Infosys says Public Services chief Lax Gopisetty is unreachable in Nepal

Infosys said on Friday that Lax Gopisetty, chief executive of Infosys Public Services, is not reachable after the flash flood that tore through the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday. The company said he was visiting the region in a personal capacity. The statement put safety first, said staff were working with agencies to gather information and make contact, and said the firm was in close touch with his family. “Our thoughts are with Lax and all those affected by this tragedy,” it added.

Infosys Public Services is the subsidiary that sells to governments in the United States and Canada. Gopisetty is based in the United States. Before this role he was Global Vice President for business applications and digital workspaces at Infosys. Before that he was a managing director for health and public services at Accenture. The flood has now placed a US-based Indian technology executive on the same missing lists that already hold pilgrims, trekkers and local residents.

The Ministry of External Affairs said on Friday that 320 Indian nationals remain uncontactable and that about 100 persons of Indian origin sit in the same column. It put 400 people on the Chinese side as accounted for and safe. Ninety-six Indians have crossed from Tibet into Nepal. Twenty-one people from Tamil Nadu reached Delhi on Friday after coming through Kathmandu. Those are government tallies. They do not name Gopisetty. The company statement is the first public confirmation that a listed-company senior executive is among the missing.

The flood began when a glacier collapse and debris flow sent water, mud and rock down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli system. Nepal’s confirmed dead passed 570 on Friday, with figures in some police updates near 579. Almost 2,000 people were unaccounted for inside Nepal. China reported five dead and 558 missing in Tibet, 260 of them foreigners. Many of the foreigners were on the road to or from Mount Kailash. Infosys did not say whether Gopisetty was on a pilgrimage, a trek or another private trip. It said only that the visit was personal.

For a company the size of Infosys the operational risk is small. Public Services is a slice of group revenue. The human file is not small. Families of missing Indians have spent three days on ministry hotlines, tour-operator chats and social media appeals. A named CEO makes the same search visible in business pages that do not usually carry disaster lists. It does not change the physics of the valley. Roads are cut. A debris lake upstream overflowed on Friday and paused some of the work. Helicopters are the way in and out of several sites.

Infosys has not appointed an interim head in public. It does not need to, yet, if contact is restored. Until then the company’s job is the one it described: stay with the family, stay with the agencies, and treat a personal trip that met a Himalayan flood as a missing-person case, not as a corporate event.