India will send Nepal 654 MW for 18 hours a day after the August flood

India's Ministry of Power on 14 September approved electricity exports to Nepal of up to 654 megawatts for 18 hours a day, from midnight to 6 p.m., through 31 December. The arrangement took effect from 13 September. Up to 600 MW can move on the Muzaffarpur-Dhalkebar 400 kV double-circuit line. Another 54 MW can move on the Tanakpur-Mahendranagar 132 kV single-circuit line. The volume from January 2027 will be reviewed in December.

The trigger is the flood that began on 26 August, when an ice-rock avalanche on the Nepal-Tibet border sent water down the Himalayan valleys. Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority put the death toll at 1,385 as of 11 September, with 5,130 people still missing. Reuters, using a slightly later count, wrote of nearly 1,400 dead in Nepal and Tibet and more than 5,300 missing. About 900 of the missing are power-station workers. More than 12 hydropower plants were swept away or badly damaged. Hydropower had supplied almost all of Nepal's electricity and had become an export earner.

The flow has reversed. In fiscal year 2025-26 India imported 3,299 million units from Nepal and exported 1,451 million units the other way. After 26 August Kathmandu asked New Delhi to clear winter-style imports earlier than the usual seasonal window. Nepal normally buys more Indian power in the cold months, when river flows drop. This year the shortage arrived at the end of the monsoon because the plants themselves are gone.

Eighteen hours a day is not a full replacement for a domestic system that ran near 100 percent hydro. It is a bridge across the daylight and evening peak until damaged stations can be inspected, rebuilt or written off. The 654 MW cap is a transmission limit as much as a generation promise. Muzaffarpur-Dhalkebar is the thick pipe. Tanakpur-Mahendranagar is a smaller western tap. Anything above those figures would need another line or a later ministerial order.

The human hole in the power sector is as large as the physical one. Nine hundred missing plant workers means operators, technicians and contractors who knew particular machines. Replacing a washed-out intake is a civil-engineering job. Replacing the people who ran it is a longer one. That is why the December review is not a formality. If reconstruction slips, India will be asked to keep the 18-hour window into 2027. If enough capacity returns, Kathmandu will want to sell surplus south again and the political argument will flip back to export access.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already told his Nepalese counterpart that India will offer humanitarian help. The Power Ministry text is drier: the approval will help Nepal meet its power requirements during this difficult period and further strengthen the close and longstanding energy cooperation between India and Nepal. The cooperation now runs in the direction it ran before Nepal's hydro boom, from Indian thermal and mixed generation into a Himalayan grid that has lost a tenth of its plant in a single flood.

The two lines have different histories. Muzaffarpur-Dhalkebar was built as a 400 kV commercial link so Nepal could sell monsoon surplus into Bihar and take power back in winter. Tanakpur-Mahendranagar is an older, thinner western connection. Using both at once is how the ministry reached 654 MW without waiting for a new tower. It is also why the cap is not a political number. It is what those wires can carry in the hours they have been scheduled.

For Indian grid operators the operational question is whether 654 MW at 18 hours is available without squeezing domestic peak. For Nepal the question is narrower. Lights and pumps need current before winter. The lines that can carry it are the two named in the 14 September order. Everything else is reconstruction time the gazette cannot buy.