Twenty-eight jurisdictions in, the usual complaint is that a state will not publish its prices. Sikkim publishes them, and in more detail than almost anybody: forty-four priced rows in four columns, graded by whether this is your first, second or subsequent offence, and for three sections graded again by whether you are driving a taxi, a bus, a goods carrier or a private car. It is a careful document. It is also dated 29 July 2010, which is nine years before the amendment that multiplied every penalty in the Act and created the helmet and seat belt sections, and fifteen years before three more offences joined the compoundable list. On that schedule a general contravention costs ₹100 where the Act now says ₹500, and riding without a helmet has no row at all because in 2010 the section did not exist. And the same department, on the same website, now runs AI cameras that generate challans automatically — with a ten-day warning period and a written promise to pay you double if the machine gets it wrong. The newest enforcement system we have seen anywhere in India, pointed at the oldest price list.
The Transport Department of the Government of Sikkim runs a website for Sikkim Nationalised Transport, and on it there is a page headed “Compounding of Offences (Penalties)”. That page carries the state's compounding schedule. It is not in the site's main navigation; it is reached from a sidebar menu for the Motor Vehicle Division, listed there as “Penalties”. We want to be accurate about that rather than dramatic: the page is linked, it is reachable, and we found it from the department's own menu.
What is on it is, for this series, rare. Most jurisdictions we have looked at either publish nothing, or publish a document that turns out to be about something else. Sikkim publishes a real schedule with real numbers, and it tells you which instrument made them.
“Sub- Section (1) of Section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 empowers the State Government to levy fines for violation of the provisions of Act. Accordingly, the State Government has determined the fines for various offences vide Notification No 121/MV/ T dated 29/07/2010. In the event of violation of Motor Vehicles Act & Rules the enforcement wing compounds and levies requisite fines as detailed below:”
Transport Department, Government of Sikkim — “Compounding of Offences (Penalties)”Three things in one short paragraph. The power is correctly identified as sub-section (1) of section 200. The instrument is cited by number and date. And the body that does the compounding is described as “the enforcement wing” — a phrase we will come back to, because section 200(1) asks the state to specify who those officers are, and a wing is not a specification.
We could not find Notification No. 121/MV/T itself. What is published is the department's own rendering of its contents, not a copy of the instrument, and nothing on the site links to a gazette page or a PDF.
On our Chandigarh page we were able to compare a government website against that government's own notification, and they differed in four places, one of them a date. A department's rendering of its own instrument is good evidence and it is not the instrument. For Sikkim we have only the rendering, so every figure below is the department's account of its own 2010 notification — which is the best available and is worth saying out loud.
This puts Sikkim in a halfway position between two others. Nagaland has a notification we can cite by number and date and cannot read at all, and no amounts. Sikkim has the number, the date and the amounts, and not the paper.
Here it is, transcribed completely. The column headings are the department's: Sections, then 1st Offence, 2nd Offence, Subsequent offence. Where the schedule gives a heading row with no figures and then breaks the section down, we have kept that structure, because the structure is part of what the document is.
| Sections | 1st Offence | 2nd Offence | Subsequent offence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 177 | — | — | — |
| For offences committed under sub-section (8) (11) and (13) of section 41 read with section 177 | 100 | 300 | 300 |
| 177 | 100 | 250 | 300 |
| 178(1) | 300 | 400 | 500 |
| 178(3)(a) | 50 | 50 | 50 |
| 178(3)(b) | 200 | 200 | 200 |
| 179(1) | 450 | 500 | 500 |
| 179(2) | 450 | 500 | 500 |
| 180 | 900 | 1000 | 1000 |
| 181 | 450 | 450 | 500 |
| 182(1) | 450 | 450 | 500 |
| 182(2) | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 183(1) | — | — | — |
| (a) For motor cab, auto rickshaw | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| (b) For stage carriage buses and mini buses | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| (c) For contract carriages buses, goods carriers | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| (d) For private cars, omnibuses, jeeps and others | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| 183(2) | — | — | — |
| (a) For motor cab autorickshas | 400 | 500 | 500 |
| (b) For stage carriage, buses and mini buses | 400 | 500 | 500 |
| (c) For contract carriages, buses, goods carriers | 400 | 500 | 500 |
| (d) For private cars, omnibuses, jeeps and others | 400 | 500 | 500 |
| 184 | — | — | — |
| (a) For motor cab autorickshas | 1000 | 1500 | 2000 |
| (b) For stage carriage, buses and mini buses | 1000 | 1500 | 2000 |
| (c) For contract carriages, buses, goods carriers | 1000 | 1500 | 2000 |
| (d) For private cars, omnibuses, jeeps and others | 1000 | 1500 | 2000 |
| 186 | 200 | 300 | 500 |
| 189 | 450 | 500 | 500 |
| 190(2) | 1000 | 1500 | 2000 |
| 191 | 450 | 500 | 500 |
| 192 (Only in respect of offences other than failure to obtain new registration mark under section 47 and failure to renew the certificate of registration as required under sub-section (8) and (11) of section 41 | — | — | — |
| (a) For motor cab autorickshas | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 |
| (b) For stage carriage, buses and mini buses | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 |
| (c) For contract carriages, buses, goods carriers | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 |
| (d) For private cars, omnibuses, jeeps and others | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 |
| Failure to obtain new Registration mark under Section 47 or failure to Renew registration under sub-section (8) and (11) of section 41 | 3000 | 4000 | 5000 |
| 192A | 2000 | 3000 | 4000 |
| 194. Vehicle exceeding permissible weights | 2000 | — | — |
| Upto 500kgs | 3000 | 3000 | 4000 |
| 501 to 1500 kgs | 4000 | 5000 | 5000 |
| 1501 to 2500 kgs | 4000 | 5000 | 6000 |
| 2501 to 3500 kgs | 5000 | 6000 | 7000 |
| 3501 to 4500 kgs | 6000 | 7000 | 8000 |
| 4501 to 5500 kgs | 7000 | 8000 | 9000 |
| 5501 and above | 10000 | 10000 | 10000 |
| 194(2) | 2500 | 3000 | 3000 |
| 196 | 900 | 1000 | 1000 |
| 198 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Forty-four rows carry figures. The unclosed bracket in the section 192 heading is the department's, and so is the spelling of “autorickshas”; we have reproduced both rather than tidy a government document we are asking you to check things against.
We should say this before criticising the date, because the two things get confused. Judged as a piece of drafting, this is one of the better schedules in the series.
Somebody who understood the Act wrote this. That is why the rest of the page is a criticism of a date and not of a draftsman.
The four vehicle classes appear three times: motor cab and auto rickshaw; stage carriage buses and mini buses; contract carriage buses and goods carriers; and private cars, omnibuses, jeeps and others. In this schedule the amounts turn out to be the same across all four in every case.
That looks like wasted effort and we think it is not. A schedule that sets up the classes and then prices them equally has built the structure to price them differently later without redrafting. It is the difference between a table and a framework, and whoever wrote it in 2010 clearly expected it to be revised.
Sub-section (1) of section 200 asks the State Government to specify two things by notification: the amount, and “such officers or authorities” as may compound. Sikkim's published schedule does the first and not the second. The only description of who takes the money is the phrase in the introduction — “the enforcement wing”.
Its notification has five columns, and the fifth names the authorities for every row, down to a rank floor of Head Constable. It is the only jurisdiction in this series that published both halves of section 200(1) in one instrument.
The amounts, in four columns, and a wing. The officers may well be specified inside 121/MV/T itself — the rendering on the website simply does not reproduce that part, which is one more reason to want the instrument.
We are not asserting Sikkim failed to specify officers. We are saying that what is published does not tell a driver who is entitled to take money from them, and in a state now running automated challans that question has an extra edge.
Section 178(3)(a) — travelling in a stage carriage without a ticket. Sikkim prices it at ₹50 across all three columns. The maximum under the Act today is ₹50.
Of forty-four priced rows, exactly one is at the current statutory figure, and it is there because the Act never changed it. We learned this lesson on Chandigarh, whose schedule also carries a ₹50 row and where we nearly wrote it up as embarrassingly stale before checking the Act. Not every small figure is out of date. Sometimes the law is just old and still says fifty rupees.
The overloading entry is odd, and we would rather point it out than smooth it over. The heading row reads “194. Vehicle exceeding permissible weights” with 2000 in the first offence column and nothing in the other two. Then the weight bands begin, and the very lightest band — “Upto 500kgs” — is 3000.
So the section heading carries a figure lower than the cheapest band beneath it. There are at least three readings: the ₹2,000 is a minimum that the bands then build on; it is a leftover from an earlier draft; or it is a transcription slip in the web rendering rather than in the notification. We cannot choose without the instrument.
This is exactly the kind of thing that argues for publishing the paper rather than a summary of it. A driver charged ₹2,000 for overloading cannot tell from this page whether that is a lawful figure under a heading row or an error, and neither can we.
Now the interesting part, and the reason we transcribed the whole thing instead of summarising it. Read as a document about today, this schedule is wrong in dozens of places. Read as a document about 2010, it is right — and the places where it is right are how we know it was written carefully.
A compounding schedule can only contain sections that were on the section 200 list when it was made. So a schedule is a photograph of that list on its own date, and holding Sikkim's 2010 photograph next to the 2026 list gives you a diff of two eras of Indian motor vehicle law.
Sikkim prices section 191 — selling or altering a vehicle in contravention of the Act — at ₹450, ₹500 and ₹500. Section 191 is not on the compoundable list today. It was removed by the 2019 amendment.
In 2010 it was on the list. So the row is correct for its date and impossible for ours.
We hit this first on Assam, where a section 191 mismatch sat as an open question for several pages. Then Mizoram's 2018 notification turned out to list it too, which closed the question: both documents were right on their own dates. Sikkim's 2010 schedule is the third, and it is the oldest, which makes it the cleanest illustration. Before calling a government document careless, check what the Act said on the day it was written.
Sikkim prices section 184 — dangerous driving — at ₹1,000, ₹1,500 and ₹2,000, broken down across all four vehicle classes. No limitation, no carve-out, no qualifying words.
Today section 184 is compoundable only for one limb: clause (c) of the Explanation, which is the hand-held communication device. Chandigarh's notification says so in words, in its own row — “184 (only for use of handheld communication devices)”. Sikkim's has no such qualification because in 2010 none was needed. Section 184 was compoundable in full.
Two rows, then — 191 and 184 — where the schedule is unqualified precisely because the law was unqualified. A sloppy draftsman does not accidentally get two independent 2010 positions right.
Look through the schedule for a helmet. There is none. There is no seat belt either, and nothing about two-wheeler overloading. This is the single most practically important thing on this page.
Sections 194B (seat belt), 194C (two-wheeler overloading) and 194D (helmet) were brought in by the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019. Before that there was no separate helmet offence with its own penalty. A rider without a helmet was contravening section 129, and the penalty came from the general provision in section 177.
Which Sikkim's schedule prices at ₹100.
So on the state's published schedule, riding without a helmet in Sikkim costs a hundred rupees. Under the Act as it now stands it costs ₹1,000 and a three-month disqualification of your licence. That is a tenfold difference in money and a consequence the schedule has no way of mentioning.
Here is the comparison for the sections that make up ordinary roadside enforcement. The left-hand figure is Sikkim's published first-offence amount; the right-hand one is what the central Act provides today.
While transcribing the ninety-seven row schedule published by the Andaman and Nicobar Police we found that three entries in our statutory figures were wrong. We checked against the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 itself. The corrections are:
Section 190(2) is not “using a vehicle in an unsafe condition” and is not ₹1,500 to ₹5,000. It concerns violating standards relating to road safety, control of noise and air pollution, and the fine may extend to ₹10,000. The ₹1,500 and ₹5,000 figures belong to section 190(1).
Section 192 for a first offence is a fine which may extend to ₹5,000 but shall not be less than ₹2,000. The ₹5,000 to ₹10,000 band we printed is the second or subsequent offence range.
Section 192A — the 2019 Act provides a fine of ₹10,000; we should not have carried “minimum ₹5,000”.
Update, 7 October 2026 (later the same day): the table below now carries the corrected figures. We have kept this note in place rather than quietly swapping the numbers, so that anybody who read the earlier version can see exactly what changed and why. The full account is on the Andaman & Nicobar page, and every correction in this series is collected on our state-by-state page.
| Section | Sikkim, 2010 | Act today | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 177 | ₹100 | ₹500 | 20% |
| 178(3)(a) | ₹50 | ₹50 | 100% |
| 179(1) | ₹450 | ₹2,000 | 23% |
| 180 | ₹900 | ₹5,000 | 18% |
| 181 | ₹450 | ₹5,000 | 9% |
| 182(1) | ₹450 | ₹10,000 | 4.5% |
| 189 | ₹450 | ₹5,000 | 9% |
| 192A | ₹2,000 | ₹10,000 | 20% |
| 192 | ₹3,000 | ₹2,000–₹5,000 first | inside the band |
| 194D | no row (₹100 via 177) | ₹1,000 + 3 months | 10% |
| 194B | no row | ₹1,000 | — |
| 194C | no row | ₹2,000 + 3 months | — |
| 196 | ₹900 | ₹2,000 | 45% |
| 198 | ₹100 | ₹1,000 | 10% |
The percentages are ours and they are simple division. What they describe is not a state undercutting the Act on purpose — it is a document that stopped while the law kept going.
The section below originally said two rows of this schedule sat below the statutory minimum. Neither of them does. Section 192 for a first offence runs from ₹2,000 to ₹5,000, not from ₹5,000 to ₹10,000 as we had it — so Sikkim’s ₹3,000 is comfortably inside the band. And section 192A carries a flat fine of ₹10,000 with no statutory floor at all, so its ₹2,000 row is a large gap but not a breach of a minimum either.
The section 192A row at ₹2,000 is still far below the ₹10,000 the 2019 Act provides, but calling that a breach of a minimum was the wrong characterisation. Read what follows as one gap rather than two floor breaches, and the legal question the next section raises is academic on these figures.
We found this while reading the Andaman and Nicobar schedule, which prices section 192(1) correctly in a graduated band from ₹2,000 to ₹5,000. The full account is there.
Most of that table is a state charging less than the ceiling, which is ordinary. Two rows are different in kind.
These are not amounts below a maximum. They are amounts below a floor the Act itself sets. In 2010 both were unremarkable; the minima came in with the 2019 amendment.
We are going to set this out and not resolve it, which is what we have done with every genuinely undecided question in this series.
A minimum is Parliament saying the offence is worth at least this much. Compounding substitutes a payment for a prosecution, and if the payment can be set below the floor the legislature fixed, the floor does nothing. On that reading a state figure below the minimum is simply ineffective to that extent, and the minimum governs.
Section 200 says the amount is “such amount as the State Government may…specify”, with no words tying it to the penalty the section carries. Compounding is an alternative to conviction, not a conviction, so the sentencing floor arguably speaks to what a court must impose and not to what a counter may accept.
We have found no decision on it and we are not going to invent one. What we will say is the practical consequence: if you are charged ₹2,000 under section 192A in Sikkim, that is below the Act's own floor, and it is the state's published figure. Nobody is overcharging you. Whether the figure is good in law is a different and open question, and it is not one you need to resolve in order to pay.
The compoundable list is not the one it was when we started this series either. Serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 struck out the whole of sub-section (1) and put a new one in its place, and S.O. 227(E) set that going on 13 January 2025. Three sections joined the list that no counter could touch before: 177A, sub-section (3) of section 192B, and section 201. The replacement text is reproduced word for word on our Nagaland page.
Sikkim's schedule has no row for any of them, which it cannot. What that means in practice is that for those three sections the state has specified no amount at all, and the only figure available is the Act's own — not less than ₹500 and up to ₹1,000 for section 177A, for example.
Mizoram remains the only state in this series whose own published page names section 177A and gives it a figure. Twenty-one other state schedules, Sikkim's included, do not mention it — and for most of their lives they could not have, because it was non-compoundable from its insertion in 2019 until January 2025.
Now the other half of this page, and the reason Sikkim is worth a long read rather than a short note about a stale schedule.
From 10 April 2025, the same Transport Department has been running camera-based automatic challan generation. The system detects vehicles whose documents appear to have lapsed — insurance, pollution certificate — by checking registration numbers against the national database, and issues the challan electronically to the registered owner. The department operates its own challan portal on the same domain as the penalty page we transcribed above.
We should be careful about what we do and do not know. We could not establish who built or operates the system, how many cameras there are, or where they are placed. What is on the record is the procedure, and the procedure is remarkable.
Because the public objected, loudly. Drivers and vehicle owners complained of false and unjustified e-challans, and said the system lacked accuracy and transparency, leading to undue penalties. That is the reported substance of the complaint and it is the complaint you would expect about automated enforcement anywhere.
What the department did next is the part worth noticing. It did not publish a defence of the output or a statement that the technology was sound. It published a procedure that changes how the system behaves and what the citizen is owed when it is wrong.
Four provisions, from the reporting of the order that took effect on 10 April 2025.
We have read the published material of twenty-nine jurisdictions now and this is the first cure period we have found written down anywhere.
Think about what it concedes. A lapsed insurance certificate is a real offence under section 196 and the state is entitled to charge for it the moment it is detected. Sikkim has decided, in writing, that for a document failure detected by a camera it will tell you first and give you ten days. That is the department choosing compliance over collection in a case where it had the power to choose otherwise.
This is the useful part for anybody holding an AI-generated document-failure challan in Sikkim: were you alerted, and were you given ten days? If the answer is no, the department's own published procedure was not followed, and that is a far better thing to put in a letter than an argument about whether a camera can see a windscreen properly.
And then there is this, which we did not expect to find in any jurisdiction.
“any e-challan proven to be falsely generated by the AI cameras will be cancelled, and the vehicle owner will be compensated with double the penalty amount previously imposed”
As reported of the Sikkim e-challan standard operating procedure, effective 10 April 2025Not cancelled. Not cancelled with an apology. Cancelled, and the owner paid twice the penalty.
We have spent twenty-eight pages asking governments for very modest things: publish the schedule, publish the officers, link the notification, print the table you promised. In almost every case the answer has been silence. Here is a state that went past all of that and attached a price to its own error.
We are not going to pretend we can tell you how often it has been honoured, because we cannot. A written commitment is not an audited outcome. But a written commitment is what you need before you can ask for anything, and nowhere else in this series has one.
Here is the limit, and it is the limit that this particular state should worry about most.
The procedure addresses a challan that should not have been generated at all — the camera was wrong, the documents were valid, the vehicle was misidentified. It says nothing we could find about a challan that was correctly generated for a real offence but at the wrong amount.
And that is the error this state is structurally most exposed to, because its published schedule is from 2010 and its law is from 2025. A wrong number is a different kind of mistake from a wrong detection, and only one of the two has a written remedy here.
This is the question the whole page builds to, and it is a practical question rather than a clever one. An automated system issues a challan with an amount on it. Somebody loaded that amount into the software. There are two candidates.
| Offence | If the 2010 schedule | If the Act today |
|---|---|---|
| No insurance (196) | ₹900 | ₹2,000 |
| Pollution certificate (190(2)) | ₹1,000 | up to ₹10,000 |
| Registration lapse (41 r/w 177) | ₹100 | ₹500 |
| No permit (192A) | ₹2,000 | ₹10,000 |
| No helmet (194D) | no row — ₹100 via 177 | ₹1,000 + 3 months |
The two document-failure offences the AI system is reported to target — insurance and pollution — are both in that table, and both have two different answers.
Because nothing published says. The penalty page gives the 2010 figures and does not mention the AI system. The reporting of the AI system describes the procedure and gives no amounts. The two halves live on the same domain and never refer to each other.
We are not going to guess, and we are specifically not going to guess by looking at a commercial challan website's rate list for Sikkim, which is what almost every search result for this state offers. Those lists are not this state's schedule and we have no idea where they come from.
So this is the single most useful thing an ordinary person in Sikkim can do, and it costs the price of a letter: look at the amount on your own e-challan and see which column it came from. One receipt answers a question that no published document in this state answers. If it says ₹900 for insurance, the machine is running on 2010. If it says ₹2,000, the machine is running on the Act and the published schedule is decoration.
And if you would rather have the answer officially than infer it, an RTI application asking which schedule of amounts the e-challan system applies is a single-sentence question that the department must be able to answer, because somebody configured the software.
Put the dates in order and the point makes itself without any help from us.
The kindest explanation for a sixteen-year-old schedule would be that the state had quietly stopped issuing instruments — that the machinery had seized up and the 2010 notification was simply the last thing anybody managed to do. We have seen something close to that elsewhere in this series.
It is not available here. In the fifteen months before we wrote this page, the Transport Department of Sikkim amended its own Motor Vehicles Rules and launched and then re-regulated an automated enforcement system. That is an active department. The 2010 schedule is not a symptom of paralysis; it is an item that did not come up.
A department capable of writing a standard operating procedure for artificial-intelligence cameras in April 2025 is plainly capable of reissuing a list of amounts. The schedule is not stale because nobody could update it. It is stale because updating it was never the thing that got done.
Sikkim has its own Motor Vehicles Rules, from 1991, and they have been amended more than once — there is a set of amendment rules from 2006, and the October 2024 notification above.
We should be straight about the source for that 2024 notification. Its number and date come from a commercial compliance tracker, not from a gazette we could open. We treat that as a pointer rather than as a document, and we would not rest a legal figure on it. We are willing to rest this particular conclusion on it, because the conclusion — that the department is active — is independently supported by the April 2025 procedure, which was reported by several outlets.
Those 1991 Rules are not on the department's own Acts and Rules page. We know, because we read it. It is headed “Acts And Rules - MVD” and it lists five items:
| Item as listed | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | “The Sikkim Motor Cehicles Taxation (Amendment) Act, 2011 (Act No. 16 of 2011)” | Taxation |
| 2 | “Description of Motor Vehicle ‘Schedule - I’” | Taxation schedule |
| 3 | “Vehicle For Transport Of Goods” | Taxation schedule |
| 4 | “Description of Motor Vehicle ‘Schedule - II’” | Taxation schedule |
| 5 | “Light Motor Vehicle” | Taxation schedule |
Five items, all five about tax. The parent statute is the Sikkim Motor Vehicles Taxation Act, 1982, amended by Act 16 of 2011. The misspelling of “Vehicles” as “Cehicles” is on the state's page and we have left it there, because we are quoting.
On a page whose title is Acts And Rules there is no Motor Vehicles Act, no Sikkim Motor Vehicles Rules, and no compounding notification — even though the department publishes the compounding amounts two menu items away.
We would have written that up as a local quirk if we had not just written the page before this one.
In Arunachal Pradesh, the district transport office for the capital describes its entire state-law remit as implementing the central Act, the central rules, ministry notifications, and a motor vehicle taxation Act — the only state statute it names. In Sikkim, the Motor Vehicle Division's Acts and Rules page contains only a motor vehicle taxation Act and its schedules.
Two consecutive north-eastern jurisdictions, researched separately, where a transport department's own account of its state-law universe is about collecting tax. We are not claiming a regional pattern from two cases. We are recording that when a transport department in this part of India writes down which state laws it administers, the answer has twice been a taxation statute — and that this is a reasonable thing to expect, because tax is the function a state department performs under its own legislation while enforcement runs on central law.
Nowhere, as far as we can establish. There are two routes called Public Notification on this site.
The link under Sikkim Nationalised Transport points at # — the page itself. It
goes nowhere. This is the same fault we found on
Tripura's transport site, where the Notices and Order
link was also a dead anchor.
The link under the Motor Vehicle Division opens a real page. It is headed “Public Services” and its entire content is one sentence: that city buses run at regular intervals within Gangtok until half past four daily.
So the state's only compounding notification is cited by number on a page about penalties, and neither of the two places on the site designed to hold notifications holds one. The copyright line on these pages reads 2016.
A short detour, because it explains the shape of everything above. Sikkim does not have a state road transport corporation. The government department runs the buses and the trucks itself, which is unusual in India, and it has been doing so for a very long time.
“The system of vehicular transportation was introduced in Sikkim in 1944 known as Sikkim state transport. Subsequently this was renamed as Sikkim nationalized transport department in 1955. Unlike other state where the transport sector is looked after by road transportation corporations, in Sikkim, this is directly taken care of by the government department i.e. Transport Department. As most of routes within the State were nationalized, prior to 1975 all passengers and goods were exclusively transported by SNT buses/trucks or under its supervision. However, the system has now been diluted after the extension and enforcement of Central Motor Vehicles Act. 1988.”
Transport Department, Government of Sikkim — “About SNT”Nineteen forty-four is thirty-one years before Sikkim became a State of India. The department predates the republic it now belongs to, and it predates the Motor Vehicles Act it now enforces by more than four decades.
Read that last sentence again: “after the extension and enforcement of Central Motor Vehicles Act. 1988”.
Extension is not a loose word here. It is the mechanism. A central enactment does not simply apply in Sikkim because Sikkim is in India; the Constitution provided a specific route by which central law reaches this state, and the department has used the technical term for it in its own prose, probably without thinking about it.
When Sikkim became a State in 1975, the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act inserted Article 371F — special provisions with respect to the State of Sikkim. Two of its clauses matter for this page.
(k) “all laws in force immediately before the appointed day in the territories comprised in the State of Sikkim or any part thereof shall continue to be in force therein until amended or repealed…”
(n) “the President may, by public notification, extend with such restrictions or modifications as he thinks fit to the State of Sikkim any enactment which is in force…”
Inserted by the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975Clause (n) is why the Motor Vehicles Act applies in Sikkim, and it is the clause the department's word “extension” points at. Clause (k) is the one that provided for the old Sikkim law to carry on until somebody changed it.
We are going to be deliberately unclever about this, because there is an elegant argument available here and it is wrong.
It would be very neat to say that in the one state whose Constitution contains a clause about laws continuing in force unchanged, the compounding schedule has continued in force unchanged for sixteen years. That is a pun, not a legal point.
Article 371F(k) preserves laws that were in force before 1975. Notification No. 121/MV/T was made in 2010, under a central Act that was extended to Sikkim after 1975. Nothing in Article 371F protects it, preserves it, or stops the state replacing it tomorrow morning. The schedule is old because it is old.
What Article 371F does genuinely give this page is the answer to a question nobody asks: why is a central Act of 1988 the operative law in a territory that was not part of India in 1975? Because the President extended it, under clause (n) — and the department says so, in its own words, on its own About page.
This is the third page in a row where a state-specific constitutional provision has turned up in a page about traffic fines: Chandigarh and Article 239, Arunachal Pradesh and Article 371H, and now Sikkim and Article 371F. In the first it decided who signed the notification. In the second it raised a question we left open. In the third it explains why the Act is there at all and does nothing to the schedule. We think saying which is which is more useful than finding a pattern.
We looked for a government road accident series for Sikkim and did not find one we could read directly. What we have is a local publication's compilation, drawing on the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways annual report, and we are attributing it rather than presenting it as something we read off a government page.
| Year | Accidents | Deaths | Our ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 196 | 78 | 39.8 |
| 2018 | 180 | 85 | 47.2 |
| 2019 | 162 | 73 | 45.1 |
| 2020 | 138 | 47 | 34.1 |
| 2021 | 155 | 56 | 36.1 |
The right-hand column is ours: deaths per hundred accidents. It runs between thirty-four and forty-seven, which is high by Indian standards and entirely believable on these roads, where a single loss of control on a hill has nowhere good to end and help is a long way off. 2020 is the pandemic year and should not be read as a policy outcome.
Every one of those years ended before the AI system existed. We found no published series covering 2025 or 2026. So nothing here tells you whether automated enforcement in Sikkim has saved a single life, and anybody who tells you it has, or has not, is working from numbers that do not exist.
The same compilation carries a sentence stating that during 2021 Sikkim recorded the highest fatality rate, with the figure given as 8.7.
We cannot make that work. A fatality rate of 8.7 per lakh population would be well below the national figure rather than the highest. A rate of 8.7 per hundred accidents contradicts the fifty-six deaths in a hundred and fifty-five crashes in the same table. Whatever the basis is, it is not one of the two we recognise, and the sentence does not say.
So we are printing the claim and refusing to interpret it. When a ratio is not physically plausible, the honest conclusion is that the counting basis differs — not that you have found something. We learned that on Mizoram, where a severity figure of ninety per cent sent us looking for a scandal and the answer was that two documents were counting different things.
Some sections are not on the list, never have been, and no state notification can add them. If one of these is printed on your challan there is no counter outcome to aim at.
Sections 194C and 194D each carry a three-month disqualification of the driving licence alongside the money. Section 200(2) makes clear that compounding does not displace it, and it ties back to section 206(4), under which an officer may seize the licence and forward it.
Sikkim's schedule cannot warn you about any of this. Both of those sections did not exist when it was written, and the third is priced without a word about the consequence. Only Chandigarh, in twenty-nine jurisdictions, has printed the disqualification in the rows of its own schedule.
Four questions. Unusually, all four arise directly from the state's own published pages, and two of them ask for documents the state must hold.
| The question | Why it is answerable | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A copy of Notification No. 121/MV/T dated 29 July 2010. | The department cites it by number and date on its own website. It must have it. |
| 2 | Whether any notification under section 200 has superseded or amended it since 1 September 2019, and if so its number and date. | A yes-or-no with a citation. Either a newer instrument exists or the 2010 one still governs. |
| 3 | Which schedule of amounts the e-challan system applies. | Somebody configured the software. This is the question that matters most to an ordinary driver and nobody has published it. |
| 4 | The officers or authorities specified under sub-section (1) of section 200, which the published schedule omits. | The section requires the state to specify them, so a specification either exists or it does not. |
This is the clearest case for an RTI application we have seen in twenty-nine jurisdictions, and not because Sikkim is obstructive — the opposite. It is because Sikkim has published enough to make four sharp, document-specific questions possible. You cannot ask a precise question of a state that has published nothing.
Pay it. A printed section that appears on the compoundable list, with a sum no larger than the Act permits for it, is a lawful challan and arguing about which of the state's two rulebooks produced it will cost you more than the challan. Pay, keep the receipt, read the section on it.
Write when one of these is true: the amount is above the Act's maximum; the section cannot be compounded at all; or an AI camera charged you for a document that was valid on the day, or charged you without the alert and the ten days the department's own procedure promises. That last one is Sikkim-specific, it is written down, and it is the strongest letter available to anybody in this state.
It is a category of its own, and a genuinely awkward one to grade.
| How good is the published schedule? | How modern is the enforcement? | |
|---|---|---|
| Chandigarh | Best drafted in the series — thirty rows, five columns, officers named | Conventional |
| Assam | Eighty-eight rows at the statutory maximum, issued twenty-five days after the amendment | Conventional |
| Arunachal Pradesh | None published at all | Point-of-sale machines, one district publishing its collection |
| Tripura | None published at all | Conventional |
| Sikkim | Well drafted and sixteen years old | The most advanced we have found — AI cameras, a written SOP, a cure period and double compensation |
Every other jurisdiction in this series sits roughly where you would expect on both axes. Sikkim is the only one that is at one extreme on each.
This region is now complete, and no two of its seven answers resemble each other.
Seven jurisdictions, one central section, seven different relationships between the law and the paper. That is the finding of this region and it took seven pages to earn.
We have changed our mind twice in this series about what a published schedule is for, so here is the current position, stated plainly.
On the Tripura page we stopped treating a published schedule as evidence of a well-run system. It is not. It is a citizen's protection: it lets you check a figure. Road safety depends on enforcement happening and on what follows a crash, which are different variables entirely.
Sikkim adds the next refinement. We would have said, before this page, that an out-of-date schedule was close to worthless — a document that tells you the wrong number. We no longer think so.
It lets you identify which rulebook you were charged under, which is a real and checkable thing. In Arunachal Pradesh, with no schedule at all, your only check is the statutory ceiling — useful, but it catches nothing except gross overcharging. In Sikkim you can look at ₹900 on a receipt and know, immediately, that you were charged under a notification from 2010. That tells you something true about the system you are dealing with, and no amount of statutory ceiling would have told you it.
An old schedule is worth more than no schedule, and the reason is not accuracy — it is traceability.
Which also sharpens what Sikkim should do. Not because its citizens are being overcharged — on these figures they are being charged less than the Act allows. Because a state running automated enforcement in 2026 against a price list from 2010 has made its own excellent procedure harder to hold it to.
It cannot tell you which schedule your particular challan came from, because only your receipt knows. It cannot produce Notification No. 121/MV/T. It cannot tell you whether a state figure below a statutory minimum is good in law. It cannot tell you whether the double-compensation promise has ever been paid. And it is not legal advice about your matter, which turns on your paper and not on this page.
The complaint on this page is that Sikkim has a careful compounding schedule and the law has moved sixteen years past it. The next jurisdiction we looked at has the opposite fault exactly, and putting the two together taught us something neither showed on its own.
Jammu & Kashmir has no findable compounding schedule, in a territory where the Motor Vehicles Act has only ever existed in its current form — it arrived there on 31 October 2019, sixty days after the 2019 amendment commenced, so a stale schedule of the kind this page is about could not exist there even in principle.
That territory published a figure nobody else does. In 2023 it recorded 13,72,501 traffic challans: 4,28,609 compounded and 9,43,892 sent to court. Roughly sixty-nine per cent went to a magistrate.
Which showed us a third thing a compounding schedule does, beyond letting a citizen check a figure and beyond the traceability this page argues for. A schedule is a routing instruction. It is what keeps small matters at a counter instead of in a court list. Sikkim’s schedule may be sixteen years old, but it exists, and an officer here has something to compound under.
The two jurisdictions divide the virtues neatly. Sikkim published a written remedy for AI challans — a ten-day cure window and double compensation — and that territory published none, with far more cameras. That territory published its camera uptime and its court-versus-counter split, and Sikkim published neither. Neither published what it collected.
This page is about a schedule that is too old. The thirty-fourth jurisdiction in this series, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, has the opposite problem: no schedule at all, on either side of a merger that left two bodies of law inside one territory.
They look like different failures and the remedy is identical.
A notification that adopts the Act’s compoundable list and the Act’s own figures by reference, rather than transcribing numbers that then sit still while Parliament moves.
Here, that would have meant this territory’s 2010 instrument never falling behind the 2019 amendment in the first place. There, it would mean a single document displacing two unpublished rulebooks at once. One drafting technique, two problems solved.
The honest comparison is that this territory did more than that one. It drafted forty-four priced rows and published them where a person can find them. Everything about that document was done properly except that time passed — which is a better failure than never starting.
The compounding schedule was transcribed in full from the Transport Department's own “Compounding of Offences (Penalties)” page, read directly in a browser because the ordinary fetch route was refused at the network level. We transcribed it twice, and we are glad we did: our first pass reported a three-column table with about twenty-five entries, and the page actually carries four columns and forty-four priced rows. The department's history, its Acts and Rules page and both of its Public Notification routes were read the same way, and quoted as they stand including their typographical errors. Article 371F is quoted from the Article as inserted by the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1975. The e-challan procedure is from the reporting of the order effective 10 April 2025, attributed as reporting. The accident figures are attributed to a local publication's compilation of the Ministry's annual report. For the section 200(1) list and every statutory figure we worked from the Act itself in its current form, which means as rewritten by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 once S.O. 227(E) brought that rewriting into force. Every percentage and every deaths-per-hundred-accidents figure is our own arithmetic and is labelled as ours.
Not one figure on this page comes from a commercial challan or rate-list website. For Sikkim that mattered more than usual: the search results for this state are almost entirely such sites, every one of them offering a confident table of Sikkim rates. None of those tables is the schedule we transcribed above, none of them cites an instrument, and we have no idea where their numbers come from. We would rather show you a sixteen-year-old government document and tell you how old it is.
A section that cannot be compounded. 185, 187, 188, 193, 197, 199A, or 184 beyond the device limb means there is no counter outcome and the matter begins in court.
A licence already at risk. Where the paper cites 194C or 194D, three months off the road travels with the money, and handing over the money does not buy it back — a consequence this state's schedule is silent about.
A camera challan the department will not cancel. If the documents were valid and the procedure was not followed, the department has committed itself in writing. If it declines anyway, that is the point at which written commitments need somebody who can enforce them.
Anyone hurt. Close this page and get an advocate today.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Asking is free. Being introduced to an advocate is free. Each document we draft shows its own price on its own page before you commit to anything.
Sikkim is the strongest case in this series for an RTI application at five hundred rupees, and the reason is a compliment to the state: it has published enough that four precise, document-specific questions are possible, and the most useful of them — which schedule the AI system applies — has a one-line answer that somebody in the department already knows. Where an amount or a refusal needs challenging rather than a document requesting, a written reply is the instrument, and that is also the route for a camera challan where the ten-day procedure was not followed. For the plainer requests there is a simple application. And if what you want is the 2010 notification itself, the RTI route is the only one that can produce it.
No part of an advocate's fee comes to us.
And what twenty-nine jurisdictions have not changed about our advice, detailed schedule or no schedule at all: read the section, find the ceiling, settle it, and put the paper away.
Arunachal publishes no compounding schedule, and the only state statute its district transport office names is a taxation Act. But one district did something no government in this series has done: it published what it collected. Lohit reported 3,782 challans and ₹42,18,800 in 2025 — which divides into about ₹1,115 per challan, the first real figure we have had for what is actually being charged on a road rather than what a document says it should be. And behind it sits Article 371H, under which this State’s Governor alone carries a personal responsibility for law and order — a question we raise and deliberately leave open.
ReadTripura publishes twenty-six no-parking zones and twelve parking zones in Agartala, each with a notification number and date; a tax penalty scale; and eleven amendments to its Motor Vehicles Rules, the latest dated five days before the central compoundable list changed. It publishes no compounding amount at all — and its Notices link points at nothing while its Acts link points at a file that will not open. Then its accident figures changed our mind: deaths fell forty per cent in two years while crashes fell nine. That is survival, not prevention — and it forced us to say plainly what a published schedule is actually for.
ReadPuducherry left us asking who the “State Government” is in a Union territory. Chandigarh answers it in practice: its notification of 6 December 2019 says the section 200(1) power is exercised by the Administrator — who since 1984 is, ex officio, the Governor of Punjab. What follows is the best compounding notification we have read: 30 rows, five columns, a column naming the only three authorities who may compound, the three-month licence disqualification written in (the first schedule in the series to do it), section 206(4) on the speeding rows, and section 184 limited in brackets to handheld devices. One problem: the police website misquotes it in four places, including a date fourteen months in the future.
ReadSection 200 gives the compounding power to “the State Government”. Puducherry is a Union territory — and the General Clauses Act says that in a Union territory those words mean the Central Government, while a Council of Ministers advises an Administrator whose disagreements go to the President. We set the provisions out and leave the question open. Underneath: the territory’s rules are not made under section 200 (second jurisdiction proved on the instrument’s face), two different monthly rates sit under one ₹100 cap, the police table of 95 offences carries pre-2019 figures — and the territory’s own 2015 policy recorded a death rate double the national average and promised to notify penalties and fund road safety from compounding.
ReadA compounding arrangement has two halves — what an offence costs, and who may settle it for which offences. Most states publish one. Mizoram publishes both, and they do not match. Its penalties page, updated February 2025, is the only state document in this series that names section 177A, and the only government page that prints the three-month licence disqualification under 194C. Its compounding notification is from 1 August 2018 — still listing section 191, which 2019 removed, and listing nothing 2019 inserted. So a helmet is priced at ₹1,000 on one government page and absent from the other. Plus the only rank floor in India with a uniform condition on it.
ReadTwenty-one pages read a state’s schedule. Nagaland does not publish one — but it published something no other state government did: a notice telling the public that section 200 itself had been replaced. Serial 26 of the Schedule to the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023, commenced by S.O. 227(E) on 13 January 2025, substituted section 200(1) and added 177A, 192B(3) and 201 to the compoundable list — so every schedule in this series is now under-inclusive, and the community service power may have been deleted before any state used it. Following 177A back led somewhere stranger: the regulations it punishes were superseded in 2017, and state departments are still publishing the 1989 version.
ReadTwenty pages built around a table. Meghalaya’s section 200 notification has no table at all — instead of figures it sets a rule: amounts “not lesser than fifty percent of the maximum fine prescribed”. So a 2011 document still works, while Telangana’s fixed schedule from fifteen weeks earlier went stale. But the formula only saved the money, not the scope — its list of nine sections is from 2011, and section 194D for helmets did not exist then. Chasing that took us to something twenty-one pages had never done: reading section 200 itself — which settles that the compoundable list is Parliament’s and not the states’, confirms why drink driving can never be compounded, and reveals a community service power no state has used.
ReadThree pages in this series quoted a state rule capping a composition amount at ₹100 and we treated it as a stale state figure. We were wrong, and Goa proves it. Its rule 54 names its own parent provision — section 50(3), which allows “not exceeding one hundred rupees” in lieu of action under section 177. The ceiling is Parliament’s, not the state’s. In 1988 section 177 also carried ₹100 — the two matched exactly. In 2019 Parliament raised section 177 to ₹500 and ₹1,500 and left that ceiling alone: a 31-year symmetry became a 15:1 gap by nobody doing anything. Also here: the four paperwork delays this reaches, and why the real exposure on a late transfer is never the fee.
ReadOn Shimla’s sealed and restricted roads the law that stops you is not the Motor Vehicles Act — it is a Himachal statute of its own, the Shimla Road Users and Pedestrians (Public Safety and Convenience) Act, 2007. And it contains what no section 200 schedule in India contains: a fifty per cent on-the-spot settlement written into the Act itself, twice. Also here: the RC and the licence impounded if you do not pay; a plea of guilty by money order; time limits that run against the prosecution rather than against you; two appeals with named officers and real deadlines — the first appellate route in nineteen states that is in a statute; and section 22, confirming the Motor Vehicles Act keeps running alongside all of it.
ReadSeventeen states chose their own numbers. Assam did not choose. It issued notification TMV.250/2019/67 twenty-five days after the 2019 amendment — the fastest in India — and across eighty-eight rows gave no discount at all: every figure is the Act’s own. It is also the only state in eighteen that publishes four separate schedules, one per class of officer. The price never changes between them; the permission does. Police cannot compound overloading in Assam, and the two ₹1,00,000 dealer rows are reserved to senior transport officers. On a second speeding offence the schedule offers no amount at all — it offers impounding of the licence under section 206(4). Then in June 2024 the cabinet replaced the two-wheeler document fine with a warning, which is generous and which settles nothing.
ReadThe state publishes its own price list and almost nobody has read it. Notification F 5-5/VIII-Trans/2021 of 25 October 2021, issued under sub-section (1) of section 200 and sitting on the department’s own gazette archive — one of only two post-2019 schedules in India. Forty priced entries, twenty-four kinds of officer down to a Head Constable, and a repeat-offence column used on nineteen of forty rows where Madhya Pradesh — same 1994 rulebook, same design — uses it on six of thirty-one. We measured every row against the Act: a tenth of it on one section, the whole of it on five, one row above the Act and one below its floor. Plus the three-month disqualification that no schedule in seventeen states has ever mentioned.
ReadFifteen pages of schedules answer one question — what does it cost. Kerala answers the one that matters after you have paid. Following the Supreme Court, the High Court has held that even after a section 194 offence is compounded, the excess load cannot be permitted to stay on the vehicle — and directed that the driving licence goes to the Licensing Authority under section 19(1) even where the offence is compounded under section 200. Paying ends the offence. It does not authorise the condition, and it does not stop the second track. Also here: ₹5,000 per light for after-market LEDs, and Kerala’s 726 AI cameras — 1.3 crore challans, ₹900 crore issued, ₹300 crore collected, and ₹34.8 crore of payments frozen over questions about which cameras can even read speed.
ReadEvery schedule in this series was drafted before Parliament rewrote the penalties in 2019 — Telangana’s 2011, Andhra Pradesh’s 2008, Maharashtra’s 2016. Madhya Pradesh issued one on 6 March 2023, superseding all others. It is the only post-amendment list in fifteen states. And it prices three ways at once: by section, by first or second offence, and by what you drive. We checked every row — the repeat column changes the figure on only six of thirty-one, and those six turn out to be a coherent set. Also here: ₹1,00,000 per vehicle aimed at dealers not drivers, ₹300 for a helmet (the lowest anywhere), a load-projection row priced by what you are carrying, and 19 categories of officer including District Magistrates.
ReadBoth states carry a “Compounding” link. Open Andhra Pradesh’s and it is a different law altogether — not section 200 but section 86(5), the money taken instead of suspending your permit. G.O. Ms. No. 332 of 2008, rule 217, priced by what the vehicle is and what it carries: overload ₹2,000 + ₹100 per 100 kg, ₹200 per hour for missing your timings, ₹500 per excess big animal. Medium goods pay half, light goods a third. And AP is the only state in fourteen that publishes the other half too — a prosecution table naming the eight offences no payment will ever close. Its note four is the sting: the published fees are minimums, not prices.
ReadThirteen states in, we finally have the document itself. Every page so far ended the same way — the amounts live in a notification under section 200 that nobody can open. Telangana publishes its own. G.O. Ms. No. 108 of 18 August 2011: eighteen offences, two columns by vehicle, the officers who may take the money — and a proviso that does what nothing else in this series does. It writes the state’s own ceiling: the compounding fee shall not exceed the maximum fine prescribed in the relevant penal section. Odisha showed the floor; this is the roof. One problem: it is dated 2011 and the Act changed in 2019. Also here: the real 80–90% discount of December 2023, a half-rate for agriculturists, and why the police have had to call the yearly “discount” messages fake and fraudulent.
ReadTwelve states in, this is the one that shows you the line. Odisha’s One Time Settlement Scheme for e-challans pending on 31 July 2025 is not a flat discount. Six rows say “50%”. Eleven say a rupee figure — and that figure is always the exact statutory minimum the Act prescribes, never half. Seventeen rows, no exceptions. Where Parliament wrote “may extend to” the state halved it; where Parliament wrote “not less than” the state stopped dead at the floor. We reproduce all seventeen. Also: what the annexure leaves out — helmet, seat belt, insurance, licence, overloading — the notified speed limits under s.112, and a scheme that names no power and carries no legible date.
ReadThree states have now printed a composition rate in their own rules, and all three measure delay differently. Karnataka counts months. Tamil Nadu uses bands of days. Uttarakhand counts weeks — and sets the rate by what you drive. Rule 45: one rupee a week for an invalid carriage, five for a motor cycle, fifty for everything else — and a proviso capping the lot at ₹100. So a lorry hits the ceiling in a fortnight and an invalid carriage takes two years. Unlike Tamil Nadu, transport vehicles are in. Also here: the first appeal fee printed anywhere in eleven states (₹20 and ₹25), the Deputy Transport Commissioner (legal and tribunal), and a year in which challans rose 118.77% while collections rose 37.07%.
ReadTen states in, and this is the one that is open about exactly one half of itself. Tamil Nadu publishes no compounding amounts for road offences and no officer schedule — and then prints four composition rates inside its own rules, which almost nobody is ever shown. Rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113: a late registration, a transfer not reported, a new registration mark, a change of address. ₹40 up to thirty days, ₹75 to sixty, ₹100 after — and ₹150 in the top slab of rule 113 alone. Each rule says the money is taken in lieu of any action under section 177, which no other state spells out. Also here: the enabling clause cites a section 311 that does not exist in the Act, rule 98 quietly leaves transport vehicles out, the founding notification carries no date, and section 200 is absent for the seventh time in seven tests.
ReadNine states in, the range has turned out to be enormous — and Gujarat sits at the bottom of it. Chief Minister Vijay Rupani announced the cuts on 10 September 2019: triple riding at ₹100, where West Bengal takes ₹1,000 and three months of your licence. Helmet and seat belt ₹500. A pollution offence ₹1,000, where Bengal takes ₹10,000 with a disqualification. Ten times, for the same words in the same Act. Then on 4 December 2019 the Transport Minister announced helmets would be optional except on highways and panchayat roads — we print what was said, flag that we could not find the notification, and say plainly that this is no reason to ride without one. Also here: rule 107, the first appeal procedure we have been able to read in nine states, and rule 98A’s thirty-day grievance clock for app aggregators.
ReadTwo things, and the first one saves money today. Rules 37 and 45 of the Karnataka Motor Vehicles Rules still compose a late registration renewal and a late transfer intimation at twenty-five rupees a calendar month, capped at one hundred rupees — figures written in 1989 and never updated, and the two lapses vehicle owners get caught by most. We quote both rules in full. The second thing is bigger: Karnataka is where somebody asked out loud whether a state may cut a traffic fine. The Centre said yes on 11 September 2019, Karnataka took legal opinion, cut on 21 September, and the Centre then said states had no authority at all. Both were right about different things — a state cannot touch the fine a court imposes, but section 200 gives it the compounding amount. That distinction is the key to every other state page on this site, and this is where it surfaced.
ReadEvery state publishes what you can pay. Maharashtra is the only one that also published what you cannot — a list of nine non-compoundable offences. Two of them are things your neighbours let you settle for money: driving without a permit (₹10,000 in both Jharkhand and West Bengal) and overloading (₹20,000 plus ₹2,000 a tonne in Jharkhand). Here there is no amount at all — a court decides, both the driver and the owner are charged, and a repeat permit offence carries a minimum three-month sentence. The same document shows a Police Constable as the compounding authority for about 95 of 104 offences, the lowest rank floor of any state we have examined and the exact opposite of Bengal. Its money is from 2016 and stale, it is still sitting on a government server, and we say so.
ReadFive states in, every page had a hole — Haryana told us who may issue a challan but never what it costs, Jharkhand the reverse. Bengal prints both halves in one notification. Schedule I names who may compound, and for oversized vehicles under section 182B that is the Director of Transport alone, one officer for the whole state. Schedule II runs to twenty-six rows and six columns, because Bengal is the only state that prints the section you broke and the section you are charged under separately — which makes a challan testable on its face. We reproduce both schedules. Then overloading, which is deliberately left out: it runs on its own notification that suspends the permit on a second offence and cancels it on a third, with the registration suspended behind it. Also: a ₹10,000 figure where Jharkhand charges ₹1,000, three rows where a licence disqualification rides along with the payment, a rule 349 that may crack our five-state pattern, and a police page still quoting superseded notifications.
ReadA District Transport Officer in Patna wrote that traffic challans could not be taken up at a National Lok Adalat. Somebody took that letter to the High Court — and fourteen months later the State had notified a scheme letting old e-challans be closed at fifty per cent, with the Chief Justice directing where the counters should stand and that no money be taken in cash. This page traces the whole sequence from Rani @ Rani Tiwari v. State of Bihar to Notification No. 3261 of 30 April 2026, sets out exactly which offences the scheme covers — and the one it leaves out, which is overloading, the most expensive offence in the Act. Also: why the Lok Adalat did not reduce anything, a correction to our own earlier pages, section 200 missing for the fifth state running, and the Supreme Court order pulling from the other end.
ReadThree state pages in we had to keep telling readers the amounts could not be printed, because the document fixing them was unreachable or a photograph. Jharkhand broke that. Its Transport Department memo Pari. Ayu.-192/2016 carries a five-column schedule — section, offence, penalty before 1 September 2019, penalty after, and the compounding fee — and we reproduce all twenty-five rows. Then the harder half: section 185 and a dozen others are not in it at all, section 194A has an empty compounding cell, and a second speeding offence carries a licence impoundment instead of a sum. Also here: three rows whose penalty columns appear transposed, the three-month deferral of September 2019, the state rules of 2001 that will not open, a Delhi address printed on the state enforcement page, and the Supreme Court order of 28 September 2026 that turns an unpaid challan into a blocked registration.
ReadAcross three state pages we kept asking the same question — who is actually allowed to stop you and write this — and Haryana is the first state that answers it. Rule 225 of its 1993 rules, substituted in 2021, appoints seventeen categories of officer and lists the sections each may challan under. We reproduce the whole schedule. The police floor is an ASI, their list is shorter than the transport list, and overloading under section 194 does not appear against the police at all — it is transport department work. Two provisos matter: five officers cannot touch private buses, and police powers widen outside municipal limits. Section 200 is missing from the enabling provisions for the third state running, so the amounts come from a notification we could not find — and we say so rather than copying a rate list.
ReadOur second state page, and the finding at the top of it is one the High Court only said out loud in August 2026: Uttar Pradesh has no separate traffic police cadre, and the Bench asked the government to decide on creating one. The state’s own rules contain no compounding provision — section 200 is not even among their enabling sections — so the amount comes from a notification, dated June 2020, and the schedule everybody quotes online is older than the 2019 amendment. An appeal in a licensing matter goes to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the Zone, not the RTO. Plus the High Court’s own Payment Setu portal across 74 district courts, the school-vehicle chapter nobody mentions, number portability, and why this page carries no compounding figures.
ReadA stay order is not a thing you can go and collect. It is an order made inside a suit, which is why the document that has to exist first is the plaint and not the application. The Supreme Court set three requirements, and most applications die on the third: irreparable injury means an injury that money at the end of the case cannot adequately repair — so “I will lose money” is usually not enough. Before any of that there is a gate: section 41 of the Specific Relief Act lists eleven situations where an injunction cannot be granted at all, including stopping a criminal proceeding, and one added in 2018 for infrastructure projects. Also the ex parte order and the thirty days in Rule 3A that people mistake for a result, what happens to somebody who breaks an injunction, and the appeal that runs both ways.
ReadAlmost nobody reading this chose arbitration. It was in the loan agreement, the builder agreement, the insurance policy — a clause nobody negotiated. So the first question is not how arbitration works; it is whether that clause can be used the way the other side says. On the two commonest versions the Supreme Court has said no. A party interested in the outcome cannot alone appoint the arbitrator (2019), and a Constitution Bench held in November 2024 that unilateral appointment clauses in public-private contracts violate Article 14. And if you are a consumer, the clause does not shut the consumer forum. Plus the twelve-plus-six month clock, the grounds for setting an award aside in the statute’s own words, the 2025 ruling on when a court may modify one, and why filing a challenge no longer freezes the award.
ReadThe one rule a court applies against you even if the other side never mentions it. Section 3 says a late suit shall be dismissed although limitation has not been set up as a defence, so hoping nobody notices is not a plan. We set out how the Schedule really works — and why the third column, saying when time starts, decides more than the number of years does. What restarts the clock (a signed acknowledgement, a recorded part payment) and the condition both carry. Why delay can be condoned in an appeal but never in a suit. The Covid exclusion of 15 March 2020 to 28 February 2022, still worth nearly two years and still forgotten. And section 27, where losing the period does not just bar the suit — it extinguishes the ownership.
ReadEvery page on this subject opens by saying mediation is voluntary. That is true of one of the three mediations you can end up in. Before a commercial suit it is compulsory, and the Supreme Court has treated compliance as jurisdictional — skip it and the plaint is liable to be rejected. And a court can refer you without your consent at all, unlike arbitration. We also did the thing nobody seems to have done: checked how much of the Mediation Act 2023 is actually in force. The commencement notification we could find switched on the regulator and the rule-making power — not pre-litigation mediation, not confidentiality, not enforcement. Plus the section 12A judgments from 2022 to October 2025, what is privileged, and the four grounds on which a settlement can be undone.
ReadTwenty pages on this site mention it and none of them explained it, so here it is from the only angle that matters: the point of view of the person being asked to sign. A Lok Adalat cannot decide anything — the Supreme Court said so in 2008 — it only records what you agree to. And section 21(2) makes that record a civil decree against which no appeal lies to any court. Not a suit to set it aside, and not objections in execution: the Supreme Court shut both doors in November 2025, in a case where a man lost a property he had bought for four crore rupees through an award he was never party to. Also what can and cannot be referred, the divorce line nobody reconciles, the court fee refund, why the traffic challan discount has no instrument behind it, and the Permanent Lok Adalat, which can decide against you.
ReadThe words are not interchangeable in India and the difference has consequences. Who may appear for you, where notaries, legal consultants, document writers and “case managers” fit, and how to spot somebody who is not entitled to practise.
ReadA three-question test that does not depend on how frightened you are, an honest list of when the answer is no, what the Advocates Act actually restricts, why a power-of-attorney holder cannot argue your case, and who is entitled to free legal aid.
ReadHow to verify that somebody is really enrolled, why specialisation by forum beats seniority, the Bar Council rules that protect you before you sign anything, the conflict question to ask on day one, and the question almost nobody asks.
ReadWhy no honest Indian site publishes an advocate’s fee, the fee structures actually used, why “no win no fee” is not permitted here, what is a fee and what is an expense, and how to agree it so there is no argument later.
ReadWhat to take, in what order, what to say about the facts that hurt you, what a vakalatnama actually does and how long it lasts, what to write down before you leave, and what should happen in the first week afterwards.
ReadWritten for both sides. Why a single line at three thousand five hundred rupees decides which of two separate systems your tenancy is in, the closed list of grounds under Section 14, the first-default protection most tenants never hear about, the summary procedure under Section 25B that is lost by doing nothing, notice under Section 106, and why changing the locks is the worst thing a landlord can do.
ReadThree different suits wear one name. Whether you are asking for a share, for possession, or for a document to be undone — and why each has a different clock. Self-acquired against coparcenary, a daughter’s right by birth, why a mutation entry is not ownership, why GPA and will papers are not a conveyance, and the two decrees a partition suit ends in.
ReadOne “no” at the counter is not where the law ends. The three doors, in the order the law gives them — the police station, the DCP under Section 173(4), the Magistrate under Section 175(3) with its new affidavit condition — plus the complaint case where the accused is now heard first, and why the officer refusing you is sometimes right.
ReadThe distinction everything rests on, and why it is decided on the medical record by another doctor rather than by how bad the outcome was. Why the complete record is the first step and must be obtained before you complain, consent as a separate and often stronger ground, and the three roads — compensation, prosecution and professional discipline — of which only one pays.
ReadThe one law that can take back property you already signed away. Section 23 and what Urmila Dixit (2025) settled about eviction and possession, the Maintenance Tribunal before a Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the ceiling on the monthly amount and the route that has none, whether you may actually bring a lawyer, and where a daughter-in-law’s right of residence fits.
ReadFees, transfer certificates, admission and expulsion — and why the door that opens is the Directorate of Education rather than a court. What the Delhi High Court held in May 2026 about a hike at the start of a session against one imposed mid-session, why a certificate cannot be held against your dues, and how to ask the regulator for something it can actually do.
ReadFive different papers, five different answers to “what if I do nothing”. A private legal notice against a civil summons, a criminal summons, a tribunal notice and a police notice; the thirty days that is directory and the hundred and twenty that is not; ex parte orders and the thirty days to undo one; and why complying with a Section 35(3) police notice now protects you.
ReadWhat a family does in the first twenty-four hours, and the two rights nobody will offer you: default bail under Section 187(3), which turns on sixty or ninety days rather than the merits and dies the day the chargesheet is filed, and release under Section 479 after half the maximum sentence — a third for a first-time accused. Plus sureties, conditions, and why a bail order is not release.
ReadThe court is not deciding which parent is right. It is deciding one thing — the welfare of the child — and that re-sorts every argument you were planning to make. Custody, guardianship and access are three different things; Section 6(a) gives a starting position for a child under five and not a rule; joint custody is a Law Commission recommendation and not a statute. Plus interim orders, access as the child’s right, parental alienation, passports and travel, and what to do when an order is broken.
ReadGetting the content taken down and getting the person acted against are two different cases, with different addressees and different clocks. The Grievance Officer’s twenty-four hours and fifteen days, the twenty-four hour rule for nudity and morphed images, the thirty-day appeal almost nobody uses, why Shreya Singhal explains the wall you hit, Zero FIR, preservation requests, and the Section 63(4) certificate that decides whether your screenshots count at all.
Read“The marriage is over” is not a ground — Parliament never made irretrievable breakdown one, and no Family Court can act on it. So the case turns on what you can PROVE. The Section 13 grounds as they actually read, what cruelty means after Samar Ghosh and what it does not, desertion and its two years, the one-year bar, and why Section 23(1)(a) destroys a manufactured ground.
ReadThe danger is rarely a confrontation — it is a false complaint at a police station, and from that moment the State does the family’s work for it. What answers it is her own statement before a Magistrate. Plus the protection petition, why consenting adults are covered married or not, the three-day rule when you move, and the honest Delhi position on the thirty-day notice. For adults only.
ReadThe paper in your hand picks your procedure — not the amount, and not how obviously you are in the right. On a cheque, a note, a written contract or a guarantee, Order XXXVII gives you a suit in which the defendant has no right to defend. Plus the three-year clock, the written acknowledgment that restarts it, why a cheque bounce complaint is not a recovery suit, the mandatory mediation that gets commercial suits rejected, and why winning is not the same as being paid.
ReadTwo questions come before the facts: which door, and how much time is left. Section 6(1) built the Local Committee for the two situations in which the office route is useless — fewer than ten workers, or a complaint against the employer himself. Section 9(1) starts a three-month clock from the last incident, extendable by three, and recent decisions treat the outer edge as a wall. Plus who counts as an employee, what counts as a workplace, the conciliation that may not end in money, the inquiry’s civil-court powers, and why Section 28 means the committee and the police are not an either–or.
ReadWhat your building legally IS decides the case, not what you are complaining about. Most Delhi RWAs sit under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 — a registration statute with no power to levy maintenance, fine a member or recover anything, so the charge rests on the bye-laws and is enforced only by suit. A co-operative society goes to the Registrar under Section 70, where an election challenge dies in thirty days. And a building under the Delhi Apartment Ownership Act, 1986 has a Deed of Apartment, parking inside the statutory definition of common areas, dues as a charge on the flat, and model bye-laws that make elections and audit compulsory.
ReadA challan is two different things wearing one name. Some can be paid and closed; the rest cannot be paid at all, because the compounding list takes in Section 184 only for handheld phone use and leaves Section 185 out altogether. The notice is not a bill either – it is issued under the section headed “Restriction on conviction”. Plus what paying on the Virtual Court actually means, why the “three challans” suspension rule does not exist, and what to do when challans keep arriving for a car you sold years ago. No penalty figures, and the page says why.
Read“Court” on a challan does not mean a trial. It means a Magistrate now holds the file, and that the next click is a plea rather than a payment. How to find the case – and why a driving licence number will never find it. Why the summons only appears after you act. What contesting actually does, and the published figure showing how few people do it. The Act’s own short route, why traffic offences are expressly NOT petty offences under the new code, when you must attend in person, what the court can do to your licence, and what five official sources say – and do not say – about ignoring it.
ReadA licence goes out of two different doors – a government office under Section 19 and Rule 21, or a courtroom on conviction – and the grounds, the appeal and the way back differ for each. The appeal is thirty days from RECEIPT, and we found no provision for condoning delay. A High Court has quashed a suspension that named no ground and recorded no satisfaction. The licence does not simply revive when the period ends: the Act wants a refresher course, or a fresh test and a medical certificate. And almost nobody knows you can apply to have a disqualification removed after six months. Plus why there is no three-challan rule and no points system in force.
ReadEverybody argues “it was not me”. The strongest ground is usually not your evidence at all – it is whether the challan complies with the rule the government wrote for issuing it. Rule 167A requires the camera to carry a yearly approval certificate, requires the challan to be accompanied by FIVE named things including a photograph showing the offence AND the plate, and requires the notice to be sent within fifteen days. And Rule 167A(10) gives an owner who was not driving an express right to say so – a right the portal does not implement. Plus Delhi’s own complaint form, the cloned-plate gap nobody fills, and why Section 209 is a far weaker shield than people think.
ReadWe read the registration chapter of the Act section by section, and the answer is not the one anybody wants: there is no provision by which a seller can take himself off the register without a transfer being completed. Transfer needs the buyer. Cancellation is about the vehicle – destroyed, beyond repair, removed out of INDIA, not out of the State. And the challans are the smallest part of it: the Supreme Court has held that a registered owner who purported to sell but still appears in the records is not absolved of liability for compensation. Form 29 is necessary and has not been shown to be sufficient. One rule prevents all of it.
ReadThe counter says clear the challans first, and nobody says under what. We went looking. The Act has no such provision at all – not in section 48, not in section 50, not in fitness or permits. The power is in a rule, and the rule is narrower than the practice: ninety days, the offender’s own licence or the vehicle named in the challan, and permit, fitness and tax expressly left out. A 2018 ministry circular goes further and cites no authority for doing so. Then on 28 September 2026 the Supreme Court directed much of it anyway. Plus the Kerala judgment holding that a transfer after a death is not a transaction at all.
ReadThe section is headed “offences by juveniles” and the person it makes guilty is an adult: the guardian of the child or the owner of the vehicle, and those can be two different people. ₹25,000 and up to three years, the registration cancelled for twelve months, and no licence for the child until twenty-five. The part nobody prints: Section 199A is not in the compounding list, so it cannot be paid at a counter and must go to court. Plus the complete exemption in sub-section (3), the written representation the Act requires before a registration is cancelled, and why the Pune case was not this section at all.
ReadTwo things are said everywhere about this and both are wrong. It cannot be paid online – Section 185 is absent from the compounding list, so a court challan is issued and a magistrate decides, which the Delhi Traffic Police has itself confirmed. And six months in prison is the maximum, not the outcome: the reported figures show custody in under a tenth of cases, for days. The consequence that is real, and that nobody prints, is the licence – on conviction, disqualification of at least six months, and the provision carries no “special reasons” escape at all.
ReadSince the transport strike of January 2024 every page on this subject has been built on a provision that has never been brought into force. The government’s own release excluded Section 106(2) when the new criminal laws commenced, and the Delhi High Court confirmed in July 2026 that it was still unnotified. The charge in practice carries five years and is classified as bailable. Plus the twenty-four hour reporting window almost nobody knows about, and the ₹2 lakh claim the Supreme Court found only 205 families in the whole country made in a year.
ReadAcross nine pages on challans and road cases we kept saying this is a court application and not something to settle at a police station, and kept not explaining how. This is that page. The old provision had no deadline at all – its replacement gives the court fourteen days to record and photograph the vehicle and thirty days to order its release, and a High Court enforced that in August 2026. Plus why the registration certificate is not the whole answer, how much the bond can lawfully be, and the special statutes where the Magistrate has no power at all.
ReadOur first state page, and the state-specific part is narrower and stranger than people expect. Rajasthan’s notification binds officers by rank and by area: a Head Constable may compound inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, an Assistant Sub-Inspector everywhere else. The state’s own motor vehicles rules contain no compounding provision at all. Plus the thirty-day appeal to the RTO, a quarter of every compounding fee going to a non-lapsable road safety fund, who really owns the highway cameras, and why a seized vehicle here is so often a mining matter.
ReadSearch “Punjab e-challan” and almost everything you get belongs to Pakistan — the Punjab Safe Cities Authority in Lahore, a row of .pk sites, and commercial services. Not one Indian government result. The reason is that Punjab publishes almost nothing: its Transport Department’s whole notifications page holds nine items, four of them single scanned pages 11, 12, 16 and 17 of one user-charges file, and no section 200 schedule at all — while its own menu sends you to the centre. One date does exist: 19 December 2019, so here alone you can ask for the notification by name. Plus three two-second tells, the Gurmukhi-versus-Shahmukhi check, and why Chandigarh — whose Administrator is Punjab’s Governor — wrote the best schedule in India.
ReadOne question put to thirty-four Indian states and union territories: have you published what a challan costs, and who may take it? Five published a schedule after the 2019 amendment, seven are still running documents older than it — the oldest from 2008 — and around twenty publish no amount at all. In the whole country only two schedules tell you that a helmet offence costs three months of your licence. The full comparison table with every jurisdiction linked, the four jobs a schedule actually does, the patterns we did not expect — and every correction we have had to publish about our own pages, in one place.
ReadThe only jurisdiction in this series that was created while the amended Act was already running. Two Union territories merged on 26 January 2020, but section 17 of the Merger Act kept both rulebooks alive in their own halves — so the real question is whether Daman runs on one schedule and Silvassa on another. Neither exists. The registration mark was unified in four days; the municipal regime in eight months; the compounding schedule not in six years. The Transport Department publishes four documents, the whole legal library two entries, the police force’s rules shelf one reservation roster — and the traffic police page never once uses the word challan.
ReadThe smallest jurisdiction in this series, and the first where we had to ask whether our own question is fair. No two inhabited islands are joined by a road. The police run seven coastal security stations and publish no traffic page. The Department of Road Transport names no Act and no Rules at all — the only one of thirty-three — and a single Motor Vehicle Inspector is Licensing Authority for the whole territory. No section 200 notification could be found. We argue it both ways and then say where we come down: the principle holds, the scale does not — and a one-page notification would settle it.
ReadThe A&N Police publish a ninety-seven row spot fines list — the largest and most current schedule in this series. It marks which offences go to court instead of a counter, notes where the licence is to be seized, and prices the one compoundable limb of section 184 at ₹3,000 while sending the other five to court in the same row. Its notification is dated 22 days after the 2019 amendment — faster than Assam, which we had called the fastest. And row 17 of it caught three wrong figures in our own tables, which this page sets out in full.
ReadOn 25 August 2026 Ladakh notified S.O. 250, directing twenty per cent of everything collected by compounding traffic violations into a road safety fund — non-lapsable, audited by the CAG, and spent on signage, black spots, driving test tracks and ambulances. Puducherry promised exactly this in 2015 and never did it. The same notification calls a compounding fee one taken by “the officers authorised under Section 200” — so that authorisation exists, and we still could not find it. A territory that has published where a fifth of your money goes, and not what the money is.
ReadIn 2023 this territory recorded 13,72,501 traffic challans — 4,28,609 compounded and 9,43,892 sent to court. That is sixty-nine per cent going to a magistrate, which is the opposite of what section 200 exists to achieve, and no other jurisdiction in this series publishes the split at all. We could find no compounding notification here. The Act itself only arrived on 31 October 2019 — sixty days after the amendment — so this is the one place in India that has never known the pre-2019 Act. And in Srinagar 835 cameras now issue challans with no published procedure, for the one offence that costs you your licence.
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Open the directorySikkim is one of the few states where the amount on your challan tells you something on its own — it reveals whether you were charged under the published schedule of July 2010 or under the Act as it now stands, and those give different answers for almost every section. If a camera generated it, tell us whether the documents were valid on the day and whether you were warned and given ten days, because the department has put both of those in writing. Your request reaches the whole directory together and whoever is free first takes it; nobody sees your number until an advocate accepts; and for anything we draft ourselves there is nothing to pay up front.
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