A traffic challan in West Bengal: the only state that prints both halves.

What Bengal does that nobody else does

By this point in the series the division of labour is familiar. Parliament writes the offences and the ceilings; a state decides what it will take to settle one without a trial, which of its officers may take it, where appeals go, and what machinery it builds. Five states in, no state had published more than a fragment of its own share.

Bengal publishes nearly all of it, and in one place. One notification carries the officers and the money. It also carries a piece of information no other state prints at all, which is the distinction between the provision you breached and the provision you are being charged under. And then, for the one offence where a figure would understate what is happening to you, it stops giving figures and gives a sequence of consequences instead.

The document this page is built on

Transport Department, Government of West Bengal, Notification No. 208-WT/3M-128/97(Pt. IIID), dated 24 January 2022, signed by Rajesh Kumar Sinha, Secretary to the Government of West Bengal. It is made under section 200 of the Motor Vehicles Act, and it ends with four words that matter: “This shall take immediate effect.”

Its opening is in the old form, and worth reading once:

What it swept away, and the one thing it spared

This notification does not sit alongside what came before it. It replaces it. In its own terms it supersedes all the earlier notifications issued in this regard, with a single exception preserved by name: notification no. 2023-WT/3M-128/1997(Part IIID) dated 30 July 2021.

Hold on to that exception, because it explains a gap you will notice in the table. The spared notification is the overloading one, and overloading is consequently missing from the twenty-six rows. Bengal did not forget it; Bengal deliberately left it where it was.

Which offences can be compounded at all

The opening sentence above is the gate. Twenty-eight provisions are named, and if the section on your challan is not among them there is no compounding route in Bengal, whatever anybody at a counter says. Section 185, drink driving, is not there — and would not be in any state, since it is not compoundable anywhere in India.

Schedule I: who may compound

Four lines, and the fourth is the one worth staring at.

The offence only one officer in the state may touch

Section 62A of the Act is the prohibition on registering, or issuing a fitness certificate to, a vehicle that exceeds the prescribed width, height, length or overhang; section 182B is the penal provision that goes with it. For that category, and that category alone, Schedule I gives the power to the Director of Transport and to nobody else.

One officer, for the whole of West Bengal, for one kind of offence. We have not seen another state concentrate a compounding power like that. The practical consequence is checkable: if an oversized-vehicle matter is being settled at a district counter, the person settling it is not the Director of Transport, and Schedule I says the Director of Transport is who it has to be.

The rank floor, and how it compares

For everything else the floor is a Motor Vehicles Inspector on the transport side and a Sub-Inspector or Sergeant on the police side, and it is the same inside Kolkata as outside it. That last point is itself a choice. Rajasthan makes the floor depend on geography — Head Constable inside the Jaipur and Jodhpur Commissionerates and Assistant Sub-Inspector elsewhere. Haryana goes down to Assistant Sub-Inspector, with a separate rule for outside municipal limits.

Bengal sets a higher floor than either and applies it uniformly. Whether that produces better enforcement we have no way of knowing. What it produces for a driver is a simpler question at the roadside: the officer compounding this is at least a Sub-Inspector, or he should not be compounding it.

Why Schedule II has six columns

Most state schedules have three or four: a serial number, a description, a section, a figure. Bengal has six, and the extra pair is the interesting part. The headings are: Sl. No.; Nature of offence; Violation of Section of Motor Vehicles Act, 1988; Penal Section of Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 under which offence committed is to be compounded; Penal measures, first offence; and Penal measures, second and subsequent offence.

So the schedule records two different section numbers for the same event. You drove without a fitness certificate, which breaches section 56; you are charged under section 192. You drove without a permit, which breaches section 66; you are charged under section 192A. You carried an excess load, which breaches sections 113 and 114; you are charged under section 194 and its sub-sections.

What the extra column lets you check

It makes a challan internally testable. Elsewhere a challan carries one number and you either accept it or you do not. In Bengal the schedule tells you which violation ought to sit behind which penal section, so a mismatch between the two is visible on the face of the paper.

We are not going to tell you that a mismatch wins you the matter, because it depends entirely on what the mismatch is. What we will say is that it is a question you can ask here with a document behind you, which in five other states you could not ask at all.

Schedule II, all twenty-six rows

Reproduced below with the columns the notification uses. We have shortened one or two of the longer descriptions for width; the section numbers and the money are as printed.

How to read your own row

1. Take the penal section off your challan — the one you are charged under, which is the number the schedule is keyed to.
2. Find it in the fourth column. Note what the third column expects the violation to be, and compare it with what your challan records.
3. Check whether you are on the first-offence figure or the repeat figure. Several rows double.
4. Check whether the cell contains anything besides money. Three rows carry a three-month disqualification and one carries an impoundment.
5. If the row is number eighteen, you are not in this schedule at all, and the overloading section below is yours.
6. Note the rank of whoever is compounding it, because Schedule I makes that a real question here.

The heaviest rows, and who they are aimed at

One lakh rupees per motor vehicle for unauthorised alteration by a manufacturer or dealer under section 182A(1) is the largest figure in the schedule by a factor of ten. Alteration by the owner, under 182A(4), is five thousand per alteration.

The gap between those two is the point. Bengal is pricing the trade and the individual differently for what is, physically, the same act. If you have had a vehicle modified, which of the two rows you fall into depends on who did it, and that is a question worth getting right before anybody writes a figure down.

Where a disqualification rides along with the money

Three rows attach a three-month disqualification from holding a licence to the compounding itself, not to a conviction: section 190(2), section 194C and section 194D. A fourth, section 183/1 on a second offence, has the licence impounded under section 206(4).

This is the part of the Bengal schedule people are least likely to expect. In most of the country, compounding is the route that avoids consequences beyond the payment. Here, for a helmet offence or a pillion offence, the published position is a thousand rupees and three months without a licence. If somebody has told you a helmet challan in Bengal is just a thousand rupees, the schedule says otherwise.

Ten thousand for the section Jharkhand charges a thousand for

Section 190(2) covers breach of the standards prescribed for road safety, control of noise and air pollution. Bengal compounds it at ten thousand rupees with a three-month disqualification, on the first offence, and at the same on the second.

Our Jharkhand page carries that state’s schedule, where the same provision compounds at one thousand rupees first and two thousand on a repeat, with no disqualification in the compounding column at all. And Gujarat sits lower still, at a thousand rupees for a small vehicle and three thousand for a large one — a tenth of the Bengal figure, with no licence consequence attached. Same Act, same section, ten times the money and a licence consequence on top. It is the sharpest divergence between two states that this series has turned up, and it is the clearest possible answer to anybody who thinks a national rate list means anything.

The second speeding offence: money and the licence

A first speeding offence is a thousand rupees for a light motor vehicle and two thousand for the medium and heavy passenger and goods classes. A second doubles both — two thousand and four thousand — and the schedule adds that the licence of the driver shall be impounded under sub-section (4) of section 206.

Compare Jharkhand again, where the second speeding offence carries no sum at all and only the impoundment. Bengal takes the money and the licence. Two neighbouring approaches to the same repeat offence, and the difference is not small for anybody who drives for a living.

The three-year window on dangerous driving

Section 184 is five thousand rupees, and ten thousand if committed within three years of a previous similar offence. That period is written into the cell.

It is a small drafting detail with a real effect. Most schedules say “second or subsequent offence” and leave open the question of how far back the first one counts — a question that has to be argued when it arises. Bengal has answered it in advance. If your previous dangerous driving offence is more than three years old, the schedule puts you back on the first-offence figure.

Excess passengers, and the obligation that is not money

Row nineteen reads: two hundred rupees per excess passenger, offloading of the excess passengers, and arrangement of alternative transport for them by the offender.

That third limb is unusual and it is not a token. For an operator caught with an overfull vehicle on a route, the two hundred rupees a head is trivial and the duty to put those passengers into another vehicle, at your cost, on the spot, is not. Anybody running passenger services in Bengal should price that in rather than reading only the first number in the cell.

Madhya Pradesh has since given us a fourth answer on the same provision: a minimum of ten thousand rupees plus a thousand per tonne over the limit, with the obligation to unload written into the entry exactly as it is here. Half Bengal’s flat figure and half its per-tonne rate, with the same practical sting attached. Our page on a challan in Madhya Pradesh has the comparison across five states.

Why overloading is not in the schedule

Row eighteen is the only row in Schedule II with no figure in it. Where the money would be, it says the fine is to be realised in terms of notification no. 2023-WT/3M-128/1997(Part IIID) dated 30 July 2021, annexed to it. That is the one notification the 2022 instrument expressly declined to supersede.

A state does not carve an exception into a supersession clause by accident. Overloading was kept out because what Bengal does about overloading does not fit in a cell.

The overloading ladder

Notification No. 2023-WT/3M-128/1997(Part IIID), dated 30 July 2021, signed by the same Secretary, and in force, in its own words, “with effect from the 1st of August, 2021”. It does not set a price. It sets a sequence.

1. First offence, section 113. Twenty thousand rupees plus two thousand rupees for every extra tonne; twenty thousand for a dimensional breach. And the excess load must be offloaded before further movement — the vehicle does not continue as it is.
2. Second offence. The same amounts, plus suspension of the permit under section 86(1)(a).
3. Third and subsequent. The same amounts, plus cancellation of the permit and suspension of the vehicle’s registration.
4. Section 114 — refusing to be weighed. Forty thousand rupees, cancellation of the permit and suspension of the registration, without waiting for a second or third occasion.

Refusing the weighbridge is the worst option

Look at where section 114 sits on that ladder. It is forty thousand rupees, twice the base overloading figure, before anybody has counted a tonne — and it brings permit cancellation and registration suspension immediately, where overloading itself takes three occasions to get there.

Whatever reasoning might tempt a driver to decline a weighment, the instrument has been written to make it the single most expensive decision available at that barrier. It is worth telling drivers this in advance, because the decision is made in thirty seconds by somebody who has not read a notification.

And one state goes further still. Maharashtra published a list of offences that cannot be compounded at all, and both overloading under section 194 and driving without a permit under section 192A are on it — the second being the section Bengal settles at ten thousand rupees. Three positions on the same two provisions of the same central Act, within a day’s drive of each other: a price, a price with a ladder behind it, and no price at all.

What a cancelled permit actually means

The permit order is appealed, not paid

Once the consequence is a suspension or a cancellation, you have stopped dealing with a challan and started dealing with an order. The difference governs everything that follows. A challan has a figure and a counter. An order has an authority that made it, a forum above that authority, and a period within which you must reach that forum.

People lose at this step more often than at any other, not because the order was right but because they spent three weeks trying to pay something and then discovered there was nothing to pay. If a permit order has arrived, the clock that matters started on its date.

The appeal rules we found, and what we could not read

The West Bengal Motor Vehicles Rules 1989 carry appeal provisions, and we were able to establish the numbering even where we could not get the text. Rule 207 is headed Appeal. Rule 208 deals with appeals against orders of the State Transport Authority. Rule 209 deals with appeals against orders of the Regional Transport Authority. Earlier in the rules there are appellate provisions for driving licences at rules 5 and 6, for conductor licences at 31 and 32, and for registration at 54 and 55.

That is more than we have been able to say about any other state in this series — Haryana, Jharkhand and Bihar all defeated us on the appeal question entirely. What we still cannot tell you is the limitation period, because the text of those rules would not load. It is the first thing to establish and it is a question for an advocate practising there, or for a written enquiry. If the order concerns a permit, an appeal is the document, and this page exists largely because Bengal is the one state where we could at least tell you which rule it goes under.

Rule 349, and a pattern that may be cracking

Why we are being careful about that

Three reasons, and we would rather set them out than let a heading do more work than it can bear.

• We could not read rule 349’s text. We have the heading and its position in the sequence, and nothing else. A rule headed Compounding of Offences might fix amounts, or might merely say that compounding shall be in the manner the State Government notifies.
• We could not obtain the enabling clause of the Bengal rules at all, so the test we ran in the other five states — does section 200 appear in the recital — we could not run here.
• The 2022 notification itself cites section 200 of the Act, not rule 349. If the rule were doing the work, you would expect the notification to say so.

Against that, the West Bengal Traffic Police’s own page cites both — section 200(1) of the Act and rule 349 of the 1989 Rules — as the source of the compounding power. So somebody in the state treats the rule as operative. We cannot resolve it from here.

Where the section 200 count now stands

Honestly: five states tested and five absences, then one state where the test could not be run and where a rule heading points the other way. That is a crack rather than a break, and we are recording it as one.

It matters because the conclusion we had been drawing — that compounding is always exercised by standalone notification and never through the rules — was becoming a settled claim on these pages. A settled claim is exactly the kind of thing that should be revisited the moment something inconvenient shows up, and rule 349 is inconvenient. If its text turns up, this section gets rewritten either way.

The police website quotes superseded notifications

What we are and are not saying about that

We are making a statement about documents: a later instrument says it replaces the earlier ones, and a public page still names the earlier ones. We are not making a statement about anybody’s conduct. Government pages age, and a page that was accurate in 2015 does not announce the day it stops being accurate.

The reason to print it is practical. If a figure is quoted to you in Bengal and it traces back to the 2003 amendment, it may not be the operative figure, and the thing to do is ask whether it matches the schedule of 24 January 2022. That is a question anybody can ask, and it costs nothing.

The fifteen-day bank procedure

The same police page describes a process worth knowing about: the offender has fifteen days to deposit the compounded fine at a designated bank, and then presents the deposit slip to the Compounding Officer in order to retrieve any documents that were seized. Failure to do so results in prosecution.

We flag it with a caution, for the reason just given — it appears on the page that cites the superseded notifications, so it may describe the practice of an earlier regime. Whether the fifteen-day bank route is still how it works is a question for the Compounding Officer, and it is worth asking before assuming either answer.

Why a bank in the middle is a good design

Whatever its current status, the design is worth noticing. Roadside compounding puts money and discretion in the same hands at the same moment. A procedure that sends you to a bank, produces a deposit slip, and makes the slip the thing you hand over separates the payment from the officer entirely.

It is slower and it is plainly safer, for the officer as much as for the driver. If you are given a choice between paying at a counter and paying into a bank against a slip, the slip is the better paper to be holding six months later.

If your section is not on the list

Then there is no compounding route in West Bengal and the matter goes to a court. The gate is the list of twenty-eight provisions in the opening sentence of the notification, and nothing outside it can be settled by payment however reasonable that would be. Section 185 is the obvious example and it is not a Bengal peculiarity; drink driving is not compoundable anywhere in India.

The Supreme Court, 28 September 2026

On 28 September 2026, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1007, Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan addressed unpaid e-challans nationally, having been told that roughly ₹49,194.05 crore remained recoverable against ₹26,175.05 crore recovered.

With it: online services frozen for vehicles carrying outstanding amounts, registration renewal and duplicate registration barred, fitness certificates denied until pending fines are entirely cleared, blacklisting on the Parivahan portal with pollution certification refused, ownership transfer blocked, and the licence suspended from renewal where violations are multiple.

Two ways to lose the same vehicle

Put that beside the Bengal ladder and an operator here is exposed from two directions at once. The state can suspend or cancel the permit for repeated overloading. The national direction can deny the fitness certificate because challans sit unpaid. Either one stops the vehicle on its own.

They also have different cures, which is why conflating them is expensive. The permit order is cured, if at all, by an appeal within a period. The fitness block is cured by clearing the challans. Someone who spends a month appealing while the challans sit unpaid has fixed one problem and left the other standing.

If you only have one ordinary challan

Then most of this page is not about you, and we would rather say so than let the serious half frighten somebody holding a thousand-rupee helmet challan. Match the penal section to the twenty-six rows, check whether it is a first or repeat figure, check whether a disqualification is attached, pay through something that gives you a receipt, and keep it.

The only Bengal-specific thing to watch on a small challan is that disqualification, because sections 190(2), 194C and 194D attach three months to the payment itself and people do not expect it.

Kolkata, and the rest of the state

Schedule I distinguishes the Kolkata Police area from the districts, and then gives both the same answer: Motor Vehicles Inspector on one side, Sub-Inspector or Sergeant on the other. So the distinction is drawn and then not used, which is itself informative — Bengal chose uniformity where Rajasthan and Haryana chose to vary by geography.

What does differ is scale and what you are likely to meet. Kolkata is where sergeants are, and where camera enforcement is heaviest; the districts are where weighbridges and permit questions live. The schedule is the same; the part of it you will encounter is not.

If you run goods vehicles in Bengal

Four things, and they are the page in miniature. Overloading is not in the compounding schedule at all. The money is the same as neighbouring states but the consequence is not, because the permit goes on the second occasion. Refusing a weighment skips straight to cancellation. And the national direction will deny you a fitness certificate while challans are outstanding.

Keep the weighment slip, keep a count of prior occasions, and treat any permit order as urgent from its date rather than from the day somebody explains it to you.

If the vehicle has been seized

Separate proceeding and separate law. Seizure and release run on the criminal procedure provisions and are decided by a magistrate, not by a transport officer, and nothing in either Bengal notification touches it. Our page on vehicle release and superdari sets out the application and the time limits.

If the licence has been disqualified

In Bengal, establish first whether it came from a court or from the compounding itself, because three rows of the schedule attach a three-month disqualification to the payment. That is an administrative consequence rather than a sentence, and the route to deal with it is different. Our page on licence suspension covers both routes. Where the licence was impounded under section 206(4) after a second speeding offence, that is a third thing again.

If the challan itself is wrong

Bengal hands you a ground nowhere else does: the two section columns. If the violation recorded and the penal section quoted do not go together the way the schedule pairs them, that is a discrepancy you can point at. Everything else is national — what an electronic notice must carry, how quickly it has to reach you, the certification owed for the device — and our page on disputing a challan covers it. For a written objection to the authority, an application is the ordinary document.

Lok Adalat, and what Bengal has not done

Compoundable challans are listed at National Lok Adalats across the country and Bengal is no exception. What we did not find is any Bengal scheme reducing the amount. Bihar notified a fifty per cent settlement in 2026 and Delhi decided on fifty per cent compounding in 2024; we found nothing comparable here.

Which means the distinction that confuses everybody is worth repeating. A Lok Adalat is a venue and has no power to cut a figure; a reduction, where one exists, comes from the state’s own notification. Our page on Lok Adalats sets that out, and our Bihar page traces the one place where it actually happened.

Six states, and which one publishes most

On publication, Bengal is ahead of the other five. That is a statement about transparency and not about leniency — several of its figures are the harshest we have seen.

How we checked this

Both notifications were read from a repository of West Bengal government orders, not from the Transport Department’s own site, and we read the 2022 one three times with different questions before printing anything. The first reading produced a four-column table; the second established that there were six columns and what their headings were; only the third, asking for the rows one per line, produced the schedule above. We mention the sequence because the first reading was wrong and we would have published it.

The compounding power, the officer ranks and the fifteen-day procedure were cross-read against the West Bengal Traffic Police page, which is where the supersession problem came to light. Rule 349 and the appeal rule numbers came from a bare-act source. The Supreme Court order was read from a law reporting service, with the citation given. Where something defeated us — rule 349’s text, the enabling clause, the limitation period for an appeal — it is listed below rather than guessed at.

What to do, in order

1. Read both section numbers off the challan, not one.
2. Find the penal section in the twenty-six rows and check the figure against what is being demanded.
3. Check whether a disqualification or an impoundment is attached to that row.
4. Check the rank of the officer compounding it against Schedule I.
5. If it is an oversized-vehicle matter under 182B, check that it is the Director of Transport dealing with it.
6. Pay in a way that produces a receipt or a deposit slip, and keep it.
7. If it is overloading, count your prior occasions, because the second and third change what is at stake entirely.
8. If any order suspending or cancelling a permit or registration has arrived, find the appeal period immediately. That is the one deadline on this page that cannot be recovered.

What to keep

Both section numbers as printed. The registration number character for character. The rank and post of whoever compounded it, which Schedule I makes worth recording. The receipt or the bank deposit slip. The weighment slip in any load matter, and a note of the bridge and the hour. Any order touching the permit or the registration, with its date, because an appeal period runs from it. And the case number if a court already has the file.

Deliberately not on this page

The material that is identical in every state has been left out on purpose: the statutory definitions, what happens once a magistrate has the matter, the electronic enforcement rules, the licensing chapter, and the law of seizure and release. Including them would have buried the handful of things that are genuinely Bengal’s, which are the two schedules, the two section columns and the permit ladder. Each of those national subjects has its own page here and is linked where it becomes relevant.

When this needs an advocate

When a permit has been suspended or cancelled, or a registration suspended — the serious end of this page, and the one with a deadline. When an oversized-vehicle matter under section 182B has been dealt with by somebody other than the Director of Transport. When a three-month disqualification has been attached to a compounding you have already paid. When the violation column and the penal section on your challan do not match. And when the figure demanded does not appear anywhere in the schedule of 24 January 2022.

What we do

Two things, and the line between them is worth stating. The directory introduces you to advocates at no cost, keeps your number out of sight until one of them accepts, and earns us no commission from either side. Separately, we draft. The document this page is built around is the appeal against a permit or registration order, because that is where Bengal’s own instrument leads and because Bengal is the only state where we could name the rules it goes under. For the lighter work there is a written application to the authority, an RTI request where a figure or a notification needs sourcing, and a compounding or settlement petition where the matter has gone past a counter.

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

What we could not verify

What we charge

Asking is free and so is reaching an advocate through the directory. Anything we draft carries a figure shown on its service page before you order, and no part of it is a commission from an advocate. For an ordinary challan that matches the schedule there is nothing here for us to do, and we would rather tell you that than find something to sell.

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

Questions people ask