It usually means an official form or receipt of acknowledgement or other kind of proof document, piece of paperwork, police citation, etc.
[1] Similarly, British-English Dictionary Lexico also defines Challan[2] as noun, "an official form or document, such as a receipt, invoice, or summons", and verb, "issue (someone) with an official notice of a traffic offence" and gives several examples of their applications, which are also paralleled by the Oxford Learner's Dictionary's two separate entries on the same.
While most of the dictionaries talk about the meaning representing a monetary penalty which is true in most real cases, Collins English Dictionary goes one step further and defines the verb part of the meaning of Chalan as "verb (transitive), to cause (an accused person) to appear before a magistrate",[5] which in reality happens only in a subset of cases of Challan when a person misses paying the Challan and the matter moves to the next step of receiving a summon from a court.
are lodged, Traffic police officers, on the street or in their mobile vans, carry portable printed Challan booklets.
E-Challan is similar to English-Hindi portmanteaus like e-Seva-Kendra, a service-centre (Seva-Kendra) that has electronic or online transaction facilities.
When a traffic challan is issued against a person's name he or she is responsible to pay the penalty depending on the type of violation made as per the Indian Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.
But other than traffic violations other offenses may be also challaned with a magistrates order under Section 188 of Indian Penal Code (IPC).
An e-challan can also be defined as a specific format used for depositing or remitting the contribution or statutory payment at a bank or treasury.
In Coimbatore city the system started in October 2013 and service uses hand-held machines for Spot Fining System, which runs on a low cost platform named VIOLET (Violation Prevention and Regulation Enforcement), which runs on android-based tablets or cellular phones and is also integrated to a Bluetooth printer to dispatch receipts.
[16] Other initial cities where it started becoming operational included Ahmedabad,[17] Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi,[18] Vijayawada etc., followed by Mumbai[19] and Pune by mid 2015.