Nine state pages have had the same shape: the rules tell you very little and the money lives in a notification nobody can open. Tamil Nadu inverts half of that. It has written four composition rules into the rules themselves, each with a published slab table and each naming the provision it is substituting for — forty rupees, then seventy-five, then a hundred. On ordinary road offences it publishes less than almost any state in this series. One half transparent, the other half closed.
Every page in this series has run into the same wall. A state controls four things — what it will settle an offence for, which officers may act, where appeals go, and what machinery it builds — and almost none of it reaches a document a citizen can open. The money in particular lives in a notification under section 200, issued separately, and in most states it is either unreachable or a photograph.
Tamil Nadu is the first state to invert half of that. On road offences it publishes less than almost anybody: no schedule we could find, no officer list. On paperwork it publishes more than everybody: four composition rules written into the rules themselves, each with its own slab table, each naming the provision it stands in place of. One half closed, one half unusually open.
They cover the four moments when a vehicle owner is supposed to file something and does not. Registration or its renewal. A transfer of ownership. A new registration mark. A change of address. Each has its own rule, and each rule carries a table.
“Where there is delay on the part of the owner in making application for registration or for the renewal of a certificate of registration of a motor vehicle other than a transport vehicle under sub-section (1) or as the case may be under sub-section (8) of section 41, the registering authority may, having regard to the circumstances of the case, require the owner fo pay, in lieu of any action that may be taken against him under section 177, an amount specified in the Table below”
The word “fo” is a typographical error in the printed copy we read. We have left it as printed rather than silently tidying a quotation.
“Where there is failure to report to the registering authority, the fact of transfer within the period specified in clause (a) or clause (b) of sub-section (1) of section 50, the registering authority may, having regard to the circumstances of the case, require the transferor or the transferee, as the case may be, to pay in lieu of any action that may be taken under section 177, an amount specified in the Table below”
Note the words transferor or the transferee. Both sides of a sale are named.
“Where there is delay on the part of the owner of a motor vehicle in making an appiication under sub-section (1) of section 47 of the Act the registering authority may, having regard to the circumstances of the case, require the owner to pay, in lieu of any action that may be taken against him under section 177, an amount specified in the Table below”
This is the rule for a vehicle kept in another state beyond the permitted period, where a new mark has to be assigned. “appiication” is again as printed.
“Where there is the delay on the owner in intimating the new address to the registering authority concerned under subsection (1) of section 49 the registering authority may having regard to the circumstances of the case, require the owner to pay in lieu of any action that may be taken against him under section 177, an amount specified in the Table below”
The top slab here is a hundred and fifty, not a hundred. It is the only one of the four that differs.
| Rule | What it covers | ≤ 30 days | 31–60 days | > 60 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 98 | Registration, or renewal of a certificate of registration — section 41 | ₹40 | ₹75 | ₹100 |
| 105-A | Transfer of ownership not reported — section 50(1) | ₹40 | ₹75 | ₹100 |
| 109 | New registration mark not applied for — section 47(1) | ₹40 | ₹75 | ₹100 |
| 113 | Change of address not intimated — section 49(1) | ₹40 | ₹75 | ₹150 |
Three rules end at a hundred rupees and one ends at a hundred and fifty. The rule that charges more for a long delay is rule 113, which is about not telling the registering authority that you have moved.
The rules do not explain it and we are not going to construct a reason. We print it because a summary that said “four rules, forty, seventy-five, a hundred” would be wrong by fifty rupees in one case out of four, and because that is exactly the kind of flattening that makes a page easier to write and worse to use.
All four rules carry the same phrase, and it is more useful than it looks. Section 177 is the general penalty provision of the Motor Vehicles Act — the one that applies where no specific penalty is laid down for an offence. By naming it, the rule tells you precisely what the slab amount is standing in place of.
Compare Karnataka, whose comparable rules say the composition is accepted “in lieu of prosecution” without saying under what. Tamil Nadu identifies the provision. If there is ever an argument about what was being substituted, a named section is a stronger thing to point at than a general phrase.
Each rule says the registering authority may, having regard to the circumstances of the case, require the amount. That is a discretion exercised against a published figure, not an automatic levy.
It cuts both ways and it is worth understanding before you write anything. The authority is not obliged to compose at all; equally, where it does, the figure is the one in the table and not a number somebody picks. The practical consequence is that the circumstances are worth setting out properly, in writing, rather than left to be inferred from a counter conversation.
Rule 105-A is the only one of the four to name two people: the transferor or the transferee, as the case may be. Section 50(1) places reporting duties on both sides of a sale, and the composition rule follows that.
So a seller whose buyer never reported the transfer is not automatically outside the rule, and a buyer whose seller did nothing is not either. If you are on either side of a private sale that went quiet, this is the rule your problem sits under, and the amounts are small enough that dealing with it is cheaper than worrying about it.
Two states have put composition rates into their rules, and they chose different machinery for the same job.
Work it through and the two systems cross over. A delay of three weeks costs twenty-five rupees in Karnataka and forty in Tamil Nadu. A delay of two months costs fifty in Karnataka and seventy-five in Tamil Nadu. A delay of six months costs a hundred in both, because both have reached their ceiling.
So Tamil Nadu is dearer for short delays and identical for long ones — except under rule 113, where a long delay costs fifty rupees more than it would across the border. None of this is worth planning around; it is worth knowing because it shows that two states solving the same small problem in the same decade produced two different instruments, which is the story of this entire series in miniature.
That is a short application and it is the paper this page is built around. It is the same document we offer on the Karnataka page, because two states have the same kind of provision and the same kind of letter answers both. We would rather say that than invent a separate product to make a page look different.
Driving. All four are about failing to file something on time, and none of them touches what happens if the vehicle was used on a road in the meantime.
Using a vehicle whose registration is not valid is section 192, which other states in this series compound at two thousand rupees in Jharkhand and five thousand in West Bengal, with nothing resembling a hundred-rupee ceiling. The slab is for the paperwork. A vehicle parked while the paperwork lapsed is in a completely different position from one that kept running.
Read rule 98 again slowly. It applies to “a motor vehicle other than a transport vehicle”. None of the other three carries that qualifier: rule 105-A, rule 109 and rule 113 are written about vehicles generally.
So the published slab for a late registration or a late renewal is available to a private car, a scooter, a motorcycle and a privately used jeep, and on the face of the rule it is not available to a goods carriage, a bus, a taxi, an autorickshaw worked for hire or anything else answering the definition of a transport vehicle in section 2(47). A transport vehicle with a lapsed registration is left to whatever the department decides to do about it, and section 177 is the provision sitting behind that silence.
This matters more than it looks, because a transport vehicle is the one most likely to have a renewal falling due: its fitness certificate, its permit and its registration run on different clocks and all three have to be kept alive at once. The reader who most needs a published figure is the reader rule 98 excludes. We cannot tell you what replaces it for that owner, because nothing we found says. What we can tell you is to ask, in writing, before paying anything a counter quotes, and to keep the reply.
Rules 109 and 113 do remain open to a transport vehicle on their wording, so a lorry owner who has moved house or been allotted a new registration mark is inside the slab even though the same owner is outside it for the registration itself. We would not have predicted that, and we are reporting the wording rather than explaining it.
Since this page was written, the opposite case has turned up. Uttarakhand’s rule 45 covers the same four filing lapses in a single provision and puts a transport vehicle in its own row of the table, at fifty rupees a week under a hundred-rupee ceiling. Two states, the same central sections, and directly opposite answers on whether a lorry owner gets a published rate at all. Our page on a challan in Uttarakhand sets rule 45 out in full.
Three states in a row defeated this check because the copy of their rules carried no preamble. Tamil Nadu’s does. The notification is numbered No. SRO A-78 (b-l)/S9 — no date printed on the copy we read — and the recital runs:
“In exercise of the powers conferred by sections 28, 38, 65, 95, 107, 311 and 138 read with section 211 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 (Central Act 59 of 1988), the Governor of Tamil Nadu hereby makes the following rules”
Tamil Nadu Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 — enabling clause, as printedSection 200 is not in it.
You will have noticed it too. The Motor Vehicles Act 1988 does not have a section 311. The Act does not run that far.
Every other state in this series cites section 111 in its enabling clause, and 111 is otherwise conspicuously missing from the Tamil Nadu list. On the face of it this is a printing or scanning error for 111. We have quoted the recital exactly as printed and flagged the problem rather than correcting it, because tidying a quotation is not something a page like this gets to do. If you need the point for anything that matters, get a certified copy of the notification.
Section 211 is a general power concerning fees and conditions that several states invoke alongside their specific rule-making provisions. Bihar does the same — and therefore so does Jharkhand, which runs on Bihar’s rules. Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra reach for section 213 instead.
Nothing turns on it for a reader. It is listed here because the differences between these recitals are the clearest evidence that ten states drafted ten instruments independently, and the one thing they agree on is the thing they all leave out.
The recital above carries a number and no date. That is worth a paragraph on its own, because across ten states it is the first time we have met a founding instrument we cannot place in time.
Set it against the others. West Bengal’s compounding notification is numbered and dated to the day, 24 January 2022, and says in terms what it supersedes and what it leaves standing. Maharashtra’s list is dated 4 August 2016 and sat on a government server until a 2023 upload. Gujarat’s aggregator amendment carries a long departmental number and 16 February 2023. Jharkhand’s memo carries a number, a date and the name of the officer who signed it. Each of those lets a reader ask the only question that decides anything: is this still the one in force?
An undated copy cannot answer it. It may well be that the published original is dated and the date was lost in scanning, which is the likelier explanation given that the same copy prints a section number the Act does not contain. But a reader cannot act on what is likely. If the slabs on this page are going to be quoted at a counter, the safe version is a certified copy obtained from the department, with the amending notifications listed, and an RTI application is the ordinary way of getting one.
We have left the figures on the page because they are what the published rules say and because a reader is better off knowing a slab exists than not. We have also said plainly, here and in the gaps section, that we could not date the instrument they come from. Those two things are not in tension; printing the first without the second would be.
With Tamil Nadu the count moves. Seven states tested, and section 200 absent from every one: Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and therefore Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and now Tamil Nadu. Three could not be tested: West Bengal, Karnataka and Gujarat, in each case because the available copy began at Chapter I.
At seven out of seven this is no longer a curiosity. The power to fix compounding amounts is exercised by standalone notification everywhere, never through the rules — which is precisely why those notifications are so hard to find, and why a reader who goes looking in the rules for a figure will not find one. What Tamil Nadu and Karnataka put in their rules is something different: composition of filing lapses, which is a separate machinery with a separate source.
The rules name appellate authorities in three places that we could identify. Rule 15 makes the Deputy Transport Commissioner the appellate authority in driving licence matters. Rule 61 does the same for conductor licences. Rules 127 and 128 deal with appeals about a certificate of fitness.
We could not read the text of any of them, so the limitation period and the fee are both blanks. Those are the two things to establish first if an order rather than a challan has arrived, and a missed period is not a thing anybody can repair afterwards. An appeal is the document once an order exists.
This is the first match in ten states. Uttar Pradesh sends licensing appeals to the Deputy Transport Commissioner of the zone concerned; Tamil Nadu names the same designation at rule 15. Everything else across these pages has diverged — the rank floor for compounding runs from Police Constable to Sub-Inspector, the amount for one section varies tenfold, and an offence that is a payment in one state is a prosecution in the next.
Two states independently choosing the same appellate officer is a small thing, and after nine pages of divergence it is worth noting simply because it is the only one.
Rule 4 defines an Inspecting Officer of the Transport Department as an officer not below the rank of Motor Vehicles Inspector Grade II. Rule 52 designates assistant registering authorities. We could not read either in full.
That gives a floor for inspection. It does not answer the question of who may compound a road offence, and we are not going to let one rank stand in for the other.
Unknown. Haryana prints an officer schedule in its rules with seventeen categories; West Bengal prints one in its notification; Maharashtra’s table shows a Police Constable as the authority for most offences. For Tamil Nadu we have an inspection rank and nothing about compounding competence at all.
Because we could not find one. Tamil Nadu does not appear among the states listed in the repository that collects post-2019 compounding notifications, and the state transport site gave us nothing readable.
So this page carries what is in the rules and nothing that is not. Four slab tables, quoted in full, and no figures at all for speeding, helmets, insurance or anything else that happens on a road. That is an honest reflection of what Tamil Nadu has published rather than a gap in our effort.
Every state has unsourced fine tables circulating. Here the defect is compounded, because there is no publicly available notification to check them against even in principle. In Gujarat or Jharkhand you can at least say a table is reproducing a known instrument wrongly. For Tamil Nadu nobody outside the department appears to be able to say what the instrument contains.
Which means a quoted figure here is two steps removed from anything verifiable, and the only sensible response to one is to ask where it comes from.
One recent amendment, for anybody running passenger vehicles. G.O. Ms. No. 544, Home (Transport-I), dated 24 October 2025 added a further proviso after the fourth proviso to rule 319:
“Provided also that in the case of a mini bus, there shall be, on the left side of the vehicle, an entrance-cum-exit or an entrance in the rear and an exit in the front of the vehicle.”
G.O. Ms. No. 544, Home (Transport-I), 24 October 2025It is a construction requirement rather than a traffic rule, and it is on this page for one reason: a vehicle that does not comply is a vehicle that can fail inspection, and a failed inspection is upstream of everything else this page describes.
On 28 September 2026, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007), Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan were told that roughly ₹49,194.05 crore remained unrecovered on e-challans nationally against ₹26,175.05 crore collected.
“We also direct that let there be random checking of the vehicles and if it is found that the e-challan issued has not been abided or honored, necessary steps shall be taken to impound the vehicle itself.”
S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, 28 September 2026And while an amount is outstanding: online services frozen, no renewal and no duplicate of the registration certificate, no fitness certificate until pending fines are entirely cleared, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal with no pollution certificate issued, transfer of ownership blocked, and the driving licence suspended from renewal on multiple violations.
Read those two things together and a sequence appears that catches people in this state specifically, because Tamil Nadu is one of the few that charges for the lateness.
Rule 98 charges for a renewal of registration applied for late. The Supreme Court direction bars renewal of a registration certificate while challans are outstanding. So an unpaid challan prevents the renewal; the renewal becomes late; and the slab under rule 98 starts climbing from forty rupees towards a hundred. The amounts are trivial. The order of operations is not: clear the challan first, because the sequence cannot be run backwards.
The same shape with a different rule. A pending challan now blocks transfer of ownership, and rule 105-A charges where a transfer is not reported in time. If a transfer is stuck because money is outstanding against the vehicle, the clock in rule 105-A keeps running regardless.
Again the sums are small and again the point is the ordering. Two slow problems that each make the other slower is a worse position than either one alone.
This is the most common version of the rule 105-A problem and it is worth dealing with rather than hoping. Report the transfer yourself if you have not, keep the acknowledgement with its date, and check the national portal against the registration number.
The reason to move now rather than later is that since September 2026 an unpaid challan blocks the transfer itself. A vehicle that was never transferred can quietly become a vehicle that cannot now be transferred, and the person still showing as owner is the person the system looks at.
This page has used three words that get run together, and in Tamil Nadu it matters more than usual because all three appear.
Our Karnataka page deals with the first two at length, because that is where the question of what a state may and may not reduce was argued in public in 2019.
Nothing was found setting out how Tamil Nadu treats section 194, and after nine states we are not going to reason our way to an answer. Look at the spread. One state charges by the tonne over the limit and stops there. Another charges by the tonne and then suspends the permit if it happens twice. Bihar put a figure on it and then, when it cut every other figure in half, wrote overloading out of the scheme by name. Maharashtra refuses to take money for it at all and sends it to a magistrate. Those four outcomes came from four drafting rooms with the same central provision in front of them. A fifth guess would carry no information.
There is no payment that closes a drink-driving case in Tamil Nadu, and there is none in any other state either. Section 185 was never brought inside the compounding machinery, so a state notification has nothing to fix an amount against. What happens instead is a prosecution: the matter goes before a magistrate, and if it ends in a conviction the licence consequence follows from the conviction rather than from any transport officer’s decision. Our page on drink driving cases sets out the sequence from the roadside test onwards.
The rules are state-wide, so the four slabs are identical everywhere in Tamil Nadu. What changes is which registering authority holds your file and how long the queue is.
Nothing we found gives Chennai its own schedule or its own rank floor. That is a contrast with Rajasthan, where the compounding rank differs inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates, and with Gujarat, where the reported helmet position turned on whether you were on an urban road or a highway.
A seizure is outside everything this page describes. The slabs belong to the registering authority and a seizure does not; it is governed by the criminal procedure code, the officer who decides release is a magistrate, and the timing was rewritten when that code was recast. Paying a composition will not get a vehicle back and was never meant to. The application, the documents it needs and the periods that now apply are set out on our vehicle release and superdari page.
Establish which of three things happened before doing anything, because the answer decides where you go. A conviction can carry a disqualification ordered by the court itself. A licensing authority can suspend on its own motion without any conviction. And since September 2026 a renewal can be withheld where violations have piled up unanswered. Only the second of those is appealed to a transport officer, and in Tamil Nadu that officer is the Deputy Transport Commissioner named at rule 15. Our page on licence suspension takes the first two in turn.
The national grounds do the work here, because Tamil Nadu adds nothing of its own on road offences: an electronic notice has to carry prescribed content, reach you inside a set period, and be backed by a certificate for the device that produced it. Our page on disputing a challan takes each in turn.
Add one question particular to this state and it follows from the blank above: ask which notification the amount comes from. In most states that is a check; here it is the only way anybody outside the department can establish the figure at all. A written reply is the ordinary vehicle for putting it.
National Lok Adalats clear compoundable traffic matters in very large numbers, and a Tamil Nadu challan is as eligible for one as any other. What a Lok Adalat does not do is discount anything. It records what the parties agree; the discount, where there is one, was created earlier by the state in a notification, and the Lok Adalat is simply the counter at which the discounted figure is paid. Bihar in 2026 and Delhi in 2024 are the two instances in this series where that happened, and in both the notification came first. Nothing of that kind was found for Tamil Nadu. Our page on Lok Adalats explains what an award there is and what it is not.
The rules came from a full copy of the Tamil Nadu Motor Vehicles Rules 1989 carried on a transport information site — the same document also sits on a government audit server that declines automated access. We read it twice: once to find the enabling clause and the rule numbers, and once to take rules 98, 105-A, 109 and 113 word for word with their tables. The typographical errors we have reproduced are in that copy.
The October 2025 amendment to rule 319 came from a regulatory update service carrying the government order number and date. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service with the citation given. Two things defeated us: Tamil Nadu’s compounding notification for road offences, which we could not locate anywhere, and the text of the appellate rules.
Two dates above all, on any filing lapse — when the duty arose and when you complied — because the slabs are counted in days and that count is the whole calculation. The acknowledgement of anything filed, with its date. The challan with its section, where there is one. The registration number character for character. Proof of payment. And the case number if a court has the matter.
Anything that reads the same in Chennai as in Chandigarh has been left out: the definitions, the course a prosecution takes after the papers reach a magistrate, the rules governing electronic notices, the licensing chapter, and the law on seizure and release. All of those have pages of their own on this site and are linked above at the point where they come up. What is left here is the part that is only true of Tamil Nadu — four rules with their rates printed, one section number that does not exist, and a complete silence where the road offences should be.
When the matter has reached a court. When an order about registration, a permit, a fitness certificate or a licence has gone against you and a period is running whose length nobody has told you. When a transport business is exposed rather than one vehicle. Not, in our view, for a forty-rupee slab under rule 98 — that is a letter, and you can write it yourself if you would rather.
Two things, kept apart. The directory introduces you to advocates at no cost, keeps your number hidden until one of them accepts, and takes no commission from either side. And we draft. The document this page is built around is the written application to the registering authority invoking rule 98, 105-A, 109 or 113 with the slab and the day count set out. Alongside it: an RTI request for the compounding notification in force, a written reply where a road-offence figure is disputed, and an appeal once an order exists.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Tamil Nadu’s compounding notification for road offences — we could not locate one at all, which is why there are no road-offence amounts on this page.
The date of notification No. SRO A-78 (b-l)/S9.
Whether “section 311” in the enabling clause is a misprint for section 111. We believe it is; we have not confirmed it against a certified copy.
The text of rules 15, 61, 127 and 128 — and therefore the limitation period and the fee for an appeal.
The text of rule 4 and rule 52 in full, and who may compound a road challan in Tamil Nadu at what rank.
Whether the four slab amounts have been revised since the rules were made.
Tamil Nadu’s position on overloading under section 194.
Any Madras High Court decision dealing directly with traffic challan compounding, and current state-level enforcement figures.
The four composition rules on this page are all expressed as being “in lieu of any action … under section 177”, and three of them prescribe amounts of forty, seventy-five and a hundred rupees. Rule 113 prescribes a hundred and fifty.
That has become interesting since we wrote this page. Our page on Goa traced where these composition ceilings come from: provisions like section 50(3) of the Act permit “such amount not exceeding one hundred rupees as may be prescribed”. Goa and Uttarakhand both cap at a hundred because that is the central limit.
So a hundred and fifty rupees cannot be sitting under a hundred-rupee ceiling. Either rule 113 draws on a different parent provision with a different limit, or something has been amended that we have not traced. We have not resolved it and we are not going to guess, but it is worth knowing that the figure is the odd one out and why.
Questions are free, and so is the introduction to an advocate. Every document we write shows its price on its own page before you order it, and none of it is a share of anybody’s professional fee. Where a published rule caps your problem at a hundred rupees we will point at the rule first, and the application we offer is priced on the assumption that you would rather not spend much on a small thing.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Nine 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.
ReadSikkim publishes the region’s fullest compounding schedule — forty-four priced rows in four columns, graded by repeat offence and by vehicle class — made by Notification No. 121/MV/T dated 29 July 2010. Sixteen years on it still prices a general contravention at ₹100, has no helmet row at all because the section did not exist, and carries two figures now below the statutory minimum. Meanwhile the same department runs AI cameras with a ten-day cure window and a written promise to pay you double if the machine is wrong — the most citizen-protective provision we have found anywhere. The newest enforcement in India, pointed at the oldest price list.
ReadArunachal 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%.
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Enrolled advocates anywhere in India can apply to be listed. Your entry is published only after we verify your enrolment number with your State Bar Council.
Would rather not pick anybody? Tell us the matter instead — one form goes to every advocate at once, and the first to take it up calls you.
This directory carries no ratings, no reviews, no rankings and no fees — only the factual particulars the Bar Council of India permits, published at each advocate's own request. Browse the network · Terms for Advocates