A plot with no recorded access is a plot you may not be able to build on. How to check whether the road to your gate legally exists — and what to do when it does not.
A buyer once asked me to look at a plot in Chapagaun that seemed underpriced by about a third. The land was fine, the Lalpurja was clean, the boundary matched the Naksa. The road to it was a compacted strip running two hundred metres across a neighbour's field, and it appeared in no municipal record at all.
It had been used for twenty-five years. Everyone in the tole agreed it was the road. The municipality did not, and neither would the building permit office.
Why recorded access matters
Building permits in most municipalities are conditioned on the plot having access from a recorded road of a specified minimum width. The setback you must leave, the height you may build to, and in some zones whether you may build at all, are all calculated from that road.
If the access is not recorded, three things follow. You may be refused a permit. Your bank may decline to lend, because their legal check will find the same gap. And your eventual buyer will discover it exactly as you should have.
The three kinds of access
- Recorded public road. It appears in the municipal road record with a defined width. This is what you want.
- Registered right of way. A private access formally registered as an easement over a specific parcel, appearing in the Malpot record. Workable, but read the recorded width and terms.
- Customary use. Everyone has always driven across it. This is not a right. It ends when the underlying land is sold, subdivided, inherited or walled.
How to check, in four steps
- Ask the ward office and the municipality whether the access appears in the road record, and at what width. Get it in writing if you can.
- Check the Napi Naksa — a public road generally appears as its own parcel on the cadastral map. If the approach to your plot is drawn as part of a neighbouring kitta, ask why.
- Measure the road yourself at its narrowest point, not its widest. A permit is assessed on the constraint, not the average.
- Ask the neighbours whose land the road passes. If any of them describe it as "our land that we let people use", you have your answer.
Width, surface and the price difference
Two plots of identical size in the same tole can differ by twenty to thirty per cent in value on road access alone. It is the largest single price factor we see within a neighbourhood — above facing direction, above view, above plot shape.
| Access | Typical effect on value | Practical consequence |
|---|---|---|
| 20 ft+ blacktop | Premium | Truck access, higher permitted build, easy resale |
| 13–16 ft blacktop or pitch | Baseline | Car access, standard residential build |
| 12 ft gravel | Discount | Car access in dry season, permit limits, monsoon difficulty |
| Under 10 ft or unrecorded | Heavy discount | Permit risk, financing risk, narrow resale market |
If the access is not recorded
It is not always fatal. Options include a formal right-of-way registration agreed and executed with the owner of the land the access crosses, or a municipal road-record correction where the road has long been treated as public. Both take time and both require someone else's cooperation.
What you should not do is pay a full price on the assumption it will be resolved later. If you want the plot, negotiate the risk into the price and make the registration a condition of completion — in writing, with a deadline.
