings and service.

And it will not help with section 185. Drink driving is not in section 200(1) in any rendering we read, so there is nothing to compound anywhere in India; our page on drink driving cases sets out what follows.

Added later: the three renderings above have all been superseded

This section was added after this page was published, and it corrects the page rather than defending it.

Everything above about Meghalaya’s own notification stands. What does not stand is the discussion of section 200(1). We reported three published renderings, noted that they disagreed at the edges, and declined to choose between them. We did not know why they disagreed.

Sub-section (1) of section 200 was replaced in its entirety with effect from 13 January 2025, by serial number 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, commenced by notification S.O. 227(E). All three of the renderings we read predate that substitution.

The substituted sub-section adds section 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B and section 201 to the compoundable list, keeps sections 181 and 190(2), and brings in dangerous driving as “clause (c) of the Explanation to section 184” — which is the authentic form of the handheld-device limitation we could only report second-hand here. It also appears, on its face, to have removed the community service proviso discussed above, though there are two readings of that and we have not chosen one.

We have written the correction out in full, with the substituted sub-section printed word for word, on our Nagaland page — Nagaland being the one state government we have found that told the public about the change. We have left this page’s own text as it was, because what it said was an accurate record of what we had read at the time.

Added later: a state has printed the figures we had to calculate

Because Meghalaya publishes a percentage rather than a schedule, every amount on this page is our own arithmetic from the statutory maxima, and we said so each time.

The Mizoram Transport Department publishes those maxima on its own website, which lets the inputs be checked against a government source rather than against our reading of a bare Act.

Its page prints section 177 at ₹500 and ₹1,500 for a subsequent offence — the figures behind the ₹250 and ₹750 floors above. It prints section 183 at ₹1,000–2,000 for light vehicles and ₹2,000–4,000 for medium and heavy, which is the band behind our point that half the maximum here lands exactly on the statutory minimum. And it prints section 194 at ₹20,000 plus ₹2,000 per excess tonne, which is what makes the Meghalaya half ₹10,000 plus ₹1,000 a tonne — to the rupee, Madhya Pradesh’s 2023 fixed figure.

That does not make our conclusions right. It does mean the numbers we fed into them were.

What we could not establish

• The authenticated text of section 200(1), and therefore which of three published renderings is current. This is the biggest gap and it affects more than this page.
• Whether the handheld-device limitation on section 184 is in the current provision.
• Whether the community service proviso is in the current provision.
• Whether section 191 was dropped from the list in 2019.
• Any Meghalaya notification under section 200 later than 30 November 2011.
• The text of the superseded 2007 notification, so we cannot show what changed.
• Whether any internal circular gives officers a rate card inside the fifty per cent band.
• Any Meghalaya figures for challans issued or amounts collected.
• Any Meghalaya High Court decision on compounding under this notification.
• The date of publication in the Meghalaya Gazette. The notification directs publication but does not record it.

How this page was put together

The notification — its number, date, enabling words, officer list, section list, the fifty per cent floor, the supersession and the signatory — comes from the scanned copy published on a Government of Meghalaya police website. We read it three times: once to identify it, once for the body, once to pull the operative sentences character by character. The reconstruction we did on the damaged words is set out above in full.

Section 200 itself comes from three separate published texts, which disagree, and we have printed all three positions rather than choosing. Section 177’s post-2019 figures come from two independent sources, one of them Assam’s own 2019 notification. The comparison figures for other states come from our own pages on those states, each of which declares its sources.

The corroboration for the handheld-device limitation is our own observation about a row in the Assam schedule, and we have labelled it as circumstantial because that is what it is.

Everything here was written for this page. Nothing is taken from a commercial challan site, and where we could not establish something we have said so.

When this needs an advocate rather than a document

Working out a band from a statutory maximum does not. Nor does asking which notification is being applied.

An advocate is the right answer where a section that is not compoundable is involved, because then there is a prosecution rather than a settlement — and in Meghalaya that list is longer than in most states, taking in uninsured driving, unregistered vehicles, dangerous driving and racing on the face of the 2011 notification. Also where a goods vehicle or a permit is exposed, and wherever an accident is involved.

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 charge

Nothing is charged for a question, and nothing for putting you in front of an advocate. Each document we draft shows what it costs on its own page, before you decide anything. An advocate’s fee is a matter between you and that advocate; we take none of it.

This page has an unusually high proportion of readers for whom the right answer is to do nothing. If the amount you were quoted falls inside the band, pay it, take the paper, and keep it. We would rather lose the work than draft a letter that cannot change the outcome.

Questions people ask