How VAHAN counts registrations (and what it misses)

VAHAN (Parivahan) is India's national vehicle registration system. Public monthly extracts count new registrations by maker, fuel, state/UT, and vehicle class. Autiqa Lens and Auto IQ focus on passenger vehicles (4W PV) — the signal most OEM, fleet, and market analysts care about when they say "India car registrations."

Registration is not the same as wholesale billing or retail delivery. A car can be produced and invoiced in one month and registered later. Re-registrations, temporary registrations, and late RTO uploads also affect what appears in a given calendar month file.

Lag matters: an "April" extract often still includes late-March RTO uploads, and the current calendar month is frequently incomplete while RTOs keep posting. Autiqa surfaces the latest published month, flags partial months, and publishes a data-status page so you can see coverage and freshness before you quote a number.

When comparing months, prefer closed months over the live partial month. YoY comparisons should use the same calendar month a year earlier — Autiqa Lens tables expose both MoM and same-month YoY where the underlying extract supports it.

Never sum state rows to invent an All-India total. VAHAN publishes an All-India series that is the authoritative national figure. State extracts and the national row are maintained separately; adding states double-counts or misses UT/edge cases depending on the cut.

Autiqa keeps the All-India rule across Lens dashboards, forecasts, and generated market briefs. State pages report each state's own registrations and its share of the national total — they do not redefine India by addition.

Raw fuel labels vary across RTOs. Autiqa maps them into stable public buckets (petrol, diesel, CNG, EV, strong hybrid, and residual others) before charts update, so MoM fuel mix stays comparable.

Maker names are normalised to Autiqa OEM slugs (for example Tata Motors → tata-motors) so market-share pages and monthly snapshots stay stable even when source spelling drifts.

Use Lens for the latest national OEM, fuel, and state cuts; open a state page for "registrations in Maharashtra"-style questions; open an OEM page for market share; and use the monthly Auto IQ VAHAN brief when you need a narrative summary. Check Lens data status whenever you need the exact latest month label, partial-month warning, or Pro history boundary.

If you need ownership economics rather than registration counts, switch to Autiqa TCO — consumer, fleet, and EV-by-state calculators sit beside the registration intelligence, not inside VAHAN itself.