Encroachment Blocking a Natural Drain: Legal Remedies

A natural drain, the nala or seasonal stream that carries rainwater to a river, pond or low ground, is usually public land, and nobody may build on it, cover it or narrow it. If one has been encroached and your colony or village now floods, you have three practical routes. The tehsildar or municipal body can demarcate the drain and remove the encroachment. The SDM can order the obstruction removed as a public nuisance under section 152 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. And where the authorities will not act or the blockage is causing environmental damage, the National Green Tribunal can direct restoration of the drain.

This guide is for residents whose lane floods every monsoon since a nala was covered, villagers whose fields have turned into a swamp after a road or wall cut off the old drainage line, and RWAs fighting a slab laid over a stormwater channel. It also covers what happens when the obstruction is a government road, culvert or project.

Drains are part of the wider river system; our topic page on river and floodplain cases covers the larger picture, and our guide on construction on a river floodplain deals with the land beside the river itself.

The essentials

Someone has covered or built over the nala near us. What can we do?

Start by finding out what the land is on paper. In villages and peri-urban areas, drains are usually shown on the revenue map and recorded in the khasra as a nala, watercourse or similar (in north India often as gair mumkin nala, meaning land that cannot be cultivated because it is a drain). In cities, the municipal body or development authority usually has a drainage plan showing stormwater drains, many of which follow old natural channels. If the record shows a drain, the land is public, and the person who built on it has no right to be there however long ago he did it.

Then complain to the authority that controls the land: the tehsildar for revenue land, the municipal body or development authority for urban drains, the panchayat for village drains. Ask for demarcation and removal. At the same time, if the blockage is causing flooding, smell or disease, apply to the SDM under section 152 of the BNSS, which allows the magistrate to order an unlawful obstruction removed from any public place or from a channel that the public uses.

If both stall, and especially if the blockage is causing waterlogging, pollution or damage to a river or pond downstream, the NGT can hear the dispute. A watercourse is part of the stream that the Water Act protects, and the destruction of natural drainage raises a substantial environmental question.

What counts as a natural drain?

Any channel that rainwater has followed naturally over time to reach a river, pond, lake or low ground. It may be a deep nala that runs all year, a shallow channel that flows only for a few days in the monsoon, or a low strip across fields that you would not notice in April. The Water Act's definition of a stream covers a watercourse whether it is flowing or for the time being dry, so a nala does not lose its protection by being dry most of the year.

Many urban drains that look like concrete sewers today were natural streams once, sometimes small rivers. That history matters because master plans often protect them with a green strip on each side, and because covering a natural channel with a slab is treated very differently from covering a man-made drain the municipality built and maintains. Old maps, satellite images and the memory of older residents often tell you which you are dealing with.

Which authority to approach for which drain

The legal basis for removing a drain encroachment

The encroacher says the land is his. How do we settle that?

With an official demarcation. Ask the tehsildar in writing to have the revenue staff (the patwari or lekhpal and the kanungo, depending on the state) measure the drain on the ground against the revenue map in the presence of both sides. The measurement report shows whether the wall, slab or building stands on the drain, beside it, or partly on it. In cities, the municipal body or development authority can do the same against its drainage plan.

Encroachers often have some paper: a sale deed for an adjoining khasra, an old possession certificate, a mutation entry. None of these can turn a drain into private land, but they do muddy things, and an authority faced with a confident occupant and no measurement report will often do nothing. The demarcation removes that excuse. If the demarcation itself is wrong or one-sided, it can be challenged before the higher revenue officer.

How to get a drain encroachment removed

This is the sequence that works in most cases. It moves from the cheapest remedy to the strongest.

Our page on filing a case in the NGT explains the last step. The step people skip is demarcation, and it is the one that wins most cases. Advocate B.K. Singh's usual advice to RWAs and panchayats is to spend the first month getting an official measurement report, because every authority after that, the SDM, the municipal commissioner, the NGT's committee, will start by asking for it.

How the SDM's public nuisance power works

Under section 152 of the BNSS, the magistrate, on a police report or other information including your application, can pass a conditional order directing the person responsible to remove the obstruction within a fixed time, or to appear and show cause why the order should not be made final. If the person does not appear or fails to show cause, the order is made absolute, and if it is still not obeyed, the magistrate can have the work done and recover the cost, and disobedience is an offence.

This route is useful because it is local and relatively quick, and the SDM usually knows the area. Its limits are that the magistrate deals with obstruction and nuisance, not with title or long-term restoration, and that a determined occupant may claim a genuine title dispute, which can slow things down. It works best combined with the revenue demarcation.

What if a government road, culvert or wall is blocking the drain?

This is common, and harder. A road raised across fields without enough culverts, a boundary wall around a government campus built across a drainage line, or a culvert too small for monsoon flows can flood a village as badly as any private encroachment. You cannot ask the tehsildar to evict a government department. What you can ask for is redesign: more or bigger culverts, a cross drainage structure, or realignment.

Write to the department that built it and the DM, with photos of the flooding and the line the water used to follow. If they refuse, the NGT can direct the authority to provide proper drainage where the obstruction causes environmental harm, and a High Court writ is possible where the grievance is mainly about an arbitrary government decision. Our guide on an NGT case against an authority that will not act explains how such cases are framed.

Removing the encroachment is not the same as restoring the drain

Once a slab or wall comes down, ask what happens next. A drain that has been covered for years is usually full of silt, garbage and debris, and its bed may have been raised or its line shifted. Unless the channel is cleared to its recorded width and depth, and its connection to the pond or river downstream is opened, the colony will flood again next monsoon and the encroacher will say the removal achieved nothing.

So ask the authority, and if you are before the NGT ask the tribunal, for a restoration plan: desilting, removal of debris, restoring the recorded width, a fence or green strip along the edges, and a named officer responsible for keeping it clear before each monsoon. Where the master plan provides a buffer along the drain, ask that it be kept free. The cost of this work, to the extent it results from the encroachment, can be recovered from the encroacher.

What to collect before you complain

When poor families are living on the drain

Not every encroachment is a banquet hall. Along many urban nalas, families have lived in small houses for decades, often with ration cards and electricity connections. The law does not give them a right to stay on a drain, but authorities and tribunals generally expect removal to be done with notice and, where state policy provides for it, rehabilitation. A complaint that ignores this can stall, because officers are reluctant to act and courts may intervene.

If the encroachment includes both commercial structures and poor households, it is fair and practical to ask that the commercial encroachments be removed first and that the authority follow its rehabilitation policy for the rest. That is a position a tribunal is far more likely to accept, and it gets the drain working sooner.

Mistakes that slow drain cases, and when not to file

The most common mistake is complaining about flooding in general terms without identifying the drain on paper. An officer reading "our colony floods because of encroachments" has nothing to act on. Name the khasra number, the stretch and the encroacher. Another is filing in the wrong place: a fight between two neighbours over rainwater crossing their plots is a civil suit, not an NGT case, and the tribunal will say so.

Timing matters too. Under section 14 of the NGT Act, an application must be filed within 6 months of when the cause of action first arose, so for a slab laid years ago you may need to show continuing harm or frame the case as a claim for restoration under section 15. And if dumping of debris is what is choking the drain, the cleaner route may be the C&D waste rules; see our guide on construction and demolition waste dumping.

Before you approach the authorities

Related guides

Where the drain ends in a pond that is also being filled, see our guide on getting an encroached village pond restored. If the nala has turned into a sewer, read about town sewage entering a lake or river, and if a factory is using it to carry effluent to the river, see industrial discharge into a river. For how photos, RTI replies and reports are used before the tribunal, our guide on evidence in NGT cases will help.