A traffic challan in Puducherry: before asking what the state decided, we had to ask whether there is a state.

The question we had not had to ask before

Every page in this series has been built on one sentence of the Motor Vehicles Act. Offences may be compounded by such officers or authorities and for such amount “as the State Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, specify in this behalf”.

We have quoted that twenty-three times. We have measured state schedules against it, caught states pricing offences Parliament never made compoundable, and found a state that had no schedule at all. In all that time we treated the phrase “the State Government” as self-explanatory, because in Kerala or Odisha it is.

Puducherry is a Union territory. So the first thing we had to do here was look up what those two words mean, and the answer is not what we assumed.

What the General Clauses Act does to those two words

The Motor Vehicles Act does not define “State Government”, so the General Clauses Act, 1897 supplies the meaning. Two clauses of its section 3 matter.

Put those together against section 200 and the position is this. “State” includes a Union territory, so section 200 certainly applies in Puducherry. But the body the section hands the power to — “the State Government” — is, in a Union territory, the Central Government.

And what the Government of Union Territories Act does to it

Except that Puducherry is not an ordinary Union territory. It has a Legislative Assembly and a Council of Ministers, under the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963.

So there is an elected government here with real functions, advising an Administrator, with the President as the referee. None of that is the Governor of a State, and none of it is simply “the Central Government” either.

What we are not going to resolve

Why this is the first question for six more jurisdictions

Of the eleven jurisdictions still to come in this series, six are Union territories: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Chandigarh, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.

Only one of those six has a legislature of its own, so for the other five the General Clauses Act answer is likely to be the whole answer: the power belongs to the Central Government, exercised through an Administrator. Which means that on those pages the thing to look for is not a state notification at all.

We have spent twenty-three pages looking for state notifications. It is useful to discover, with eleven to go, that for nearly half of them the document may have a different author entirely.

And one we should have asked about Delhi

There is a version of this that we got wrong by omission, and it is worth owning.

Delhi was the first page in this series. Delhi is the National Capital Territory — a Union territory with its own Legislative Assembly, under article 239AA rather than the 1963 Act. We wrote that page, and nineteen more, without once asking who the “State Government” in section 200 is there.

We are not going back to change the Delhi page: what it says about Delhi’s own notification and amounts is accurate, and that is what a reader needs from it. But the question we are raising here applies to it, and we would rather say so on this page than leave a reader to notice.

The Pondicherry Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989

With the constitutional question parked, here is what the territory has actually published.

That the rules were made by the Lieutenant-Governor is itself a small answer to the earlier question: for rule-making under the sections listed, the territory’s own head of administration acted. It does not follow that the same is true of section 200, which is not among them.

The enabling clause, and section 200’s absence from it

Section 200 is not in the list, and nor is anything that could stand in for it.

The eleventh jurisdiction, and the second proved on the face

This is now a pattern with enough instances to be worth stating as one.

In eleven of the twenty-four jurisdictions we have examined, the state or territorial motor vehicles rules are not made under section 200. In nine of those we inferred it. In two we can prove it from the enabling clause itself: Goa, where the rules cite sections 26, 28, 38, 65, 95, 96, 107, 111, 138, 159, 176 and 213; and Puducherry, whose list is shorter still.

The practical consequence is the same in both. Whatever a compounding amount in these territories is, the motor vehicles rules are not the instrument that fixes it — which is why the rules contain only the narrow in-lieu provisions we come to next, and no schedule of compounding amounts for the Act’s own offences.

Rule 42, and a drafting family we now know three members of

Readers of this series will recognise that immediately. We have met it twice before.

• Goa, rule 46: “compounding fee of rupees twenty-five per calendar month or part there of, provided that the amount shall not exceed rupees one hundred”.
• Goa, rule 54: the same rate and cap, expressed as being “in lieu of action against him under sub-section (3) of section 50”.
• Uttarakhand, rule 45: the same hundred-rupee ceiling, in the words “shall in no case, exceed rupees one hundred”.

Three jurisdictions, drafted years apart, carrying the same rate and the same cap. These rules are not written from scratch; they are copied from a model, and the model is old.

Three rules, two different parent provisions

Here is what Puducherry adds, and it is the reason this section exists.

On our Goa page we spent a long section working out where the hundred-rupee cap comes from, because we had earlier treated it — wrongly — as a stale state figure. The answer was section 50(3) of the central Act, which provides for an amount “not exceeding one hundred rupees” to be paid in lieu of action under section 177. Goa’s rule 54 names section 50(3) expressly.

Puducherry’s rule 42 names section 177.

What a hundred-rupee cap is worth now

The arithmetic, which is the same one we did on the Goa page and which has not improved with time.

In 1989 the cap and the penalty were the same number, which is a coherent piece of drafting: the in-lieu amount could rise to the level of the thing it replaced and no further. The 2019 amendment multiplied section 177 by five and left the cap where it was.

We said on the Goa page that this makes the in-lieu route a bargain rather than an alternative, and that a six-month delay in Goa costs a hundred rupees where the arithmetic would give a hundred and fifty. In Puducherry the same is true, and for a four-month delay or longer the monthly rate stops mattering entirely — the cap does all the work.

Rule 33, and two different rates in one set of rules

And then there is rule 33, which we did not expect.

Ten rupees a month, not twenty-five. Same hundred-rupee cap. Same set of rules, nine rules earlier.

Is there a reason? Possibly: a late transfer of ownership and a late renewal of registration are different defaults, and a drafter might reasonably price them differently. The rules give no reasons, as these documents never do, so we are recording the difference rather than explaining it.

Note also the vocabulary. Rule 42 calls it “the amount payable ... in lieu of action”. Rule 33 calls it a “compounding fee”. Same document, two names for the same kind of thing — which is the vocabulary problem we wrote about on the Mizoram page, where a police page titled “officers who can impose penalty” described officers “authorized to compound”.

Ten rupees a month, which is two per cent

One measurement, because it is the smallest number in this entire series and it is in force.

A one-month delay in applying to renew a registration costs ten rupees under rule 33. The provision it stands in lieu of — the general penalty for contravening the Act or rules — now carries five hundred rupees for a first offence.

Ten rupees is two per cent of five hundred.

For comparison, the lowest proportion we had previously recorded was on our Chhattisgarh page, where section 190(2) is priced at three hundred rupees for a two-wheeler against a ten thousand rupee ceiling — three per cent. Puducherry’s rule 33 is lower, and unlike Chhattisgarh’s figure it is in a rule rather than a schedule, so nothing about the 2019 amendment would have prompted anyone to revisit it.

The 2021 amendment, and why it is not the answer

Puducherry has not left the rules entirely alone. A notification numbered G.O. Ms. No. 02/Tr. Sectt/2021, dated 9 March 2021 amended the penalties for offences punishable under the Puducherry Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989.

The offences it touches are the territorial ones: overcharging by autos, taxis and stage carriages; passengers carried improperly; failure to report a transfer of ownership in time; a vehicle registered in another state kept beyond twelve months; failure to report a change of address; defective signalling equipment, speed limiters or reflectors; missing registration displays or horns; driver uniform breaches; abusive language and smoking; unlicensed driving schools; unauthorised advertisements on vehicles; safety equipment deficiencies; cruelty to animals; left-hand steering; unauthorised light colours; and ticketless travel.

What the Puducherry Police publish

The document a person in Puducherry will actually find is the police traffic offences page, and it is substantial.

Four columns, headed exactly: “S.NO OFFENCES MAXIMUM PENALTY SECTION”.

Ninety-five rows is more than any state schedule in this series except Assam’s eighty-eight across four tables, and the seven-category structure makes it genuinely usable. Somebody put work into this.

The “SECTION” column is also better than most: it gives read-with citations, so a row is not just “driving without a licence” but “3 r/w 181 MVA” — the duty provision read with the penalty provision. We have not seen another police page do that either.

“Court Challan”, which nobody else does

And then there is the thing we want to praise properly, because it is the single best feature on any enforcement page we have read in twenty-four jurisdictions.

Seven of the ninety-five rows do not carry an amount. They carry the words “Court Challan”.

Two observations about which rows they chose, because they are interesting.

Some of them are clearly right. Section 186 — driving when mentally or physically unfit — is in section 200(1) and can be compounded, so marking it for court is a choice rather than a necessity, and arguably a sensible one. Section 194(2), a driver refusing to have a vehicle weighed, is also compoundable, and Assam’s schedule reserves exactly that row to officers of District Transport Officer rank and above. Puducherry sends it to a court instead.

And some are more cautious than they need to be. Section 192 — using a vehicle without registration — is compoundable everywhere, and Mizoram prices it at two to five thousand rupees. Three of Puducherry’s seven court rows are section 192 matters.

We are not criticising either way. A jurisdiction is entitled to decide that a class of offence should go in front of a magistrate, and saying so on the page is better than not saying so.

The figures are from before 2019

Now the difficulty, and it is a serious one.

Row 1.1 is the clearest. Driving without a valid licence is section 181, and section 181 has carried five thousand rupees since 1 September 2019. The page says five hundred, which is the figure the section carried before the amendment. Row 1.2 is the same story: a thousand where the Act now says five thousand.

Row 1.5 is a useful marker of the page’s vintage, because “five thousand rupees, not less than two thousand” is exactly the pre-2019 wording of section 192A. Somebody read the provision correctly — it is simply the provision as it was.

And some of the citations are wrong

Separately from the amounts, two of the seven rows in category 1 cite provisions that do not create the offence described.

• Row 1.4, driving without valid insurance, is cited as “130 r/w 177 MVA”. Driving an uninsured vehicle is section 196, which carries two thousand rupees and four thousand for a repeat. Section 130 is the duty to produce a licence, registration or other document on demand.
• Row 1.5, driving without a valid permit, is cited the same way. Using a vehicle without a permit is section 192A.

Rows 1.5 and 1.6 also carry identical penalties and identical citations for two different offences — permit and fitness — which is the signature of a cell copied down a column.

Why that is a measurement and not an accusation

A figure that is too low is not good news

People sometimes assume an out-of-date published figure is a gift. It is not, for three reasons.

You cannot rely on it. If you go to a counter and say the website says five hundred, you will be told, correctly, that the Act says five thousand. The website is not the law and arguing from it wastes the one conversation you get.

It destroys the only check you had. The single argument that works everywhere in India is that an amount exceeds the statutory maximum. To make it you need the real maximum. A published figure at a fifth of the statutory one means the published table cannot be used as a check at all.

It cuts the other way too. If a published table is six years out of date in the direction of being too low, there is no reason to assume every figure on it is out of date in that direction. Row 1.7 happens to be right, as the floor of the current range. You cannot tell which rows are which without going to the Act, which is what we had to do.

The Rules of the Road, published again in the superseded version

And a third ageing document, which closes a loop we opened two pages ago.

The police page states that it works from the Rules of the Road Regulation brought into effect in July 1989. And the Puducherry Transport Department publishes that instrument on its own website: the Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989, made by S.O. 439(E) dated 12 June 1989, published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary, Part II, Section 3(ii), thirty-one regulations, in force from the first day of July 1989.

We read that copy in three passes and asked it directly whether it mentions being superseded, or the year 2017. It does not, anywhere.

The third government we have caught doing it

On the Nagaland page we reported that the Telangana Transport Department publishes the 1989 Regulations as a current document with no supersession note, and said we used its copy because it was the cleanest government copy we could find — which rather proved the point.

Puducherry is the second transport department doing the same. And it goes one step further than Telangana, because here the territory’s police enforcement page relies on the superseded instrument by name. That is not a stale file in a document library; it is a live enforcement document citing the wrong regulations.

Why it matters more now than it did in 2024

Until January 2025 this was a tidiness problem. It is not any more.

Section 177A of the Act punishes contravention of “the regulations made under section 118” with a fine of not less than five hundred rupees and up to a thousand. It was inserted with effect from 1 September 2019. And as we set out on the Nagaland page, the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 substituted section 200(1) with effect from 13 January 2025 and made section 177A compoundable for the first time.

So since January 2025 an officer may accept money at the roadside for breaching regulations that two transport departments and one police force are publishing in a version superseded in 2017.

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

The Road Safety Policy of 29 December 2015

Everything above is paperwork. This is the document that makes it matter, and it is the most candid thing any government has published in the twenty-four jurisdictions we have read.

It opens with national figures — 4.43 lakh accidents and 1.37 lakh deaths in 2013, which it renders as about 377 deaths and 1,287 injuries a day — and then turns to the territory.

68.3 against 32.6

Its own figures for 2013: 1,451 accidents and 228 fatalities.

More than double the national death rate per lakh of population, stated by a government about itself, in a notified policy document. We have read twenty-four jurisdictions’ material and nothing else comes close to this for plain speaking. Most road safety documents in India open by describing the problem as national.

There is a reason the rate is so high that has nothing to do with driving, and we should say it: Puducherry is small, dense, and crossed by major roads carrying traffic that is not its own. A deaths-per-population figure in a territory of about a million and a quarter people, on roads used heavily by Tamil Nadu traffic, is not measuring the same thing as a state-wide figure. The policy does not make that point, and it would have been entitled to.

The promise

And then, in its action plan, the policy says this.

The policy also commits to “zero tolerance applied in relation to traffic violations”.

Read that sentence against the rest of this page. The territory undertook, in a notified policy document, to do the two things this page has been looking for: notify the penalties, and build a road safety fund out of compounding.

On our Himachal Pradesh page we found a non-lapsing amenities fund created by primary legislation, and noted that a sub-section routed its proceeds to the Consolidated Fund conditional on appropriation — a fund that existed on paper and leaked in practice. Puducherry’s is the other failure mode: a fund promised in a policy and, as far as we can tell, never built.

Eleven years, and the same number of accidents

One comparison, with a caveat attached to it that we mean seriously.

If both numbers are right, eleven years produced almost no change in the accident count — in a territory whose own policy recorded a death rate double the national average and promised zero tolerance. We would want a government figure for 2024 before building anything on that, and we have said so rather than letting the comparison do unearned work.

A severity figure that behaves properly

A small methodological note, because it corrects something from the last page.

228 deaths in 1,451 accidents is about sixteen deaths per hundred accidents. That is an ordinary, plausible figure for a full count of reported accidents.

On our Mizoram page the same calculation gave ninety per hundred, and we declined to put it in a heading, on the view that the state was most likely counting only fatal and serious accidents rather than all of them. We flagged that as a reading, not an assertion.

Puducherry’s numbers are what a full count looks like. That is some support for the Mizoram reading, and it is a reminder that before comparing two governments’ accident figures you need to know what each of them is counting.

Four regions, one territory, two neighbours

A practical feature of Puducherry that affects challans and that no other page in this series has had to deal with.

The territory is four separate districts in three different parts of India: Puducherry and Karaikal on the Coromandel coast surrounded by Tamil Nadu, Mahe on the Malabar coast surrounded by Kerala, and Yanam surrounded by Andhra Pradesh. The 2014 delegation order we looked at names all four regions for the purposes of the State Transport Authority.

Which means a driver in Mahe can cross into Kerala in a few minutes, and a driver in Yanam into Andhra Pradesh, and the compounding arrangements on the two sides of that line are completely different instruments. Kerala’s schedule and Andhra Pradesh’s note, both of which we have written about, have nothing to do with Puducherry’s rules.

It also means that when a document says “the territory”, it is covering four enforcement environments that share a government and almost nothing else. If you are asked for an amount in Mahe and your information came from Puducherry town, it is worth checking that the same instrument is being applied.

Reading your own Puducherry challan

1. Read the section number. On this page it matters more than usual, because the published figures are not reliable.
2. Do not use the police table for the amount. Use it to identify the section and the read-with citation, which is what it is good at, then take the figure from the Act.
3. Check whether the amount you have been asked for is at or below the current statutory maximum for that section. That is the one check that works regardless of everything else here.
4. If the row is one of the seven marked “Court Challan”, nothing should be payable at a counter at all.
5. If it is a late transfer or a late renewal, rules 42 and 33 cap the amount at a hundred rupees. That cap is in the rules and is worth knowing.
6. Ask, if it is worth asking, which instrument fixes the amount — because the rules are not made under section 200 and we could not find a notification that is.
7. Keep the receipt and read the section printed on it. Section 200(2) deems a compounded offence a previous commission of the same offence next time.

If it is a late transfer or a late renewal

This is the one part of Puducherry’s paperwork that is clear, published, and in your favour, so it is worth separating out.

On a four-month delay under rule 42 the arithmetic gives a hundred rupees and the cap gives a hundred rupees, so from four months onwards the delay stops costing more. Under rule 33 that point is ten months.

If you are asked for substantially more than a hundred rupees for either of those defaults, the rule is short, numbered, and quotable, and that is a good position to be in. It is also the one place on this page where we can point you at a Puducherry figure and say with confidence that it is current, because nothing since 1989 has changed it.

The flip side, from our Goa page, is worth repeating: the real problem with an unrecorded transfer is not the hundred rupees. It is that the vehicle is still in somebody else’s name, with their liability attached to it, and since September 2026 unpaid challans block transfers. The cheap compounding fee is not the reason to deal with it.

What is worth asking Puducherry for in writing

Four questions, and the first is the best question in this entire series, because the government put it on the record itself.

• Whether the penalty for traffic rules violations has been notified as the Road Safety Policy of 29 December 2015 committed, and if so the number and date of that notification.
• Whether the State Road Safety Fund was created from the compounding of offences as that policy committed, and if so its receipts and expenditure.
• Which instrument fixes compounding amounts in the territory, given that the Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 are not made under section 200.
• Whether the Transport Department intends to replace the Rules of the Road Regulations, 1989 on its website with the Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017, and whether the police traffic offences page will be updated to post-2019 figures.

Every one of those arises from a document the territory published itself, with a number and a date. That is the strongest footing anyone can ask a government a question from, and an application costs five hundred rupees, which is the least we charge for anything.

What we would actually tell most readers

If you have an ordinary challan and the amount is at or below the statutory maximum for the section, pay it and keep the receipt. Nothing on this page should stop you, and nothing on this page will get the figure reduced.

What this page is for is the narrower case. You have been asked for an amount that is above the statutory figure. Or the row is one the police themselves mark for court. Or the figure you were quoted matches the website and the website is wrong, in either direction. Or there is a repeat offence coming and you want the first one on paper properly. Those are worth writing about.

Arguing at the roadside achieves nothing anywhere, and in a territory where the published figures are six years out of date it achieves less than nothing, because you will be arguing from a document the officer is entitled to ignore.

Why this is not paperwork pedantry

We have written a lot of this page about documents being out of date, and there is a fair objection: who cares, as long as the Act is applied?

The 2015 policy is the answer. A government that records its own road death rate as double the national average, commits to zero tolerance, and says in terms that penalties will be notified and a road safety fund built from compounding, has told you that this paperwork is a road safety measure rather than an administrative chore.

On that government’s own account of what it was trying to do, a police page that understates the penalty for driving without a licence by a factor of ten is not a filing error. It is the deterrent the policy was relying on, published at a tenth of its value.

Where Puducherry sits after twenty-four jurisdictions

On what it charges: we cannot tell you, because we could not find the instrument. That puts it with Nagaland, where the notification exists and is not published, rather than with the states whose schedules we have transcribed.

On what it publishes: genuinely mixed, and better than its reputation would suggest. The police table is the most carefully structured enforcement document in this series — ninety-five rows, seven categories, read-with citations — and the “Court Challan” column is the single most useful thing any police force has published on this subject. It is also six years out of date.

On candour: first, by a distance. No other jurisdiction has published its own death rate against the national average and promised what it would do about it. That the promise appears not to have been kept is a different criticism from the one most states earn, which is that they never said anything at all.

On the question this page opens with: unresolved, and now known to be unresolved for six more jurisdictions.

What this page cannot do for you

It cannot give you Puducherry’s compounding amounts. We looked at the rules, the police page, the 2014 delegation order, the 2015 policy, the action plan and the territory’s gazette archive, and no section 200 notification turned up.

It cannot tell you whether the territorial government or the Central Government holds that power. We have set out the provisions and left the question open deliberately.

It cannot be used to challenge a challan on the strength of a wrong website. A provision applies whatever a web page says.

It is no use at all for an accident, an injury, a claim or compensation. Those live in other chapters of the Act and want an advocate on day one.

Added later: a second Union territory, and this one did it

This page asked who the “State Government” in section 200 is when the place is a Union territory, set out the General Clauses Act and the Government of Union Territories Act, and refused to answer. That refusal stands — it is a constitutional question.

But the next Union territory in this series shows what one of them actually did. Chandigarh’s notification of 6 December 2019 says in terms that the power under sub-section (1) of section 200 is exercised by “the Administrator, Union Territory, Chandigarh” — not by the Central Government, and not by a territorial government. It was signed by the Secretary Transport and endorsed for publication to the Controller, Printing and Stationery the same day.

Two things make the comparison sharper than we expected. Chandigarh has no legislature at all — it is administered under article 239 directly through the Ministry of Home Affairs — and its Administrator is, ex officio since 1984, the Governor of Punjab. So the territory with no elected government produced a full, dated, gazetted, thirty-row schedule within ninety-six days of the 2019 amendment, while Puducherry, which has an Assembly and a Council of Ministers, has nothing we could find.

We draw no lesson from two data points. We record it because this page said the question mattered for six more jurisdictions, and the first of those answered it in the simplest possible way: by issuing the instrument.

Added later: a state that publishes less and does better

This page was hard on Puducherry, and fairly: its own Road Safety Policy of 29 December 2015 recorded a death rate of 68.3 per lakh population against a national average of 32.6, promised that penalties would be notified and a road safety fund built from compounding, and eleven years later we could find neither.

Tripura is the other way round, and it made us correct something we had been implying across the whole series. Tripura publishes no compounding schedule at all — less than Puducherry does — and its road deaths fell from 261 in 2023 to 157 in 2025, about forty per cent in two years.

So a published schedule is not what makes roads safer. We had been running two arguments together as though they were one, and they are not. A published schedule is a citizen’s protection: it lets you check that the amount demanded is the amount the state fixed. Road safety depends on enforcement actually happening and on what happens in the hour after a crash. A government owes you both, and the two can come apart in either direction.

What this page says about Puducherry stands. The criticism is now narrower and more accurate: not that unpublished schedules kill people, but that Puducherry promised in writing to publish one and did not, while its own figures recorded a death rate double the national average.

Added later: a third answer, from a full State

This page raised a question and refused to answer it: when section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act gives a power to the “State Government”, who holds it in a Union territory? We have since looked at two more jurisdictions and the question has grown a third limb that we did not expect.

Chandigarh answered it in practice: a Union territory without a legislature, where the Administrator — who is also the Governor of Punjab — specified the amounts and the authorised officers expressly under the section, in a thirty-row, five-column schedule.

Then Arunachal Pradesh produced the opposite problem. It is a full State, so the definition in section 3(60)(c) of the General Clauses Act applies cleanly and points to the Governor. Except that in this one State, and in no other, Article 371H gives the Governor a special responsibility for law and order, discharged “after consulting the Council of Ministers” in his individual judgment. So the question we asked about a Union territory turns out to have a version in a State as well, and Arunachal has published no notification either way.

Added later: a fourth answer, and a fund

Two things from this page have travelled further than we expected, and both have landed in the same place.

The first is the question. This page asked who the “State Government” is when section 200 confers a power on it, and refused to answer. Jammu & Kashmir is now the fourth jurisdiction to raise it, and it raises the version closest to this one: a Union territory with a Legislative Assembly, exactly Puducherry’s category, with the Assembly restored in 2024. We found no notification there either, and we have left it open there too. Of the four, only Chandigarh has a government that answered in practice, by issuing the instrument.

The second is the fund. This page quoted a 2015 policy promising that penalties would be notified and that a State Road Safety Fund would be created from the compounding of offences. We have watched for that idea for six pages. It has now appeared: a framework placed before the Jammu & Kashmir Legislative Assembly records ₹1 crore approved for a Road Safety Fund.

Added later: eleven years on, somebody wrote the rule

The most quotable sentence on this page is from the Puducherry Road Safety Policy of December 2015: that the penalty for traffic rule violations would be notified, and that from the compounding of offences a State Road Safety Fund would be created. We could find no evidence that either half happened, and we have been watching for the idea ever since.

On 25 August 2026 another Union territory wrote it down properly. Ladakh’s S.O. 250 provides that its road safety fund shall comprise, among other things, a grant from the Administration “equivalent to twenty percent (20%) of the receipts collected by the Motor Vehicles Department and Traffic Police through compounding of traffic rule violations during the previous financial year”.

Added later: all five Union territories, counted

This page asked who exercises the section 200 power in a Union territory and refused to answer. We have now looked at every Union territory in India, and the set is complete enough to count.

What we could not establish

• Who exercises the section 200 power in Puducherry. Left open, deliberately. The General Clauses Act, the Government of Union Territories Act and the territory’s own rule-making practice point in different directions.
• Any section 200 notification for the territory. Not found.
• The text of G.O. Ms. No. 02/Tr. Sectt/2021. We have its description and the list of offences it touches, but not a single amount from it.
• What the “[I]” in the enabling clause is. Left as printed.
• Whether the State Road Safety Fund was created. No accounts found.
• A government figure for accidents in 2024. The comparison we drew uses a commercial compiler for that year and says so.
• Whether Puducherry prices section 177A. Nothing found.
• The authenticated consolidated text of section 200. Still not obtained, on a fifth attempt. India Code would not serve the consolidated Act, and a direct download from our environment was refused by the network. So the question we raised on the Nagaland page — whether the community service proviso survived the January 2025 substitution — remains open.

How this page was put together

The Pondicherry Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, its enabling clause, rule 42 and rule 33 are from the territory’s own published copy, read in three passes — what the document is, then its enabling clause and structure, then the specific rules quoted word for word. The police traffic offences page is from the Puducherry Police website, read the same way: the first pass gave “three or four columns and a hundred or more rows” and was wrong, as a first pass almost always is; the second gave four columns, the exact headings and the seven category counts totalling ninety-five; the third gave the rows reproduced above. Sections 177, 177A, 180, 181, 192, 192A, 196 and 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act are from published texts of Chapter XIII. Sections 3(58) and 3(60) of the General Clauses Act, 1897 and section 44 of the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963 are quoted from published texts; India Code would not serve the 1963 Act and we used a Ministry of Home Affairs copy instead, and we say so. The substituted section 200(1) and the 2017 Driving Regulations are as we set them out on our Nagaland page. The 2015 Road Safety Policy, the 2014 delegation order and the 2021 rules amendment are cited by their G.O. numbers and dates; we read the first two and have only a description of the third. Accident figures for 2013 are the territory’s own; the 2024 figure is from a commercial compiler and is labelled as such wherever it appears.

Where two documents disagreed we printed both. Where a government document carried a rendering artefact we left it as printed and said so. We did not use any commercial challan website as a source for a legal figure. We have named no private individual; the only references to people are to offices — Lieutenant-Governor, Administrator, Chief Minister, President.

The point at which a letter stops being the answer

Three of the seven rows the police mark “Court Challan” are matters where a magistrate is going to see the file whatever you write, and two more — driving when mentally or physically unfit, and weight limits under section 194(1) — carry consequences that no document from us will touch. In those, representation is the service and drafting is not.

The same goes for anything where a licence is at risk. Section 200(2) keeps section 206(4) alive through compounding, so paying does not return a seized licence, and that is not something a letter fixes.

And if anyone was injured, stop reading and get an advocate the same day.

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

Asking costs nothing. Being put in front of an advocate costs nothing. Each document carries its price on its own page, before you decide.

Puducherry is the clearest case in this series for an RTI application, at five hundred rupees, because the questions worth asking were written by the government itself in 2015 and have numbers and dates attached. Where a figure needs challenging rather than a document requesting, a written reply is the tool; for the plainer requests, a simple application.

Nothing an advocate charges comes to us.

And the usual closing admission, which we have now made on twenty-four of these pages: most people reading this should pay the correct figure and move on. We will tell you that even when it means we do not get the work.

Questions people ask