THE WEEK reports from Nepal: Inside the nation’s struggle to recover from a Himalayan tragedy

Nuwakot, Rasuwa & Kathmandu/ Photographs by Josekutty Panackal

Kalpana Chitrakar has not slept properly in days. Outside the army camp in Bidur, in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, the 20-year-old stands among hundreds watching helicopters land and lift off without pause, each arrival met by the same anxious ritual: people craning to see whether the security personnel have brought back someone they know. Some clutch photographs of missing relatives. Others have pinned photographs to a wall that has become a missing-persons register. Bidur, a town on the road to the Tibetan border some 60km from Kathmandu, now lies under the mud and debris left by the floods that devastated Nepal on August 26.

Kalpana’s elder brother Narayan, his wife Shanti, and their 16-year-old son Abhinash are missing. She and her 62-year-old mother survived because they had gone to a hospital on the morning of August 26. Her mother, an asthma patient, has since been moved to a nearby shelter, but Kalpana has chosen to remain at the army camp. “There is not enough medicine or clothes in the shelter. I left my mother there alone and have been waiting here for my family,” she said.

If a hospital visit spared Kalpana’s life, an early warning saved pharmacist Abi Subedhi. As he prepared to open his shop in Dhunge village, also in Nuwakot district, a fellow shopkeeper warned him of the impending danger. “I immediately escaped on a bike and was lucky to reach a safe spot [in the highlands] before the water arrived,” he said.

By September 2, as we go to press, the death toll had crossed 1,100. Nearly 4,500 people are missing. Over 280 Indians, many of them on the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage, are among them. The disaster sent torrents of water and mud through the valley of the Trishuli river, a corridor flanked by steep mountains along the border between Tibet and Nepal’s Rasuwa district, sweeping away roads, bridges and entire settlements in the process.

The catastrophe is still unfolding for thousands of families. In hospitals and military camps, many continue to wait. The floodwaters erased a 42km border road linking Nepal and Tibet, swept away 41 bridges and knocked out 13 hydropower projects and a solar plant. Early estimates put the economic toll at around $5 billion.

Nuwakot and Rasuwa districts bore the worst of it, though Dhading and Chitwan districts also suffered significant damage. When Subedhi returned to where his pharmacy once stood, he brought in an earth-mover but found the effort largely futile: goods worth lakhs of rupees had vanished.

At Devighat in Nuwakot district, residents could be seen sifting through wreckage, entering damaged buildings to dig through mud-caked clothes, bags and bank documents, salvaging whatever they could still identify. What surfaced was too damaged to be of use, yet people took most of it away.

An earthquake was initially suspected to be what triggered the disaster. But a study released on August 30 by the Nepal Environment Society (NES) points instead to a dramatic chain of events high in the mountains: a glacier at 5,200 metres on the north face of Langtang Lirung, a mountain near the Nepal-Tibet border, gave way, sending rock and ice plunging into the Lhende river in Rasuwa. The event was powerful enough for the US Geological Survey to initially register it as a seismic incident with a magnitude of 5.2.

As the mass of rock and ice hurtled down the mountain, it gathered river water and sediment, swelling into a torrent that travelled dozens of kilometres through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems, triggering the flash flood. “A massive rock and ice fall into the valley caused the disaster,” said Bishal Nath Upreti, president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management. The NES study found no evidence of a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), and no evidence of a breached lake in its analysis of satellite imagery, hydrological and meteorological records, terrain characteristics and elevation changes across the river basin.

Nepal is no stranger to natural disasters, and floods have battered the country for three consecutive years. In July 2025, the sudden drainage of a supraglacial lake in Tibet, about 36 kilometers upstream of the Nepal border, sent a torrent down the Lhende Khola, destroying the Nepal-China Friendship Bridge at Rasuwagadhi and killing at least nine people. The bridge, only recently rebuilt, has now been swept away for a second time. In late September 2024, floods and landslides triggered by Nepal’s heaviest rainfall since 1970 killed more than 300 people. But the country’s deadliest disaster in recent decades remains the April 2015 earthquake, which claimed more than 9,000 lives.

What the latest floods have taken cannot always be measured in numbers. Among the hardest hit were places of considerable historical weight, sites that had endured for centuries. Betrawati in Nuwakot district was one such place. For generations it held religious, historical, economic and strategic significance, home to the Uttargaya pilgrimage site, where thousands gather each year during Poush Aunshi to honour their ancestors. It was here that peace was negotiated after the Nepal-Tibet conflict of the late 18th century, culminating in the Betrawati treaty of 1792. For centuries the town served as a vital trade gateway to Tibet, and it remains a key route to the Chinese border today. Betrawati’s landmark bridge, once the town’s defining feature, is gone, and so is much of farmland that once sustained families.

Nepal, home to some of the world’s richest biodiversity and to landscapes as celebrated as Sagarmatha and Chitwan National Parks, has contributed little to the emissions driving climate change; its own carbon footprint remains among the lowest globally. Yet it finds itself increasingly on the front line of a worsening global climate crisis, contending with floods, retreating glaciers, landslides, droughts and heatwaves that arrive with growing frequency. For many environmentalists, the question is no longer whether Nepal bears responsibility for its predicament, but why it continues to pay such a disproportionate price for a crisis largely of others’ making.

Nepal has demanded compensation from the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases such as the United States, China and India. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told a local television channel that Nepal should turn this into a matter of justice. “We will raise this matter explicitly and forcefully on international platforms,” he said.

Meanwhile, the danger has not passed. Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has warned that a glacial lake outburst could raise water levels in the Trishuli river without warning. THE WEEK experienced that anxiety first-hand. Checking into a hotel in Dhunge, we were briefed by staff on what to do if the alarm sounded: get down and run for high ground. The Trishuli riverbed lay barely a kilometre from where we were staying, and though the hotel stood on slightly elevated ground, the staff were taking no chances. The night passed without incident, but early the next morning we were woken and told that water levels in the river were rising. Stepping outside with our bags, we found local residents already gathered anxiously nearby. The hotel’s manager, Pratul Aryal, said later that it was the first time he had seen such flooding in the area.

The damage to Nepal’s energy sector has been severe. Thirteen hydropower plants and one solar facility have been forced offline, a serious setback for a country that had been emerging as a significant power exporter. According to the Nepal Electricity Authority, electricity exports rose nearly 63 per cent in the last fiscal year, to 3.877 billion units, generating 29.32 billion Nepali rupees, or roughly Rs1,831 crore, in revenue.

The setback exposes a deeper structural fragility. A 2019 study by Nepal’s environment ministry found that 80 per cent of the population lives under the constant threat of natural disaster, with two-thirds of the country’s land classified as ecologically fragile, a burden the country’s struggling economy is ill-equipped to absorb. Over the past decade, environmental disasters have quietly drained an estimated $221.3 million a year from Nepal’s economy. Farmers, who make up roughly 60 per cent of the population, tend to bear the brunt of such disasters, with each event further eroding already precarious incomes.

The timing has compounded the damage, striking as it did during Nepal’s peak trekking season. “Many people have cancelled their trips. Hotels are empty. Many establishments are not staffed. It will take months to recover from the disaster,” said Sharmila Kafle, who runs a travel agency in Kathmandu.

Offers of assistance have come from the Red Cross, the United Nations, the World Food Programme and several foreign governments. Yet in the early phase of the response, authorities suggested that domestic agencies alone would handle rescue operations, a position that Khanal later denied. Two explanations have been offered for that initial reluctance. One lies in the memory of the 2015 earthquake, when competing foreign relief teams led to poor coordination and unrest. The other is geostrategic: much of the damage has occurred along Nepal’s border with China, a sensitivity that experts believe may have shaped the government’s caution.

Identifying the dead has proved as difficult as finding the missing. “The current situation is different from the 2015 earthquake,” said Dr Gopal Sedhain, deputy director of Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, Kathmandu. “In 2015, bodies could be found among the rubble of buildings. But in the flash floods, many bodies were dismembered, making it difficult to identify those who were recovered. Guidelines were prepared in 2015 on how to handle the dead during natural disasters. Those guidelines have now been revised.”

Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has said that $5 billion will be required to restore flood-affected areas. The country’s main trade route to China lies destroyed and the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage route has been badly damaged, compounding losses to a tourism sector already in crisis.

Money alone will not repair the damage. Residents face lasting psychological and physical trauma. Disasters of this scale bring less visible risks as well, including trafficking, exploitation and the disappearance of children. “With children now missing or separated from their parents following the floods, every effort must be made to identify and address vulnerabilities and risks of trafficking and exploitation. We need to ensure children, especially girls, are protected, reunited with their families wherever possible, and provided with a strong sense of safety and security,” said Dr Unni Krishnan, global humanitarian director of Plan International.

Roads are being rebuilt, power lines restored and communications reconnected. Nepal is already at work on all of it. But as the government concedes, the road back is long and difficult.