DistantNews
Support us
🇳🇵 Nepal /Energy & Infrastructure

East-West Highway sections still run on private land due to ownership issues

From Kathmandu Post · () English

Summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

News Named sources Context piece
  • Decades after its construction, significant sections of Nepal's East-West Highway remain legally registered to private individuals, causing administrative and legal complications.
  • A lack of coordination between road authorities and survey offices has prevented the formal transfer of land ownership to the government, despite the land being used for the highway.
  • This unresolved ownership issue poses risks of legal disputes, compensation claims, and potential disruptions to planned upgrades of the highway into a four-lane corridor.

Large stretches of Nepal's East-West Highway, the nation's primary economic and transport artery, are still legally registered under private individuals' names decades after construction. Sections of the highway passing through Dhanusha, Mahottari, Sarlahi, Rautahat, and Bara in Madhesh Province, despite daily use by hundreds of vehicles and thousands of passengers, have not been formally transferred to government ownership.

We cannot delist land from an individual’s name until we receive an official letter from the Road Division. And they simply do not send the letters. This is fundamentally the road authority’s job.

— Kranti Kumar GuptaKranti Kumar Gupta, chief of the Chandranigahpur Survey Office, explained the communication gap hindering land record updates.

Officials attribute this discrepancy between physical infrastructure and legal records to long-standing administrative oversights. Stakeholder agencies have urged the Department of Survey to prioritize land acquisition and correction for the Dhanusha–Bara stretch, warning of potential legal disputes, compensation claims, and disruptions to future expansion projects if ownership issues persist.

Coordination failures between the Road Division, Survey Offices, and landowners are cited as the primary reason for the unresolved records. Road authorities reportedly failed to submit clear records identifying specific plots within the highway's boundary to the Survey and Land Revenue systems. Kranti Kumar Gupta, chief of the Chandranigahpur Survey Office, stated that his office cannot delist land from private names without official letters from the Road Division, which are often not provided.

Even today, 30 to 40 percent of national highway land remains registered in the name of private owners. If this is not transferred to the Government of Nepal immediately, it will cause major complications.

— Kranti Kumar GuptaKranti Kumar Gupta highlighted the significant extent of the unresolved land ownership issue.

Officials warn that as long as records remain unchanged, individuals retain legal rights to land physically part of the highway. This creates risks of land sales to third parties, compensation disputes, and fraudulent transactions. The unresolved ownership issue casts a shadow over Nepal's plan to upgrade the East-West Highway into a four-lane, Asian-standard corridor, with ongoing upgrade work facing procedural hurdles, including restrictions on the use of drones for land mapping.

The department did not permit the use of drones. In many places, the road te

— Roshan DasRoshan Das, chief of the Kamala–Dhalkebar–Pathlaiya Road Project, mentioned procedural hurdles affecting land mapping efforts.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Kathmandu Post. Summarized and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

More Stories

From Our Blog