India readies a third C-130J for Nepal as 288 citizens stay uncontactable
A third IAF transport is expected to fly on Friday with more medicines and food. Two earlier loads totalled 47.5 tonnes. DTC has cancelled Delhi–Kathmandu buses. Nepal police have raised the death toll to 270, with hundreds of tourists still missing.
New Delhi2 min read
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India expects to send a third C-130J load of flood relief to Nepal on Friday, 28 August, after two aircraft have already flown 10 tonnes and then 37.5 tonnes of medicines and food. Ministry briefings and overnight Indian television reports treated the third sortie as scheduled rather than hypothetical. The Delhi Transport Corporation cancelled its Delhi–Kathmandu and return buses for the day.
The Ministry of External Affairs said on Thursday that 288 Indian nationals remained uncontactable. Twenty-one pilgrims from Tamil Nadu have been brought out. Seventy-three of the missing Indians had been working at the Trishuli hydropower project. A 24-hour control room is running in New Delhi. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has kept the public line on assistance “as requested by the Nepali side.”
Nepal Police put the confirmed dead at 270 on Thursday after recovering 93 more bodies. Earlier tallies in the week sat at 157, then 162, then 165. The missing lists do not agree with each other. The Nepal Tourism Board has spoken of 644 tourists unaccounted for. Other official sheets have used 826, a figure that mixed residents, security staff and visitors. People from more than 30 countries are on those lists. Australia has said 34 of its citizens are missing. South Korea sent a team for nine.
What the mountain actually did
The United States Geological Survey said a glacial collapse and debris flow, not an earthquake, produced the seismic signal that first looked like a tremor on the Nepal–Tibet border. ISRO images released during the week showed a large fraction of a glacier body detached upstream of the Bhote Koshi. The pulse of ice, rock and water then ran the river system that includes the Trishuli, took out roads and bridges, and buried houses in mud thick enough that crews are still cutting rather than walking.
The Dalai Lama issued condolences for the dead in Tibet and Nepal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Prime Minister Balendra Shah on Wednesday and offered help. Those calls do not move wreckage. The aircraft do, and only on the Kathmandu side of a border that the slide itself ignored.
About 90 Americans were still unaccounted for in late Thursday reporting, many of them on the Kailash pilgrimage route that crosses the same high catchments. That number will move as phones come back and as names migrate from one country’s list to a confirmed death sheet.
The limit of an airlift
A C-130J can put tonnes on a tarmac. It cannot reopen a valley whose bridges are gone. Friday’s third load will matter for hospitals that still have standing walls. It will not locate the 288 Indians whose last known points sit inside the slide. The useful next document from MEA is not another tonnage figure. It is a table that splits those 288 into workers, pilgrims and others, and says how many have been seen alive since Wednesday.
Until that table exists, the public number remains what it was on Thursday evening: 270 dead in Nepal, 288 Indians unreached, and another Indian aircraft queued for Friday morning.
