Two different statutes are in play at a roadside stop, and they authorise very different things. Confusing them is what leads to the belief that a traffic officer has a general power to go through a car.
What the Motor Vehicles Act allows
The coercive powers in the Act are a short and closed list. Section 130 allows a police officer in uniform to demand the licence, and Section 130(3) allows a registering authority or an authorised Motor Vehicles Department officer to demand the insurance certificate and, for a transport vehicle, the fitness certificate and permit. Section 158(1) lists the documents a driver must produce on demand. Section 206 permits seizure of a document believed to be false, and seizure of a licence in defined situations. Section 207 permits seizure and detention of the vehicle on four grounds, and Section 202 permits arrest without warrant in defined situations.
Nothing in that list is a power to search the interior of a vehicle for its contents, and nothing in it touches a mobile telephone. The Act is concerned with the vehicle, the driver's entitlement to be driving it, and the documents that prove both.
What a search under the criminal procedure requires
Where the police are investigating an offence, the search power is in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and it is conditioned at every step. Section 185 allows an officer in charge of a police station, or a police officer making an investigation, who has reasonable grounds for believing that anything necessary for the purposes of an investigation he is authorised to conduct may be found in a place within the limits of his station, and that it cannot otherwise be obtained without undue delay, to search or cause a search after recording in writing the grounds of his belief in the case diary and specifying, so far as possible, the thing to be searched for.
Three safeguards follow. The officer shall, if practicable, conduct the search in person. The search shall be recorded through audio video electronic means, preferably by mobile phone. And copies of the record of the grounds shall be sent to the nearest Magistrate within forty eight hours, with the owner or occupier of the place searched entitled on application to a free copy.
Section 103 of the Sanhita applies the general search safeguards. Before making a search, the officer shall call upon two or more independent and respectable inhabitants of the locality, or of another locality if none is available or willing, to attend and witness the search. The search shall be made in their presence, and a list of all things seized and of the places in which they were found shall be prepared and signed by those witnesses. The occupant, or someone on his behalf, shall in every instance be permitted to attend during the search, and is entitled to a copy of the signed list. Where a person about the place is reasonably suspected of concealing an article, that person may be searched, and if the person is a woman the search shall be made by another woman with strict regard to decency.
Seizure, and the phone
Section 106 allows a police officer to seize property which may be alleged or suspected to have been stolen, or which is found under circumstances which create suspicion of the commission of an offence, and requires the seizure to be reported forthwith to the Magistrate having jurisdiction. That is a seizure power tied to suspicion of an offence, not a browsing power. Reading the contents of a telephone is not a step that any traffic enforcement provision authorises, and where a device is taken in the course of an investigation, the seizure has to be recorded and reported like any other. The right course is to ask which provision is being invoked and to ask for the seizure memo, rather than to hand over an unlocked device to end a conversation.
What to do at the roadside
- Give your name and address. Section 202(2) permits arrest without warrant of a person who has committed an offence under the Act and refuses to give his name and address. Identifying yourself costs nothing and removes a ground.
- Produce the documents. That is what the Act asks for, and it usually ends the encounter.
- Ask what the search is under, and say it politely once. If it is an investigation, the officer has to be able to name the case, and the Sanhita requires the grounds to be recorded and the search recorded on video.
- Ask for the seizure list. Anything taken should appear on a list signed by the witnesses, and you are entitled to a copy of it. Take the officer's name, buckle number and the time in writing on the spot.
- Do not obstruct. Section 179(1) punishes wilful disobedience of a lawful direction or obstruction of a person discharging functions under the Act with a civil penalty which may extend to two thousand rupees where no other penalty is provided. Record the objection, do not enforce it yourself.
If the encounter turns into a summons or a notice to appear, our guide on what a police notice under the new criminal procedure means explains what has to be answered and by when. If the vehicle is taken, the release routes are in our note on getting a seized vehicle released in Karnataka, and if the stop ends in a challan you dispute, do not pay it before objecting, for the reasons set out in our note on disputing an e-challan in Bengaluru.