India license plate: Standard

Format, years and the law

Format

LL 99 LL 9999, for example MH 12 AB 1234 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

Left to right: two letters for the State or territory (MH is Maharashtra, DL is Delhi), one or two digits for the registering office within it, then a series and a four-digit number. The office codes are each State's own invention, over a thousand, never centrally listed.

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued

1989 to 2003. No longer issued.

Vehicle class

Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, motorcycle, tractor, and machine.

Colours

Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF

Size

340 × 200 mm · every country's size

• 

  Standard 500×120 mm

  standard · 500 × 120 mm

• 

  Standard 200×100 mm

  standard · 200 × 100 mm

• 

  Standard 285×45 mm

  standard · 285 × 45 mm

About this plate

In fact non-HSRP plates went on being made in most States for another fifteen years, until the HSRP Order 2018 put the obligation on vehicle manufacturers from 1 April 2019.

How the region is encoded

TWO GEOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS, ONE CLOSED AND ONE OPEN, AND A PARSE API MUST NOT TREAT THEM ALIKE. (1) The first two letters are the STATE/UT code, a closed list allotted by the Central Government under MVA § 41(6), the decode table. (2) The two digits are the REGISTERING AUTHORITY (RTO DISTRICT) code, which no central instrument enumerates: rule 50(3) simply calls it "registering authority code" and rule 35(3) calls it "RTO Code". A decode may return the State with confidence and the district only against a State-published list of that State's own offices, dated. THIRD ELEMENT, FLAGGED AS UNSOURCED: several States are widely reported to spend the first letter of the series group on a VEHICLE-CLASS code rather than on the series, Delhi's "C" for car in "DL 3C AB 1234" is the famous case. A parse API must not decode a class from it.

How numbers are issued

The series group advances within a district as its four-digit block exhausts (single letter, then two, then three); the allocation order is an administrative matter for each State's registering authority and is published by none of them uniformly. A series letter therefore gives a LOWER bound on age within a district and nothing stronger.

Legal basis and sources

1. web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20250804185944id_/https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/1798/1/aA1988-59.pdf
2. web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20211130113450id_/https://morth.nic.in/sites/default/files/CMVR-chapter3.pdf
3. web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210514201915id_/https://morth.nic.in/sites/default/files/notifications_document/S.O.%20...

Before and after

Replaced by Standard HSRP 2004 to today