🚧 A boundary wall has eaten into our lane in Miyapur

A house near the end of our street in Miyapur has been under construction for a few months. Somewhere along the way the boundary wall moved out by about 2 feet into what used to be the road. Our lane was narrow already, with just enough room for 2 cars to pass each other slowly. Now if someone with a bigger vehicle comes from the other side, one of them has to reverse. I first noticed it about 6 weeks ago when the foundation work was going on. I thought it was scaffolding or a pile of sand that would be removed when they finished. But the wall has now been built right on that line, so it looks permanent. A couple of neighbours spoke to the family, and they said the plan was approved. Nobody has seen any paper, plan or drawing that shows this, and that bothers me. What worries me more is an ambulance or a fire truck trying to come down this lane. In the evening 3 or 4 cars are parked on the sides, and the gap is hardly enough for a bike. I keep imagining someone in a car waiting while the ambulance driver reverses the whole street. I've seen this kind of slow creep in a few other lanes nearby, a foot here and a foot there. It never happens all at once, and nobody complains until the street feels smaller. I don't know how to report this to the town planning office. Do I need a survey, or are photos enough? If anyone got a wall or an extension corrected, how did you do it, and how long did it take?

The ambulance point is what would worry me most too, our lane had a similar single file situation last year when a neighbor's compound wall extended slightly, and during an actual medical emergency the ambulance driver had to reverse almost the entire length of the street to let a car pass first. Lost precious minutes over something that basic.

Approved, and nobody has seen any paper. Sounds like my cousin's case.

Farha's point about the creep across multiple houses worries me more than a single incident would, once something like this becomes normalized across a whole street it gets harder to reverse since removing one wall while three others stay extended just looks selectively unfair to that one family. Might need a street wide survey rather than addressing this house alone.

Before asking for a survey, check if the approved layout for your lane is on the municipal site. I think many of them are online now, but I'm not sure about Miyapur.

Rizwan's surveyor experience matches what a friend went through too, though he mentioned going through the RWA instead of filing individually made the request move faster since it came with several household signatures attached. Might be worth trying that route here rather than one person reporting alone, especially since more than one household on that lane is probably affected by the same wall.

Watched exactly this happen on my street, three houses over two years, a foot or so each time they built something. Nobody complains early because each one seems minor. Looking at old photos now, the whole road is narrower than it used to be.

Filed a formal survey request with GHMC once for a similar boundary dispute, took close to six weeks just to get a surveyor to show up and measure the road width against the original layout plan. Once the measurement confirmed encroachment though, the notice to the owner went out fairly quickly, so the slow part was really just getting someone scheduled.

I'd think about the ambulance angle in your letter, because that makes it a safety matter.