21 Tamil Nadu pilgrims reach Chennai; more than 90 from the state stay untraced

Twenty-one pilgrims from Tamil Nadu landed in Chennai on Friday night. They had been on a Kailash Manasarovar package run by Super Yathra of Kumbakonam with a Nepali partner, Samrat Tours, when a wall of water and debris hit the Rasuwagadhi road on 26 August. One of them told reporters it felt like a tsunami falling off the mountains.

The 21 were part of a 57-member party from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Their bus was the one that got through. Two other buses carrying tourists from the state were reported missing in the first hours. The survivors left bags behind, walked to the Timure border police post in Rasuwa, were lifted in batches to a Nepal Army camp at Trishuli and went by bus to Kathmandu on Thursday night. The Indian ambassador saw them there. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar received them in Delhi on Friday. An Air India flight brought them home that night.

The 21 break down by district as listed by reporters in Tiruchi: nine from Cuddalore, five from Tiruchi, three from Mayiladuthurai, two from Chennai, two from Krishnagiri. Twelve are women. Nine are men. The package had been booked from 23 August to 6 September and was supposed to run Kathmandu, Syabrubesi and Gyirong.

The larger Tamil Nadu count

Information minister A. Rajmohan said more than 400 people from the state, most of them pilgrims, were in Nepal when the glacier collapse sent a mud flood down the Bhote Koshi. More than 90 were still unreachable on Friday. More than 140 had been located and were safe in different parts of Nepal. Two further groups of more than 140 each, plus a batch of 39, were later confirmed safe by the state's special representative in Delhi, K. Venkata Narayana. Names without photographs are still being matched.

A control room at Tamil Nadu House in New Delhi is taking lists from families, the Centre and Kathmandu. Rajmohan said communication lines and bridges are down and that every hour matters. The MEA's Friday tally for the whole country was 21 back from this group, 63 workers rescued at the Trishuli One hydropower site, about 400 Indians safe on the Chinese side, and 320 Indian nationals still out of contact, plus about 100 people of Indian origin who hold other passports.

The Super Yathra group is now the first named Tamil Nadu party to complete the chain from the mountain road to Chennai. The missing buses from the same convoy are the reason the state's number of untraced pilgrims has not fallen as fast as the arrival photos suggest. Relatives at the airport on Friday night were embracing the 21. Other families are still waiting for a name to move from a handwritten list to a confirmed location.

What the return does not close

Nepal's death toll has been revised upward through the week and now sits in the 600s depending on the agency. India has an 11-member tunnel team on the ground and has flown tens of tonnes of supplies. Those facts belong to the wider disaster. For Tamil Nadu the operational file is still the unmatched names. The 21 who reached Chennai show that the corridor from Timure to Kathmandu to Delhi can work when a group is intact and already at a police post. The 90-plus who are silent may be on the Chinese side, in a cut-off valley, or among the dead carried downstream. Until each name is placed, the state's list stays open.