A traffic challan in Nagaland: the one state that told the public section 200 itself had changed.

The page that had no table, and turned out to matter most

Every state page in this series has been built the same way. Find the state’s notification under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act, read its schedule of amounts, measure those amounts against what the Act itself says, and tell you what we found.

For Nagaland we could not do that. The schedule is not published anywhere we could reach. We looked in the places that have worked twenty-one times before, and then in the places that have worked once or twice, and then in the places that have never worked. It is not there.

So we went looking for whatever Nagaland had published about compounding, expecting a thin page and an honest admission. What we found instead was the single most consequential thing we have read in this entire series, and it is not about Nagaland at all. It is about section 200.

What Nagaland did that nobody else did

In December 2025 the Nagaland Transport Department put out a notice, carried by the state information and public relations service and picked up by the Nagaland press, with a plain message: offences under section 177A, which had not been among the compoundable offences under section 200, now were.

It named its authorities precisely. The central notification: S.O. 227(E), dated 13 January 2025, issued by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, bringing into force the amendment at serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023. The state notification under which its own officers are empowered: No. TPT/MV/09/2019, dated 12 November 2020.

That is a department doing the thing that almost never happens: noticing that a central amendment had changed what its own officers could do, and telling the public in terms precise enough to be checked.

We want to be careful about what we are praising here. Nagaland did not do anything clever. It did something ordinary, competently, and published it. The reason it stands out is that twenty-one other governments appear not to have bothered.

The Jan Vishwas Act, and what it is for

The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 is Act 18 of 2023. Its long title describes it as an Act to amend certain enactments for “decriminalising and rationalising offences to further enhance trust-based governance for ease of living and doing business”.

Its working parts are very short. Section 1 gives the short title and provides that it comes into force on such dates as the Central Government may appoint by notification — which is why the amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act waited until January 2025. Section 2 says simply that the enactments mentioned in column (4) of the Schedule are amended to the extent and in the manner mentioned in column (5).

Everything is in the Schedule. It covers twenty-eight Acts. The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 is the twenty-sixth of them.

That structure is worth a sentence, because it explains why this change was so easy to miss. The amendment to the Motor Vehicles Act is not in an Act called the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act. It is three rows in a table at the back of an Act about ease of doing business, commenced by a gazette notification two years after the Act was passed.

Serial number 26 of the Schedule

Serial 26 contains three amendment rows for the Motor Vehicles Act.

Row (B) is the one that changes what happens at a roadside in every state in India.

The substituted sub-section, word for word

We have read three published renderings of section 200(1) before this page, on our Meghalaya page, and declined to choose between them because they disagreed. This time we read it from a Government of India copy of the amending Act itself. Here it is, as the Act directs it to be substituted.

Read it slowly if you have read any of our other state pages, because almost every sentence we have written about what a state may and may not compound was written against the previous version of that list.

Reading the new list against the old

Three provisions are in the new list that were not in the old one.

• Section 177A — contravention of the regulations made under section 118.
• Sub-section (3) of section 192B — obtaining registration by false documents, or with mismatched engine or chassis numbers.
• Section 201 — keeping a vehicle so as to impede the free flow of traffic.

Each of those is interesting for a different reason, and we will take them one at a time.

What arrived: section 177A

Section 177A was inserted by section 59 of the amending Act of 2019, with effect from 1 September 2019. It is one sentence.

Note the shape of it: a floor of five hundred rupees and a ceiling of a thousand. It has both, so for once a citizen can check the amount from two directions.

Note also what it does not tell you: what the regulations are. We will come to that, and it is the part of this page we would most want someone in a transport department to read.

What arrived: section 192B, and only sub-section (3)

Section 192B is headed “Offences relating to registration” and was inserted by section 76 of the 2019 Act, also with effect from 1 September 2019. It has four sub-sections: an owner who fails to register, a dealer who fails to register, an owner who obtains registration by false documents or with a mismatched engine or chassis number, and a dealer who does the same.

The substituted section 200(1) brings in sub-section (3) only. Sub-sections (1), (2) and (4) remain outside section 200 and must be prosecuted.

And now the oddity. Sub-section (3) of section 192B carries imprisonment of not less than six months which may extend to a year, plus a fine. But the fine is not a figure. It is ten times the annual road tax, or two-thirds of the lifetime tax, whichever is higher.

That means the statutory maximum for a compoundable offence now depends on the particular vehicle in front of the officer. A state can publish a schedule saying “five hundred rupees” for a helmet. It cannot publish a figure for 192B(3), because there is no figure. There is a calculation, and the inputs are the vehicle’s own tax.

Readers of our Meghalaya page will see the mirror image. There, a state government declined to write figures and wrote a formula instead — amounts “not lesser than fifty percent of the maximum fine prescribed” — and the formula kept working when fixed schedules of the same year went stale. Here Parliament has done the formula side itself, and left any state that wants to price the offence with nothing to write down.

What arrived: section 201

Section 201 penalises keeping a vehicle on a public place in such a manner as to cause an impediment to the free flow of traffic, for as long as it remains in that position. Vehicles disabled by an accident are excepted while they are being inspected.

It is a small provision with a large history in this series, because it is the clearest example we have found of what the 2019 amendment did to old figures. Before 2019 it carried fifty rupees per hour. It now carries five hundred rupees.

A per-hour charge of fifty rupees is an instrument from a different era of money. We have been complaining for several pages about state notifications left behind by the 2019 revaluation, and it is worth recording that the Act had figures of the same vintage in it until 2019, and that it took an amendment to move them.

Section 201 is also the provision that the people most likely to need this page will actually meet: a vehicle parked where it blocks traffic, towed, and a charge to settle. Until 13 January 2025 that could not be compounded. It could only be prosecuted, or dealt with as a towing charge, which is a different thing in a different sub-section.

What stayed, and a commentary that got it wrong

It matters just as much what the substitution kept. A rendering we read omitted section 181 (driving without a licence) and sub-section (2) of section 190 (using a vehicle in an unsafe condition in certain respects) from the new list. If that were right, two of the most commonly charged provisions in India would have quietly stopped being compoundable in January 2025.

They did not. The authentic text prints “section 181” and “sub-section (2) of section 190” exactly where they were. We can say that only because we stopped reading commentaries and read a Government of India copy of the amending Act.

“Clause (c) of the Explanation to section 184”

Section 184 is dangerous driving. Its penalty runs to imprisonment of up to a year for a first offence and up to two years for a second within three years. It is a serious provision.

The substituted section 200(1) does not make section 184 compoundable. It makes clause (c) of the Explanation to section 184 compoundable — one limb of the list of conduct that the section says amounts to driving dangerously.

In the Explanation as published, the limbs run: jumping a red light; violating a stop sign; using a handheld communications device while driving; passing or overtaking contrary to law; driving against the authorised flow of traffic; and driving in a manner far below what would be expected of a competent and careful driver. The third of those is using a handheld communications device.

If that reading is right, the practical consequence is sharp. Jumping a red light cannot be compounded under section 184. Overtaking dangerously cannot be compounded under section 184. Using your phone can. Everything else in the Explanation has to be prosecuted, or charged under some other section.

Which explains a row in Assam we could not explain

On our Assam page we transcribed a schedule of eighty-eight rows issued twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment came into force. One of its rows reads “184(c) Using Mobile phone while driving”. Nothing else from section 184 appears anywhere in any of its four tables.

We noted at the time that we could not explain why a state would price a single limb of a section and leave the rest of it out, when the rest of it is more dangerous. On our Meghalaya page we found a rendering of section 200(1) that limited section 184 to handheld communication devices and said that this might be the answer, while making clear we could not confirm the rendering.

It is the answer. Assam did not price section 184 by limb as a policy choice. It priced section 184 by limb because that is what the Act allows, and it noticed, because it was drafting immediately after the amendment with the amendment open in front of it.

We want to flag the general lesson, because it has bitten us repeatedly in this series. When a state document does something that looks eccentric, the first hypothesis should be that the state is copying the Act correctly and we have not read the Act.

The proviso question we cannot answer

Before 13 January 2025, sub-section (1) of section 200 had a proviso attached to it. In substance: the State Government may, in addition to the compounding amount, require the offender to undertake a period of community service.

We wrote about that proviso on our Meghalaya page and called it a power Parliament handed every state in 2019 that not one of the twenty-one instruments we had read showed any sign of using.

The Jan Vishwas Act substituted the whole of sub-section (1). The substituted text, printed above in full as the Act directs it, contains no proviso.

So on its face, the community service power was deleted on 13 January 2025 — before any state had ever used it.

We are not going to tell you that is what happened, because there is something in the way.

Two readings, printed, neither chosen

Which of those is right is settled by the authenticated consolidated text and its footnotes, and that is exactly the document we could not obtain. We have said so rather than picking the reading that makes a better paragraph.

It matters a little less than it looks, for a plain reason. No state has used the power under either reading. If it was deleted, nothing changed in practice. If it survived, nothing has happened under it in seven years. The reason we are spending words on it is that a page which reported a power as live ought to report that the power may have been removed.

Section 200(2), in full, which nobody quotes

On our Meghalaya page we quoted sub-section (2) for the first time in twenty-one pages, and we quoted the part everybody quotes: on compounding, an offender in custody is discharged and no further proceedings are taken in respect of that offence.

Sub-section (2) says considerably more than that, and the rest of it is the part that affects what you should do with your receipt.

Compounding counts against you next time

Limb two is the one worth reading twice.

Almost every schedule in this series has two money columns: one for a first offence and one for a subsequent offence. On our Chhattisgarh page we counted nineteen of forty entries escalating; on Madhya Pradesh, six of thirty-one. We have spent several pages noting that no state document explains how a state knows that a driver is a repeat offender.

This is the provision that makes the first column count towards the second. You pay at a counter, you are discharged, no case is filed — and the Act nevertheless deems that offence to have been committed previously, for the purpose of deciding whether the next one is a subsequent offence.

So the subsequent-offence column in every schedule we have read is not about convictions. It is about anything you have previously paid for. Which is reasonable enough as policy, and is something that nothing you are handed at a roadside tells you.

What section 200 does not say is for how long. Some sections have their own window: section 184 counts a second offence only if it is committed within three years of a previous similar one. Where the section is silent, nothing we have read supplies a period.

Refresher training and section 206(4)

Limbs three and four say what compounding does not buy you.

Sub-section (4) of section 206 is the power to seize and retain a driving licence where the offence is one for which a licence may be disqualified or revoked. Section 200(2) makes plain that settling the money does not displace it. You can pay and still not have your licence back, and that is not an officer overreaching; it is the Act.

That closes a question we raised on our Chhattisgarh page, where we noted the three-month disqualification under sections 194C and 194D that no schedule in seventeen states mentioned, and on our Assam page, where two rows in the subsequent-offence column read “Impounding of Driving License as per Section 206(4)” instead of an amount. Assam was not improvising. It was writing down what section 200(2) already says.

Mandatory refresher driver training is a requirement the 2019 amendment attached to certain offences. We have found no Nagaland document explaining how it is arranged in the state, and no state document anywhere in this series that does. It is a statutory obligation that survives compounding and that we cannot tell you how to discharge.

Section 192A: “or with both”, and a proviso omitted

Row (A) of serial 26 made two changes to sub-section (1) of section 192A, which penalises using a vehicle without a permit.

First, in the second-or-subsequent-offence limb, the words “and a fine of ten thousand rupees” were replaced by “a fine of ten thousand rupees, or with both”. That converts a mandatory combination of imprisonment and fine into imprisonment, or the fine, or both. It is a real softening of a serious provision, which is consistent with what the Jan Vishwas Act was for.

Second, the proviso to sub-section (1) was omitted.

Section 192A is compoundable, and was compoundable before 2025. So this change moves the ceiling for a compounded second offence under it. Any state schedule that set an amount for 192A against the old wording was priced against a different provision.

Section 215(3): the Centre may step in

Row (C) is the one that has nothing to do with challans and that we are going to mention anyway, because it is the first of its kind we have met.

Section 215 concerns road safety councils and committees. Row (C) adds a proviso to sub-section (3) allowing the Central Government to constitute a District Road Safety Committee where the State Government has not done so.

In twenty-one state pages we have found plenty of state inaction and no mechanism for anyone to do anything about it. This is a mechanism. It is narrow — a committee, not a schedule — but it is a provision that treats a state’s failure to act as something the Centre may cure rather than something the public must live with.

What section 177A actually punishes

Back to section 177A, because it is the addition that will show up on challans, and because chasing it produced the strangest thing on this page.

Section 177A punishes contravention of “the regulations made under section 118”. It does not name them. It does not describe them. It is a penalty section pointing at a body of rules it leaves you to find.

So we went and found them. And this is a rule we have adopted the hard way over several pages: when a provision points at another provision, go and read the one it points at. It closed four questions when we did it with section 200, and it closed one we did not know we had when we did it with section 118.

Section 118, and the regulations made under it

Section 118 of the Motor Vehicles Act is the power of the Central Government to make regulations for the driving of motor vehicles. It is a central power, not a state one — which means the regulations that section 177A punishes breach of are the same in Nagaland as in Kerala.

There have been two sets.

Section 177A was inserted with effect from 1 September 2019. On that date, the regulations in force under section 118 were the 2017 Regulations. The 1989 Regulations had been superseded for more than two years.

The Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989

Worth a moment, because they are the document most people in India think of as the rules of the road, and because the state copy we read is still being published as current.

Thirty-one regulations, and you can hear 1989 in the headings: Keep Left; Turning to left and right; Passing to right; Passing to the left; Overtaking prohibited in certain cases; Caution at road junction; Fire service vehicles and ambulance to be given free passage; Taking ‘U’ turn; Direction indicator; One way traffic; Driving on channelised roads (lane traffic); Stop sign on road surface; Towing; Use of horns and Silence Zones; Distance from vehicles in front; Abrupt brake; Vehicles to the uphill to be given precedence; Speed to be restricted; Projections of loads; Restriction to carriage of dangerous substances; Restrictions on driving backwards.

Regulation 27, “Speed to be restricted”, requires a driver passing or meeting a procession to drive at a speed not exceeding twenty-five kilometres an hour. Regulation 21 forbids sounding the horn needlessly or continuously or more than necessary to ensure safety. They are sensible, concrete rules.

What they do not contain is any penalty, any amount, or any mention of compounding. We looked, and there is nothing. The regulations say what to do. The consequence is elsewhere.

The Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017

The 2017 Regulations are a different document in character, not just in length.

Forty regulations. Several of them are things the 1989 set had no concept of: Lane splitting (lane within a lane); Use of mobile telephones and communication devices; Action in case of vehicular accident; Pedestrian crossings, footpaths and cycle tracks; Vehicle breakdown; Entering a tunnel; Registration plates; Production of documents; Duty towards other road users and the general public; and a final regulation on knowledge and understanding of road signs, markings, traffic control signals, the Act and the Rules.

The shift is from a list of manoeuvres to a code of conduct. Regulation 3 is a duty owed to other road users and the public. Regulation 39 is about pedestrians, footpaths and cycle tracks — road users the 1989 set barely acknowledges.

These are the regulations that section 177A punishes breach of, and that an officer may, since 13 January 2025, compound for between five hundred and a thousand rupees.

Thirty-one regulations became forty

It is tempting to treat that as a detail. It is not, for the reader of this page, because section 177A does not have a schedule of conduct behind it that anybody publishes. If you are charged under 177A, the only way to know what you are said to have done is to read the forty regulations and find the one that fits.

And if the version in front of you has thirty-one regulations, there are nine kinds of conduct you will not find, including the one about mobile telephones — which is awkward, because that is also the conduct that clause (c) of the Explanation to section 184 picks out.

The supersession clause, verbatim

That is about as clear as a supersession clause gets. It names the instrument it replaces. It preserves the past. It is dated and numbered.

What a government publishes is not what is in force

And yet.

The copy of the Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989 that we read, and from which the headings above are taken, is published on the website of a state transport department — the Telangana Transport Department — as a current document. There is no note on it saying it was superseded in 2017. It sits in the department’s own document library alongside material that is current.

We are not picking on Telangana. We used its copy precisely because it was the cleanest and most accessible government copy we could find, which rather proves the point. Puducherry’s transport department publishes the same 1989 document.

Kerala Police got it right in 2018

We looked for a counterexample, both out of fairness and because we did not want to publish a page whose main finding was that everybody is wrong.

We found one. Kerala Police issued Circular 151/2018, dated 28 May 2018, signed by the Inspector General of Police and Police Chief, with the subject “Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulation 2017 – Strict implementation”.

That is a state police force, within a year of the regulations being made and more than a year before section 177A existed, circulating the 2017 Regulations for enforcement and naming them correctly.

Five years and four months with nowhere to pay

Now the dates, side by side, because the gap between them is the part of this page with the most practical consequence.

• 23 June 2017Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017 made by G.S.R. 634(E), in supersession of the 1989 Regulations.
• 1 September 2019Section 177A inserted, penalising breach of the regulations under section 118, with a fine of not less than five hundred and up to a thousand rupees. Not compoundable.
• 23 September 2019Assam issues its compounding schedule, twenty-five days later. Eighty-eight rows. No section 177A, because it could not be compounded.
• 12 November 2020Nagaland notifies the 2019 amendment in the state by No. TPT/MV/09/2019.
• October 2021Dimapur traffic police begin enforcing the amended Act.
• 25 October 2021Chhattisgarh issues its schedule. Forty priced entries. No section 177A.
• 2023Madhya Pradesh issues the newest schedule in the country. Thirty-one entries. No section 177A.
• 13 January 2025S.O. 227(E) brings serial 26 of the Jan Vishwas Schedule into force. Section 177A becomes compoundable, along with 192B(3) and 201.
• December 2025Nagaland’s Transport Department tells the public.

For five years and four months, from 1 September 2019 to 13 January 2025, section 177A was an offence carrying between five hundred and a thousand rupees that no officer anywhere in India could settle. Every breach of the central driving regulations had to go to a magistrate, or be charged under something else.

Why no schedule in twenty-one states lists 177A

We had noticed the absence and had no explanation for it. Twenty-one schedules, from eight states with pre-2019 instruments and from the three newest schedules in the country, and not one of them prices section 177A. We had vaguely assumed it was an oversight repeated by everybody, which is never a good assumption.

It was not an oversight. It was correct drafting. A state cannot set an amount for an offence that Parliament has not made compoundable, and until January 2025 Parliament had not.

This is the second time in two pages that reading a parent provision has converted something we had recorded as state carelessness into state compliance. On Meghalaya it was our inference that Chhattisgarh had chosen a non-compoundable list, when it was reciting the central one. Here it is twenty-one states declining to price a section they were not allowed to price.

The regulations do not contain a penalty

One more thing about the regulations, because it affects what you can usefully check.

Neither the 1989 set nor the 2017 set contains a penalty, a fine, an amount, or a word about compounding. We checked both. The regulations describe conduct and nothing else.

The practical consequence: if you are charged under section 177A, there is no document you can look up that says what a breach of regulation 23 or regulation 37 costs. You have the regulation, which tells you the conduct, and section 177A, which gives the band of five hundred to a thousand rupees, and that is the whole of the published material. A state notification may narrow it further, and in Nagaland we cannot tell you whether one does.

A correction to our own Meghalaya page

We have a rule about this, adopted on our Goa page after we found a mistake of our own on the Uttarakhand page: write the correction openly on the new page, do not quietly alter the old one, and add a pointer.

Here is the correction.

We would rather publish that paragraph than have a reader find the discrepancy themselves. It is also a reasonable argument for reading amending Acts rather than commentaries, which is the lesson we are taking from it.

Twenty-one schedules, now under-inclusive

Put the amendment next to the dates of the instruments in this series, and the position is simple.

Every state compounding notification we have read — the oldest from 2003 and the newest from 2023 — was written before 13 January 2025. None of them can contain an amount for section 177A, for sub-section (3) of section 192B, or for section 201, because when they were written those provisions were not compoundable.

That leaves a gap with a straightforward shape. Parliament has said an officer may compound those three offences for such amount as the State Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, specify. Until a state specifies an amount, there is nothing specified.

We will say plainly that this is the kind of point on which we expect to be overtaken by events. The sensible assumption is that states will issue fresh notifications, and some may have done so already without our finding them. A page written in October 2026 about an amendment of January 2025 is describing a gap that ought to be closing.

Nagaland’s own instrument

Back to the state, with what we can establish about it.

That is a shorter table than any other state page in this series carries, and we are not going to pad it out with figures from a commercial challan website. We have declined to do that twenty-one times and we are not going to start here.

Fourteen months, against Assam’s twenty-five days

The 2019 amendment came into force centrally on 1 September 2019. Nagaland notified it in the state on 12 November 2020 — fourteen months later.

On our Assam page we recorded the fastest adoption in this series: a full schedule of eighty-eight rows, issued on 23 September 2019, twenty-five days after the amendment came into force. We said at the time that we had seen nothing else close to it.

The fastest and the slowest adopters in this series share a border.

We do not draw a conclusion from that, because we do not know why. A small state with a small transport establishment has fewer people to put on a drafting job, and fourteen months to work through a central amendment of that size is not scandalous. What it does mean is that for fourteen months, drivers in the two states were being dealt with under materially different law.

Enforcement phased by district

The second unusual thing about Nagaland is that the notification and the enforcement are separated by another year.

Dimapur traffic police began enforcing the amended Act from October 2021 — eleven months after the state notification, and about two years after the central commencement. The reported focus at the time was the rules about tinted glass and films on windscreens and side glasses, under rules 92 and 100.

Phasing enforcement district by district is a legitimate administrative choice and it is the only example of it we have met in twenty-two pages. It is also, from a citizen’s point of view, the least predictable arrangement in this series: in a state with a schedule you can be wrong about the amount, but in a state phasing enforcement you can be unsure whether the provision is being enforced where you are at all.

What we could not find, and where we looked

We think a page that cannot produce the central document owes the reader an account of the search, so that the reader can judge whether the document is hidden or whether we were careless.

• The Nagaland Transport Department’s own website, which failed on a certificate mismatch on every attempt.
• The Motor Vehicles Department’s notifications listing, which carries tenders, smart card printer procurement, vehicle location tracking procedures, emergency alert procedures, an internal committee notice and recruitment results, and nothing about compounding amounts.
• The Motor Vehicles Department’s acts and rules page, which did not resolve.
• The state information and public relations archive, which produced the December 2025 notice and several other transport releases, none carrying a schedule.
• The state government press and gazette route. Nagaland’s gazette material is not organised in a way that lets a document be found by subject.
• Nagaland press coverage, which reported the notification’s number and date and the enforcement dates, and no amounts.

Our conclusion is that the notification exists, is referred to by the department by number and date in its own public notices, and is not published in a form the public can read. That is a straightforward thing to fix and a straightforward thing to ask for.

Two governments counting the same roads

Nagaland publishes road accident figures, and so does the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and they do not match. We are going to show you both.

Fiscal versus calendar year explains some of the gap. It does not explain its direction. For the 2022 period the state counts more accidents than the Ministry — 614 against 489. For the 2023 period the Ministry counts more deaths than the state — 86 against 76. Two governments counting the same roads, disagreeing in opposite directions in consecutive years.

We are printing both and choosing neither, which is what we did with press reports on our Himachal Pradesh page and with divergent renderings of section 177 on our Chhattisgarh page. If you need one of these figures for something that matters, get it from the publisher, with the year basis stated.

Few crashes, bad crashes

On the Ministry’s 2025 figures Nagaland recorded eighty-eight accidents and twenty-nine deaths, the second-lowest fatality count in the country after the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Among the north-eastern states Nagaland had the lowest fatalities and Mizoram the fewest accidents.

The state’s own statistics tell a less comfortable version of the same story. The severity index — deaths per hundred accidents — was 6.8 in 2021–22, rose to 22.54 in 2022–23, and reached 26.67 in 2023–24, against a six-year average of 11.02.

So: very few crashes, and the ones that happen are much more likely to kill than they used to be. Terrain accounts for some of that — a hill road gives a crash fewer survivable outcomes than a city street — and the small absolute numbers make the ratio jumpy. We note it because a headline ranking of second-lowest fatalities and a severity index of 26.67 are both true and point in different directions.

Reading your own challan after January 2025

The practical shape of this page, for someone holding a piece of paper.

1. Find the section number. Everything turns on it, and in a state with no published schedule it is the only thing that fixes anything.
2. Check it is in the substituted list at all. If it is not — 185, 187, 188, 190(1), 193, 197, 199A, or section 184 other than clause (c) of its Explanation — it cannot be compounded by anyone and there is nothing to settle.
3. If it is one of 177A, 192B(3) or 201, note the date. Those three became compoundable on 13 January 2025 and no schedule we have read predating that can price them.
4. Check the amount against the statutory maximum for the section. For 177A that is a thousand rupees; for 201 it is five hundred.
5. Ask, if it is worth asking, which notification the amount comes from and what its date is.
6. Keep the receipt, and read the section printed on it, because section 200(2) deems the offence a previous commission for the next time.

If the section on your challan is one of the three new ones

Each behaves differently, so it is worth separating them.

Section 177A. The band is five hundred to a thousand rupees. Ask which regulation you are said to have contravened, and ask for the regulations by name. If the answer names the Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989, that instrument was superseded in 2017. We are not saying that makes a charge bad; we are saying it is worth having the answer in writing.

Sub-section (3) of section 192B. This is a serious provision carrying imprisonment of not less than six months, and its fine is a multiple of your vehicle’s tax rather than a figure. If this is on your paper, this is the point in this series where we would say, without hedging, get an advocate. It is not a counter matter.

Section 201. Five hundred rupees. Check whether what is being charged is the section 201 penalty or a towing charge, because they are different and both may appear. The towing charge is recoverable from the owner or person in charge under the same section, and it is not a compounding amount.

What is worth asking Nagaland for in writing

Four things, all short, all answerable, none argumentative.

• A certified copy of notification No. TPT/MV/09/2019 dated 12 November 2020, with its schedule and its list of empowered officers.
• Whether any notification has been issued since 13 January 2025 specifying amounts for section 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B or section 201, and if so its number and date.
• Which regulations made under section 118 are being applied for the purposes of section 177A.
• Whether the amended Act is being enforced in the district concerned, and from what date, given that enforcement was phased.

An application of that kind is the cheapest thing on our list, and in this state it is the thing that actually moves the position. That is the service.

What we would actually tell most readers

Most people who land on this page have an ordinary challan for an ordinary thing, and nothing on this page changes what they should do.

Read the section. Check it against the list. Check the amount is not above the statutory maximum. Pay it. Keep the receipt. That is it, and it needs nothing from us.

Arguing almost never reduces an amount. The arguments that are worth making are narrow ones: the section is not compoundable; the amount exceeds the statutory maximum; the notification being applied predates the section being charged. Everything outside that is a conversation at the side of a road, and conversations at the side of a road do not change schedules.

We would rather say that than sell a reply that cannot work.

What this page will not help with

It is not a rate table for Nagaland, because there is no published one to report.

It will not tell you which officer in Nagaland may compound which offence, for the same reason.

It will not help with an accident claim, with compensation, with insurance, or with anything involving injury. Those are different proceedings under different chapters of the Act and they need an advocate from the start.

It will not tell you whether a particular challan is good or bad. That depends on facts we do not have and on a court we are not in.

Added later: a state has now named section 177A

When this page was written we said that section 177A appeared in none of the twenty-two state documents we had read, and explained why: it was not compoundable until 13 January 2025.

It now appears in one. The Mizoram Transport Department’s penalties page, created on 7 February 2025 — three weeks after S.O. 227(E) — lists “177(A) Driving Regulations” at five hundred to a thousand rupees, and also lists section 201 at five hundred. Both of the provisions added in January 2025 that an ordinary driver could meet, priced correctly, within a month.

Section 192B is not on it. That is consistent with what this page says about sub-section (3) of section 192B having no printable figure, its fine being a multiple of the vehicle’s own road tax — a three-column table has nothing to put in the cell. We put that forward on the Mizoram page as a guess from a silence rather than a finding.

One qualification matters. Mizoram’s page is a statement of the Act’s penalties, not a compounding schedule — it also lists sections 185, 187, 188, 197 and 199A, none of which anyone may compound. And Mizoram’s actual compounding notification is from 1 August 2018, so it contains neither 177A nor 201. The state named the new provisions on one page and cannot compound them under the other. That is the subject of the Mizoram page.

Added later: a third government publishing the superseded regulations

This page reported that the Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989 were superseded in 2017 and that the Telangana Transport Department still publishes the 1989 text as a current document, and we said we had used its copy because it was the cleanest government copy available — which rather proved the point.

Puducherry is the second transport department doing it, and it goes a step further. We asked its published copy directly whether it mentions being superseded, or the year 2017, and it does not, anywhere. More seriously, the Puducherry Police enforcement page relies on the 1989 Regulation by name, describing it as brought into effect in July 1989. That is not a stale file in a document library; it is a live enforcement page citing the wrong instrument.

Which matters for the reason this page gives: since 13 January 2025 breaching those regulations is compoundable under section 177A, so an officer may now take money at the roadside for contravening a document that two transport departments and one police force are publishing in a version replaced in 2017.

Puducherry does not appear to price section 177A anywhere. Mizoram remains the only jurisdiction in this series that names it.

Added later: still the only government that said anything

This page recorded that Nagaland’s Transport Department was the only state government we had found that told the public section 200 had been substituted, and said we expected other states to follow.

Four jurisdictions later, nobody has. Mizoram, Puducherry, Chandigarh and Tripura have published nothing about it, and no jurisdiction in twenty-seven has specified an amount for section 177A, 192B(3) or 201.

Tripura sharpens the point in an unexpected way. It amended its Motor Vehicles Rules by notification No. F.14(1)-TRANS/2023 on 8 January 2025 — five days before S.O. 227(E) brought the substitution into force — and the amendment was about regulating registration by area and zone. A state had its motor vehicles rulebook open in that exact week and the change passed it by, as it appears to have passed everybody by except the department described on this page.

What we could not establish

• Nagaland’s schedule of amounts. Not published in any form we could reach.
• Nagaland’s list of empowered officers. Same.
• The fate of the community service proviso. Two readings, printed above, neither chosen. Settled only by the authenticated consolidated text.
• The authenticated consolidated text of section 200. India Code timed out on three attempts across two pages. The substituted sub-section above is from a Government of India copy of the amending Act, which is a primary source for the direction to amend but not the consolidated section with footnotes.
• Which clause of the Explanation to section 184 is clause (c). That the Act names clause (c) is certain. That clause (c) is the handheld-device limb is our reading of a secondary rendering’s printed order, corroborated circumstantially by Assam’s row.
• Whether any state has issued a fresh notification since January 2025. We found none. We would not assume from that that none exists.
• How mandatory refresher driver training is arranged in Nagaland or anywhere else in this series.
• Whether the 2019 amendment’s section 191 omission was deliberate. Raised on our Assam page, still open.

How this page was put together

The substituted sub-section (1) of section 200 and the three rows of serial 26 are from a Government of India copy of the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023. Section 177A and section 192B are from two independent published texts of the Motor Vehicles Act which agree word for word, with the insertion footnotes. Section 200(2), section 201 and the Explanation to section 184 are from a published text of Chapter XIII. The Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989 are from a state transport department’s own copy, read in three passes — what the document is, then its structure and the exact headings, then the operative wording of selected regulations — which is the method we use on every table and schedule in this series. The Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017, including the supersession sentence quoted in full, are from a published text, read the same way. Kerala Police Circular 151/2018 is from the Kerala Police website. The commencement notification S.O. 227(E) and the Nagaland notification TPT/MV/09/2019 are named by number and date in Nagaland’s own public notice of December 2025, carried by the state information service and by the Nagaland press; we have not been able to read either instrument itself, and we say so. The accident figures are from the Nagaland Disaster Statistics 2024 and from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, attributed separately because they disagree.

Where two sources differed we have printed both and chosen neither. Where we corrected a scanning error in a government document we have said which. Where a document we needed could not be reached we have said what we tried. We have not named any private individual.

When this needs an advocate rather than a document

If a case has been filed in a court, you want an advocate, not a letter.

If the section charged is sub-section (3) of section 192B, you want an advocate from the start. It carries a minimum of six months’ imprisonment and its fine is a function of your vehicle’s tax. Nothing about it belongs at a counter.

If a licence has been seized or is at risk of disqualification, you want an advocate, because section 200(2) makes clear that paying does not close off section 206(4).

If anybody was hurt, you want an advocate, immediately, and this page is the wrong page.

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 for a question, and nothing for putting you in front of an advocate. Each document shows what it costs on its own page before you decide anything.

In this state the right first document is almost always an application for a certified copy of the notification, because until somebody has that document nobody is arguing about anything real. If a written reply is needed after that, a reply is what does the work, and a plain application covers the simpler requests.

An advocate’s fee is a matter between you and that advocate; we take none of it.

As with every page in this series, a large share of our readers should do nothing and pay. We would rather lose the work than draft something that cannot change the outcome.

Questions people ask