A traffic challan in Odisha: the state cut what it could cut, and stopped exactly where the Act stopped it.

The finding, in one paragraph

Eleven state pages have been circling one question: how far can a state go in cutting what you owe on a traffic challan? Every page has had a piece of the answer and none has had a demonstration. Odisha supplies the demonstration. Its settlement annexure is not a policy statement about reductions; it is seventeen individual decisions, and when you line them up against the wording of the Act, every single one falls exactly where the Act allows it to fall and not a rupee further.

The scheme itself

The document is headed Government of Odisha, Commerce and Transport Department, Notification, numbered TRN-POL-RT-0002-2024, issued at Bhubaneswar and signed by Usha Padhee, Principal Secretary to Government.

It opens, as printed, with a line that carries a typographical slip we have not corrected:

Four things define the scheme’s reach, and all four come from the document:

• It covers e-challans pending as on 31 July 2025.
• It is available “for a period of six months only from the date of issue of the Notification”.
• It expressly does not reach a challan “in respect of which Prosecution Reports (PR) has been submitted to designated Courts”.
• Implementation sits with the Transport Department, which the notification says will also “intensify enforcement measures against repeat offenders”.

All seventeen rows

The annexure has five columns, headed exactly: Sl. No., Section of MV Act, Offences, Amount of penalty prescribed under MV Act, and Amount to be paid by the defaulters after exemption. Here it is in full, with our own colour added to the last column so the two kinds of answer separate at a glance.

The offence wording, the punctuation and the occasional missing full stop are the annexure’s own. “may extend Rs.2000/-” at row 5 and “Rs1000/-” at row 15 are printed that way.

The pattern, and how we checked it

We did not go looking for a rule. We transcribed the table, then read the fourth column against the fifth to see whether anything was inconsistent, and the rule fell out of it.

Sort the seventeen rows by how the fourth column is worded and there are exactly two groups. Six rows describe the penalty with a ceiling alone — may extend to. All six of those sit at fifty per cent. Eleven rows describe it with a floor — not less than. Not one of those eleven is at fifty per cent, and every one of them is at the floor figure itself.

Seventeen out of seventeen. There is no row that breaks it, no row that goes below a stated minimum, and no row where a minimum existed and was halved anyway.

Why the floor and not half

Because of what the two kinds of drafting actually do.

When Parliament writes that a penalty may extend to a figure, it has set a maximum and left everything below it open. A state deciding to take half is operating inside a space Parliament deliberately left open.

When Parliament writes not less than, it has done the opposite: it has fixed a floor, and the floor is the part of the provision that carries the policy. Taking less than that is not using a discretion; it is changing what Parliament decided. Motor vehicles is in the Concurrent List, and a state law that conflicts with a central one needs the President’s assent under article 254 to survive. No settlement scheme carries that.

So the annexure reads the way it does not because somebody was being cautious with money, but because somebody drafting it worked through each provision and asked what was theirs to give away. That is unusually careful work and it deserves to be noticed.

Section 192, where both limits sit in one cell

Row 17 is the one that settles the argument. The fourth column reads, as printed, “may extend to Rs.5000-, but not less than Rs.2000/-”. Both limits in a single cell.

If the scheme were applying a flat discount, that row would read a thousand rupees more or less automatically. It reads two thousand — the floor. The ceiling in the same sentence is simply ignored for the purpose of the figure.

You cannot get that outcome by accident. It is the only row in the table where the drafter had to choose between two numbers written side by side, and the choice went the same way as every other row.

Six limbs, one figure

Section 184 fills six of the seventeen rows: jumping a red light, violating a stop sign, using a mobile phone while driving, overtaking in a no-overtaking zone, driving against the flow of traffic, and driving in any manner that would be dangerous.

The Act treats all six identically — not less than a thousand rupees and up to five thousand — so the annexure lands all six on a thousand. It is worth being clear about what that means for a reader. A thousand rupees is a fifth of the five-thousand ceiling, which looks like an eighty per cent discount and is nothing of the kind. It is simply the lowest figure the section permits.

The practical point is that a mobile-phone challan and a dangerous-driving challan settle at the same figure here, even though most people would expect the second to cost far more. The Act does not distinguish them, so the scheme cannot.

The biggest reduction, and why it was available

Section 190(2), violating air and noise pollution requirements, which the Act allows up to ten thousand rupees. The settlement takes fifty per cent, which on the ceiling is five thousand — the largest single reduction in the table.

It was available precisely because that provision has no floor. Compare it with section 182-B, oversized vehicles, where the ceiling is also ten thousand but there is a five-thousand minimum: the scheme stops there and can go no further.

Two offences, the same maximum, and the state can halve one and not the other. That is the whole argument of this page in two rows of a table.

The smallest figure in the table

Five hundred rupees, at section 177A, described in the annexure as violation of the rules of driving regulation. The Act sets it at not less than five hundred and up to a thousand, so the floor is half the ceiling and the two readings coincide.

That coincidence is worth flagging because it is the one row where you could look at the figure and conclude the scheme was applying fifty per cent. It is not; it is applying the floor, and the floor happens to be half. Section 183(i) does the same thing. Those two rows are why the pattern has to be read off the wording rather than off the arithmetic.

The same floor, reached by a formula instead of by hand

What makes this page’s central finding remarkable is the care behind it: seventeen rows gone through one at a time, with the scheme stopping at the statutory minimum on eleven of them and never once going below it.

Meghalaya gets to the same place with one sentence. Its notification requires compounding at not less than fifty per cent of the maximum fine prescribed — and because Parliament, drafting the 2019 ranges, tended to set minima at half the maxima, that formula lands on the statutory minimum automatically. On section 183(1) it lands there exactly, to the rupee, on both vehicle classes.

Two routes to the same discipline. Odisha’s took a human being checking every row in 2025. Meghalaya’s was written in 2011 and has needed nobody since.

Fifty per cent, with a power cited

The sharpest thing we could say about the scheme on this page is that it reduces amounts by half and never once states the provision it is issued under. We report that as a fact and we do not say the scheme is invalid, because we are not qualified to.

It is worth knowing what the opposite looks like. Himachal Pradesh has a fifty per cent settlement for offences on Shimla’s sealed and restricted roads, and it is in the penalty section of a state Act passed by the legislature: a fine of two thousand rupees compoundable on the spot for one thousand, and three thousand compoundable for fifteen hundred. Exact halves, twice, in primary legislation, with the rank of officer who may do it written in alongside.

Two states, the same arithmetic, and completely different legal standing. One is a six-month scheme with no power on its face; the other is permanent and in an Act. If anyone offers you a fifty per cent settlement anywhere in India, that is the question to ask: under what instrument?

The other end of the same argument

This page is about a government that would not settle below the Act’s minimum, on eleven rows out of seventeen, without a single exception. It is the clearest evidence in this series that the floor is real and that somebody was watching it.

Assam is what the other end looks like. Writing twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment, it took the Act’s full figure on every one of its eighty-eight rows — not a rupee of discount anywhere, including a thousand rupees for a helmet and twenty thousand plus two thousand a tonne for an overload.

Between the two of them, and with Telangana’s proviso capping the fee at the maximum fine in the penal section, three governments have now described the whole range a compounding figure is allowed to occupy — and none of them set out to describe anything.

What the seventeen rows leave out

Read a table like this for what it contains and you learn one thing. Read it for what it does not contain and you learn something else, and in this case the absences are more striking than the entries.

Not in the annexure, despite being among the most commonly issued challans in India:

• Section 194D — riding without a helmet.
• Section 194B — not wearing a seat belt.
• Section 194C — carrying more people on a two-wheeler than permitted.
• Section 196 — driving without insurance.
• Section 181 — driving without a valid licence.
• Section 192A — using a vehicle without a permit.
• Section 194 — overloading.
• Section 185 — drink driving, which could not have been included.

Only the last of those has an obvious explanation. Section 185 is outside the compounding machinery altogether, so there was never anything for a scheme to reduce. The other seven are compoundable in states that publish schedules, and they are missing here.

A passenger offence in a driving scheme

Row 3 is section 178, which the annexure describes as “Travel without ticket 3(b)”. It is worth stopping on, because it is the one row that is not about a driver at all.

Section 178 deals with travelling in a stage carriage without a ticket, and with a conductor who fails to issue one. The person liable is the passenger or the conductor, not the owner of the vehicle and not whoever was at the wheel.

That makes it an odd fit in a scheme framed around e-challans pending against vehicles at RTO level, and we cannot tell you how such a challan comes to be pending electronically in the first place. We are flagging it because if a section 178 entry appears against your registration number, the first question is not what it costs. It is why it is attached to your vehicle.

The row that should give anybody pause

Row 15 is section 186: driving when mentally or physically unfit to drive. The Act allows up to a thousand rupees and no minimum, so the scheme takes fifty per cent.

The arithmetic is unremarkable and the entry is not. A person issued a challan under section 186 has been recorded as unfit to be driving, and the consequence available in law is five hundred rupees under a settlement.

That is not Odisha’s doing. The thousand-rupee ceiling is Parliament’s, and it is one of the lowest in the Act — lower than using a mobile phone, lower than a stop sign. The state could not have charged more under this scheme than the Act allows in total.

We are pointing it out because this page has spent a lot of words admiring the drafting, and an honest page should also say where the result is uncomfortable. A fitness problem behind a steering wheel is not a five-hundred-rupee problem, whatever the schedule says.

Odisha against Bihar

Two states, two settlement schemes, two completely different pieces of drafting.

Our Bihar page sets that scheme out with the orders behind it. The contrast is not that one state was more generous. It is that Bihar made a single decision and Odisha made seventeen.

And against Delhi’s fifty per cent

Delhi was reported in September 2024 to be compounding at fifty per cent, and our Delhi page carries that with a caution, because we could not obtain the instrument behind it.

Set the three together and a question appears that none of the reporting ever asks: a flat fifty per cent, applied honestly, would have to go below the statutory minimum on every section 184 offence. Either those schemes are not reaching those sections, or the headline is doing something the instrument does not. We cannot answer that for Delhi or Bihar from the documents we have. We can say Odisha did not have the problem, because Odisha did not write a flat percentage.

What this proves about the whole series

Since the Karnataka page, these pages have carried an explanation: a fine fixed by Parliament is beyond a state’s reach, while a compounding amount is expressly the state’s to set. It explains the whole of September 2019, when a dozen states “cut fines” and the newspapers reported it as something no state could lawfully do.

Until now that has been an argument we assembled from enabling clauses, a parliamentary provision and a constitutional article. It was correct and it was abstract.

The Odisha annexure is the same argument written by a government, applied to seventeen real offences, with the line drawn in a visible place on every one of them. Nobody set out to prove anything; somebody simply drafted a scheme properly, and the drafting shows the limit.

And a second state has since supplied the other half. Telangana publishes its own section 200 notification, and at the foot of the schedule it writes the limit down rather than demonstrating it: the compounding fee for an offence shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Odisha shows a state refusing to go below the Act’s floor; Telangana states that it will not go above the Act’s ceiling. Two governments, two drafting styles, the same boundary described from opposite sides. Our page on a challan in Telangana reproduces that notification in full.

A notification that names no power

Having said all that, here is the thing the document does not do. It does not cite a single section. There is no in exercise of the powers conferred by recital anywhere in it.

And one we cannot date

The copy published on the department’s own website does not carry a legible date. The header runs “Bhubaneswar, dated the” and then the scan defeats us. Memo markings suggest mid-September and a news report of 10 September 2025 describes the scheme as launched.

That matters more here than it would elsewhere, because the scheme runs for six months from the date of issue. Without the date there is no way to work out when it closed, or whether it is still open. If you intend to use it, establishing that date is the first step and not an afterthought.

The cut-off, and what it does to an old challan

The scheme reaches e-challans pending as on 31 July 2025. Two words in that phrase do the work.

Pending means unpaid and still with the department. A challan already paid is not pending and there is no refund mechanism in the scheme for one that was.

As on 31 July 2025 fixes a date in the past, which is the opposite of how people usually read a scheme announced in September. A challan issued in August 2025 is newer than the cut-off and is therefore outside it, even though it is older than the scheme.

The exclusion that decides everything

One sentence decides whether the scheme reaches your matter at all:

Once a prosecution report has gone to a designated court, the matter has left the department’s hands. A court is seized of it, and an administrative scheme does not reach into a pending prosecution.

Here is the difficulty for a reader: nothing on your challan tells you whether this has happened. The challan was issued long before any prosecution report. The only way to know is to ask the department, naming the challan number and the registration number, and to get the answer in writing. That single question decides which page of this site is relevant to you.

How to use the scheme

1. Get the list of challans pending against the registration number, with dates and sections.
2. Strike out anything issued after 31 July 2025 — it is outside the cut-off.
3. For each remaining challan, ask in writing whether a prosecution report has been submitted to a designated court.
4. For those still inside, find the section in the annexure and read the fourth column carefully.
5. Apply the right rule: fifty per cent only where the Act gives a ceiling alone; otherwise the stated minimum.
6. Establish the date the notification was issued, because the six months run from it.
7. Put the whole calculation in writing rather than agreeing a figure at a counter, and keep the reply.

A settlement petition is the document that does steps three to seven in one place: it identifies the challans, states why each is inside the scheme, applies the annexure row by row, and arrives at a figure the department can either accept or dispute in writing.

The speed limits, notified under section 112

Odisha has also notified its maximum speed limits, and that document is on the same website. It comes from a different office — the Transport Commissioner-cum-Chairman, State Transport Authority, Odisha, Cuttack — and it is issued under section 112 of the Act, which is the power to fix speed limits.

The number and the date on that notification are handwritten on the copy published and we could not read either with confidence, so we are not printing them. The table itself is clear.

The table, by road type

All figures are kilometres per hour. The class descriptions are the notification’s own, shortened here only in the sense that we have not reproduced its spacing errors.

Why both halves on one page matters

In eleven previous states we have had one half of this and never both. Some states told us what an offence costs and never what the limit was. Others gave structure and no figures at all.

Odisha gives both, from two different offices, under two different sections. Section 112 is the power that says what the limit is. Section 183 is what exceeding it costs, and the settlement annexure prices it at a thousand rupees for a light motor vehicle and two thousand for a heavy or medium passenger vehicle.

Put them together and you can answer the question people actually ask, which is not “what is the fine” but “was I even over the limit”. On a four-lane divided carriageway in a car that question has a published answer: a hundred.

The municipal stretch, where it usually happens

Look at the middle column again. A national or state highway passing through a municipal or notified area council limit drops to 50 kmph for a car, 40 for a motor cycle, and 30 for a goods vehicle or a three-wheeler.

That is the half of the table that generates challans. A driver who has been doing a hundred lawfully on a divided carriageway enters a town on the same road, with the same road markings and often the same surface, and the lawful speed halves. The road does not change. The legal character of the stretch does.

This is also where an automated camera is most likely to be, for the obvious reason that it is where the limit changes. If a speeding challan has arrived and the location is a highway stretch inside a municipal limit, the figure in the notification is the one that applies rather than the highway figure.

Cashless since October 2018

A third document on the same site records something that turns out to matter a good deal: “Motor Vehicles Taxes and Fines to be collected digitally throughout the State”. An arrangement was signed on 15 October 2018 between the transport department and a bank, putting card payment into transport offices and onto handheld devices used at roadside enforcement.

It names Sanjeeb Panda, IPS, then Transport Commissioner and State Transport Authority, and the bank’s regional head for Odisha.

What Patna had to be told in 2026

Hold that 2018 date next to something from our Bihar page. In May 2026 the Patna High Court, supervising the traffic challan arrangements in that state, had to direct in terms that challan amounts are not collected in cash and that online payment facilities be made available.

Odisha arranged the same thing for itself eight years earlier, without litigation and without a court saying so. We are not holding one state up against another to score a point — Bihar had its own history and its own volumes. But a reader deciding how much weight to give a state document is entitled to know which administrations moved on their own.

There is a practical consequence too. In a state where fines have been collected by card at the roadside since 2018, a demand for cash is out of step with the state’s own arrangements, and that is a reasonable thing to say out loud.

Bhubaneswar and Cuttack — two offices

Three documents, two addresses. The settlement scheme comes from the Commerce and Transport Department at Bhubaneswar. The speed limits come from the Transport Commissioner-cum-Chairman, State Transport Authority at Cuttack.

For a reader that is not trivia. A letter about the settlement scheme goes to the department; a letter about a speed limit, a permit or an enforcement question goes to the State Transport Authority. Sending it to the wrong one does not lose your rights, but it costs a round of post at a time when a six-month window is running.

The enabling clause, and a fifth failure

The copy of the Orissa Motor Vehicles Rules 1993 we could reach begins at Chapter I, Preliminary. No preamble, no notification number, no recital of the sections the rules were made under.

Which means the one check these pages run on every state — is section 200 among the powers the rules were made under? — has nothing to run against here. Odisha is the fifth state to defeat it, after West Bengal, Karnataka, Gujarat and Uttarakhand, and all five failed in precisely the same way: the available copy simply starts at rule 1.

Seven tested, seven absences, five unopened

The running total, after twelve states. Tested, and section 200 absent every time — seven: Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar (and Jharkhand, which runs on Bihar’s rules), Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu. Could not be tested — five: West Bengal, Karnataka, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Odisha.

The result is now firm enough to state as a working rule. Compounding amounts are never kept in a state’s motor vehicles rules. They live in a standalone instrument, issued by itself, and in most states that instrument is not published in any form a reader can open. That is why these pages keep running into the same wall, and why hunting through the rules for the price of an offence is looking in the wrong book.

Fine, compounding and settlement

Three different things, and this page has all three in view at once.

• A fine is what a court imposes on conviction, fixed by Parliament. Where the Act says not less than, that floor is part of the fine Parliament fixed.
• A compounding amount is what the state will take to close the matter without a trial, set under section 200. Odisha’s ordinary one we could not obtain.
• A settlement like this scheme is a further step again: a time-limited decision about what the state will accept on challans that are already outstanding.

The annexure is interesting precisely because it shows the third kind of decision bumping against the first kind of limit. Our Karnataka page works through the first two at length, because that is where the argument happened in public.

What an ordinary challan costs here

We do not know, and this page does not guess. Odisha’s everyday compounding notification — the one that would say what a helmet offence or a document offence costs today, outside any scheme — is not something we could obtain.

The seventeen rows above are settlement figures for challans already pending. They are not a price list for tomorrow, and reading them as one would be a mistake. If a figure on a current challan cannot be tied to a provision, the way to establish it is to ask: an RTI application for the compounding notification in force, with its number and date.

The Supreme Court, 28 September 2026

In S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, decided on 28 September 2026, the Court took up unpaid electronic challans across the country.

The consequences the Court was willing to see attached to non-payment run well past the money: online transport services frozen, a registration renewal or a duplicate certificate withheld, fitness refused, a transfer blocked, and a licence renewal suspended where violations have piled up. Not one of those is a penalty in the Act. Each is an ordinary service being made conditional on the entry being cleared.

A settlement scheme and that approach are the two halves of one problem. One offers a way to clear the backlog cheaply; the other makes leaving it uncleared expensive in a way that has nothing to do with the amount.

A carrot and a stick in one document

The notification does not pretend otherwise. Having offered the reduction, it says the department will “intensify enforcement measures against repeat offenders and individuals unwilling to improve their road safety behaviour”.

That is an unusually direct sentence for a government document and it is worth taking at face value. The reduction is open for a fixed period and the stated intention afterwards is the opposite of leniency. Whatever else is unclear about this scheme, that part is not.

Overloading, and section 182-B

Section 194 does not appear in the annexure at all, so Odisha’s position on overloading is not something this page can state. Four states in this series have gone four different ways on that provision and nothing in the central Act required any of them to.

What is in the annexure is section 182-B, oversized vehicles, at the five-thousand floor. That is a different thing — a vehicle built or altered beyond permitted dimensions rather than one carrying too much — and the two get confused constantly. If a challan says 182-B, the question is the vehicle’s dimensions; if it says 194, the question is the load.

Drink driving

Section 185 is not in the annexure and could not have been. It sits outside the compounding machinery everywhere in India, which means there is no amount for any scheme to reduce and no counter at which to close it. The matter is prosecuted, a magistrate decides, and the licence consequence follows the conviction. Our page on drink driving cases follows that sequence.

Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Rourkela

The scheme is state-wide and so are the speed limits, which are set by road type rather than by district. What changes with the place is which Regional Transport Office holds the challan, which matters here more than usual because the scheme is framed around challans pending at RTO level.

Nothing we found gives any Odisha city its own schedule or its own rank floor for compounding. That is a contrast with Rajasthan, where the rank differs inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates.

If the vehicle has been impounded

Nothing on this page reaches an impoundment. The scheme is about money owed on challans; a seizure runs on the criminal procedure code, the officer who orders release is a magistrate, and the timing was reworked when that code was recast. Settling a challan does not produce a vehicle. The application and the periods are on our vehicle release and superdari page.

If the licence has been suspended

Find out which of three things happened first, because they do not share a remedy: a court disqualifying on conviction, a licensing authority acting on its own motion, or a renewal withheld because violations have accumulated. We could not read the appeal provisions in the Odisha rules, so this page cannot tell you which officer hears the second of those — that is an honest gap and we have listed it below. Our page on licence suspension deals with the court route and the administrative one.

If the challan itself is wrong

The grounds are the national ones, and all three are worth asking separately: whether the electronic notice carries what the law requires it to carry, whether it reached you inside the period for service, and whether the authority holds a valid certificate for the device that produced it. Our page on disputing a challan works through each.

For Odisha add one more, which is peculiar to a speeding challan here: which stretch of road was it, and which of the three columns in the speed table applies to it? A figure taken from the highway column on a stretch inside municipal limits, or the reverse, is a question of fact worth putting in a written reply.

Lok Adalat

A Lok Adalat records settlements; it does not create discounts. In Odisha the discount already exists in the scheme, which is the more useful arrangement — you are not depending on a sitting being held. Where a scheme and a Lok Adalat overlap, the figure comes from the scheme and the Lok Adalat is simply the counter. Our page on Lok Adalats explains what an award there binds you to and what it does not.

Twelve states, and the one thing none of them has

Rather than list the twelve again, here is what twelve pages of looking has actually produced, grouped by the kind of document that turned up. The grouping is the finding.

• States that published a priced schedule anybody can read: Jharkhand, with twenty-five rows and five columns, and West Bengal, which printed the officers and the money in a single instrument and separated the section violated from the section it is compounded under. Two out of twelve.
• States that published who may take the money but not how much: Rajasthan, by rank and by territory, and Haryana, with seventeen officer categories matched to their sections. Useful and incomplete.
• States that published the inverse: Maharashtra, which printed a list of nine offences that no payment will close, which turns out to be more useful than a price list on the day it applies to you.
• States that put a rate for paperwork in their rules and nothing for the road: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand — monthly, in day bands, and by the week with the rate set by the vehicle. Three states, three arithmetics, nearly the same ceiling.
• States whose published figures are reported rather than notified: Gujarat and Uttarakhand for 2019, and Delhi for 2024. We printed those labelled as reported, because the instrument behind each was a scan we could not open.
• States that ran a settlement: Bihar, flat and court-supervised, and Odisha, offence-by-offence and apparently on its own initiative.

And the thing none of the twelve has: a current, readable, dated compounding notification that an ordinary person can open and check their challan against. Twelve states, twelve attempts, and that document has not surfaced once. Everything these pages contain has been assembled around its absence.

How we checked this

All three Odisha documents on this page come from the transport department’s own website. That is the most direct source any page in this series has had: not a reproduction, not a law portal, but the department publishing its own notifications.

The annexure was transcribed row by row rather than summarised, and the pattern described above was found by reading the fourth column against the fifth afterwards. We state it as something we measured across seventeen rows, not as a principle we brought to the table.

Where the scan defeated us — the scheme’s date, the speed notification’s number and date — we have said so and printed nothing. The typographical slips in the notification are reproduced as printed, because correcting a quotation silently is not something a page like this gets to do.

What to do, in order

1. Pull the full list of pending challans against the registration number.
2. Separate anything issued after 31 July 2025 — outside the cut-off.
3. Ask in writing, for each remaining challan, whether a prosecution report has gone to a designated court.
4. Establish the date the scheme notification was issued, since the six months run from it.
5. For each challan inside the scheme, read the section against the annexure and work out whether it is a fifty-per-cent row or a floor row.
6. If the challan is for speeding, check which road-type column applies to that stretch before accepting it at all.
7. Put the calculation in writing and ask for a receipt that names the scheme.
8. If the department says a challan is outside the scheme and you think it is inside, get the reason in writing before paying anything.

What to keep

The challan list with dates and sections, because the cut-off turns on dates. Anything in writing about a prosecution report. The receipt, naming the scheme rather than just an amount. The registration number exactly as printed. For a speeding challan, the location as recorded, because the applicable limit depends on it. And the case number if a court has the matter.

Deliberately not on this page

Everything that reads the same in Bhubaneswar as in Delhi has been kept off: the definitions, what a prosecution looks like once a magistrate has the file, the rules on electronic notices, the licensing chapter and the law of seizure and release. Each has its own page here, linked above where it arises. What is left is Odisha’s own — a settlement annexure that shows where a state’s power runs out, a speed table that lets you check the premise of a speeding challan, and a department that went cashless before a court anywhere told it to.

When this needs an advocate

When a prosecution report has gone to a designated court, because the scheme no longer reaches that challan and a court does. When the department says a challan is outside the scheme and the dates say otherwise. When a permit, a fitness refusal or a transport business is exposed rather than one vehicle. Not for working out which column of the annexure applies to you, which is arithmetic and a letter.

What we do

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

On this page that is usually one of three things. A settlement petition that lists the challans, shows why each is inside the scheme and applies the annexure row by row. A written reply where the challan itself is wrong, or the wrong speed column has been applied. Or an RTI application for the scheme’s date and the compounding notification in force — the two documents this page most wanted and could not get.

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

What we could not verify

• The date on which the settlement notification was issued, and therefore when its six months end.
• The statutory power the scheme was issued under — the document names none.
• Odisha’s ordinary compounding notification, so there is no everyday rate table here.
• The enabling clause of the Orissa Motor Vehicles Rules 1993, so the section 200 check could not run.
• Which rule of those rules deals with appeals, and which officer hears them.
• Who may compound an offence in Odisha, and at what rank.
• The number and date of the speed limit notification, both handwritten on the published copy.
• Odisha’s position on section 194 overloading.
• How many challans or how much money the scheme was addressed to.
• Any Orissa High Court decision dealing directly with challan compounding.

What we charge

There is no charge for asking, and none for being put in front of an advocate. A document’s price sits on its own service page where you can see it before deciding, and nothing we are paid comes out of an advocate’s fee. One thing particular to this page: if the challans you are holding add up to less than the document that would settle them, we will say so and you should ignore us. A settlement petition earns its cost on a stack of pending challans, not on one.

Questions people ask