IAF C-130J flies 10 tonnes of relief to Nepal after border flood

An Indian Air Force C-130J left Hindon airbase near Delhi at about 8:35 p.m. on Wednesday carrying 10 tonnes of shelters, blankets, hygiene kits, solar lamps and medicines for Nepal, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to his Nepali counterpart Balendra Shah.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar posted that the load was Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief material “to support Nepal’s response to the devastating floods.” A C-17 Globemaster was on standby. Ministry officials said the flight was the first tranche, not a one-off drop.

The flood that prompted the aircraft began on the Tibetan side of the border and roared down the Bhote Koshi into Rasuwa. Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, told parliament that an earthquake hit the Tibet region at 8:37 a.m. local time and that the surge arrived three minutes later. Officials have pointed to a rockslide near Gyirong and a possible glacial-lake failure rather than ordinary monsoon rain.

Counts moved through Wednesday. Police and district offices first spoke of nine dead. By night Indian and Nepali tallies clustered around 95. Some wire reports later on Wednesday put the figure higher, including an Associated Press account of 98 dead and 403 missing, 341 of them foreign nationals. India Today, compiling embassy and tour-operator lists, said 133 Indians were missing, among them about 77 pilgrims linked to the Isha Foundation and more than 50 travellers from Tamil Nadu. The Kailash Manasarovar route through Kerung is the road those groups use.

The water took bridges, parts of Syapru Besi and Timure, and the Langtang Khola hydropower site. Around 60 workers from that plant were listed missing. Helicopters still could not land in some of the worst-hit pockets on Wednesday. Shah ordered the army, police and other forces onto the rivers that feed the Trishuli.

On the Indian side of the plains, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar put NDRF and SDRF teams into Maharajganj, Kushinagar, West Champaran and Gopalganj and watched river gauges. The same catchment that wrecked Rasuwa drains toward those districts.

Modi’s message to Shah was short: condolences, solidarity, and a promise that Indian teams would stay on rescue and relief. That is the pattern New Delhi uses in Himalayan disasters. The C-130J is the visible piece. The harder work is identifying the missing Indians, many of them on packaged pilgrimages with incomplete location data once phones die and roads vanish.

Wednesday night’s 10 tonnes will not reopen the border road or recover the hydropower crews. It will keep a first circle of families dry and medicated while Nepal’s own helicopters pick their weather windows. The next questions are practical. How many of the 133 missing Indians are already dead in the silt. Whether China will allow joint inspection of the slope above Gyirong that failed. Whether a second IAF aircraft is needed once Kathmandu lists specific drugs and tent counts.

Tamil Nadu’s group of about 50 pilgrims, named by The Hindu as coming from Chennai, Puducherry, Chidambaram, Kumbakonam, Mayiladuthurai and Tiruchi, is a separate problem from the missing lists. Some of those travellers are accounted for and stuck behind landslips. Others have not called home. State governments in India are now the ones families ring first, which is why district control rooms in the south have been matching passenger manifests against embassy messages.

Hydropower loss will show up later on Nepal’s grid and on invoices. Langtang Khola is one plant. Other sites on the same rivers lost inlets and access roads. Kathmandu can run without them for a few days. It cannot rebuild supply on 10 tonnes of tents.

For now the record is this: a night flight from Hindon, 10 tonnes on a C-130J, a C-17 waiting, and a death toll that is still being revised as the rivers drop and the lists get longer.