Our neighbour has a grown Ficus tree (around 20 metres tall and branched out) in his yard less than 10 metres from our premises.Its roots have crossed underground a path between our plots, invaded our compound heavily and crept up our drainage blocking all bathrooms once every couple of months.We informed him,very friendly, about the issue and cut out the roots ourselves expecting him to do something to block the roots coming to our side.At first he refused to acknowledge that the roots came from his tree and kept protesting against our protest. This has been going for around four years now with the frequent drain blockages continuing and we cutting them out on our own and he doing nothing about it.But now after my father almost slipped and fell in the bathroom after the water had flooded inside due to the root-clogged drain we made a serious request to him through our common residents' association. He now accepts that the roots are from his tree but keeps quoting about the benefits of Ficus trees and accusing us of being tree-haters. We are not tree-haters,in fact we have them in our own land and we are participants of environment-protection activities. And we do not want him to cut the tree either. We just want him to stop the roots that are invading our drains and foundations. He seems to think that there is no law in India that can compel him to act on the roots.So he remains as before without doing anything about the roots.Soon our drains will get clogged again, in its now bi-monthly frequency, and it will be another day of protest and altercation. What can we do about it?
