Fifth Indian aircraft leaves for Nepal as police put the flood dead at 1,127

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said on 2 September that a fifth Indian aircraft had left for Nepal with an 11-member rescue team, specialist gear and 5.5 tonnes of medicines. Nepal Police the same morning put the death toll from the late-August floods at 1,127. Nine of those bodies were recovered on the Indian side of the border.

India has already airlifted 68.5 tonnes of relief into Kathmandu. Sixteen trucks carrying parts for a 230-foot single-lane modular steel bridge have reached Nepal. Equipment for seven Bailey bridges is due to follow, with technical crews to assemble them. A 24-member Indian tunnel team is still working at wrecked hydropower sites, including Chilime, where the floor is marsh and the access is improvised floats.

Where the bodies are

Nepal Police broke the 1,127 figure down by district: 45 in Rasuwa, 155 in Nuwakot, 59 in Dhading, 348 in Chitwan, 66 in Gorkha, 38 in Tanahun, 217 in Nawalparasi East and 190 in Nawalparasi West. Only 95 bodies have been identified and handed to families. Prime Minister Balendra Shah said unidentified remains are being handled under the law and by scientific methods, including photographs and DNA.

The flood began on 26 August on the Bhotekoshi in Rasuwa and tore through hydropower tunnels, schools and highway corridors. Earlier Indian tallies put 163 Indian nationals among those pulled out of the zone. One hundred and fifty-one Indians left China on the same stretch of the disaster. Those numbers sit beside a missing list that officials have put in the thousands.

What the fifth aircraft adds

The first flights carried bulk relief. This one carries a small specialist team and a medicine consignment measured in tonnes, not cartons. That shift matches the phase on the ground. Roads are still broken. Identification has barely started. Infection risk rises once standing water and unclaimed bodies share the same districts.

Shah has linked the disaster to climate change and asked large emitters to treat Nepal as a creditor, not a recipient of charity. That argument will run in parallel with the rescue. For the next few days the constraint is physical. Tunnels, debris and a death register that is still mostly unnamed. The fifth aircraft does not change the geology. It puts 11 more trained people and 5.5 tonnes of drugs into a country that has already counted four figures of dead and has not yet finished counting.