Editorial policy

This page explains how we decide what to publish, where our facts come from, how we fix mistakes, and how content on this site gets written in the first place.

Sources

Fine amounts, Motor Vehicles Act sections, portal URLs, payment methods and procedural steps are sourced to an official government document: parivahan.gov.in, a state police or transport department portal, India Code, or a gazette notification. Forum posts, news reports and aggregator sites are never sources for any of those, even when we link to them for context. Where a state has notified its own fine amount that differs from the national schedule, we cite that state notification specifically rather than assuming the national figure applies. Both datasets meet that standard in full: 66 of 66 citations across the fine schedule and 260 of 260 across the state records are official — 100% and 100%, counted at build time from the records themselves.

Two of our datasets do not meet that standard, and we would rather say so here than let you find it yourself. The RTO office directory is 35% officially sourced (45 of 130 citations); 11 of its 36 state files rest entirely on independent commercial directories — insurance, used-car and vehicle-information sites — because we could not find a fetchable official code list for most states. The discount and amnesty scheme tracker is 65% official: a scheme we record as a rumour or a proposal is by definition a claim that no government order confirms, so press reporting and fact-checks are the only evidence there is — and our schema refuses to store a discount percentage on those records at all.

So the rule is per record, not per site: every record names the URLs it was actually checked against, and the measured official share of each dataset is published — and re-measured on every build — at the open-data page. Where a page rests on something other than an official document, the page says so on its face.

Corrections

If you find a wrong fine amount, an outdated section reference, a dead portal link, or any other factual error, email contact@trafficchallan.com. We aim to investigate and correct verified errors within 7 days. If the underlying source has genuinely changed, we update the page and its "last verified" date at the same time — we don't silently edit facts without moving that date.

Update policy

Fine amounts and procedures change when governments issue new notifications, so pages don't stay accurate on their own. Every page carries a "last verified" date. We re-check every page against its sources on a rolling 90-day cycle, and our build process is set up to flag any page whose facts haven't been re-verified inside that window, so stale information doesn't sit published indefinitely. When a fact changes, the page and its date both change together — the date is a claim about the content next to it, not a general timestamp.

AI assistance

Content on this site is researched and drafted with AI assistance, then checked against the sourcing standards above before publication. We're saying this plainly rather than hiding it: AI helps us pull together and phrase information faster, but it does not get to invent facts — every number and rule still has to trace back to the sources listed on the record, held to the standard set out above, and that discipline doesn't change based on how a page was drafted.

TrafficChallan.com is an independent information website, not affiliated with any government body. Challan payments happen only on official government portals we link to.