Nepal flood from Tibet leaves dozens dead and more than 100 Indians missing

A wall of water and debris came down the Bhote Koshi from the Tibet side around 9 am on Wednesday and tore through Rasuwa, Dhading, Nuwakot and Chitwan. By evening, Nepal Police and provincial officers were still revising the death toll as bodies were pulled from the Trishuli basin. Published counts on Wednesday ranged from the low teens to 72 and, in one police briefing cited by The Hindu, as high as 95. Nearly 500 people were listed as missing across the affected districts.

The Nepal Tourism Board put 384 travellers out of contact in Rasuwa alone: 291 foreigners and 93 Nepalis. The preliminary list named 105 Indian nationals and 37 non-resident Indians, along with travellers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia and the Netherlands. Samrat Tours and Travel said at least 59 of the missing Indians were on the Kailash Manasarovar route. The Indian Embassy in Kathmandu issued emergency numbers and began matching passenger manifests with agencies that send pilgrims through Rasuwagadhi.

Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told the House of Representatives that more than 80 security personnel, including 44 Nepal Army soldiers, were among those unaccounted for. Bagmati Province Police spokesperson Rajendra Prasad Dhamala said 93 people had been pulled out alive, 30 of them treated at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. Helicopters could not land at Syapru Besi and Timure because the river was still running above its normal course.

The trigger is not settled. Khanal told parliament that an earthquake in the border belt may have started an avalanche. A separate satellite reading, reported by India Today, pointed to a rockslide from an unstable slope about 20 kilometres northeast of the Rasuwagadhi crossing. Chinese officials, speaking through Xinhua, said a mudslide on the Nepali side had hit Gyirong port in Shigatse, cutting roads, power and communications. Officials in Tibet warned of major casualties in Gyirong County. A blockage remains lodged upstream. Local officer Qianggong warned that a second flood is possible if the dam of debris gives way.

Rasuwa has about 50,000 residents. Health worker Tula Bahadur BK told Reuters that settlements next to the river had been swept away and that five of his own relatives were missing. Television footage showed a metal bridge peeling off its piers, cars floating downstream and houses collapsing into brown water. At least four permanent bridges and several temporary crossings are gone. A dozen hydropower sites along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli were damaged, repeating a pattern from last year’s floods on the same river, which were later traced to a glacial lake outburst.

The Kailash Manasarovar corridor is the practical loss that will outlast the first 48 hours. Rasuwagadhi is the main overland gate for Indian pilgrims heading into western Tibet. When the crossing is closed, the season does not simply pause. Agencies lose groups already on the trail, insurance claims pile up, and the next window of clear weather in the high passes is short. Tamil Nadu districts including Chennai, Puducherry, Chidambaram, Kumbakonam and Tiruchi were named in early lists of pilgrims who had left India this week.

Cause-finding will take longer than the rescue. A glacial lake outburst, a co-seismic slope failure and a landslide dam are three different events and they demand different warnings. Nepal has sensors on some lakes in the Koshi basin, but coverage thins as the river approaches the Chinese border. The 1981 outburst from Zhangzangbo-Cho on the same headwaters remains the reference case for engineers who design the run-of-river plants now sitting in the flood path.

India’s immediate work is consular. The Ministry of External Affairs has to keep a live list that distinguishes the missing from the unreachable, because mobile towers are down and the river has cut the road. Nepal’s work is harder. It has to search a gorge that helicopters cannot enter, keep people off the banks in case the upstream blockage fails, and decide which hydropower sites can be restarted without sending crews back into an unstable channel.

The numbers will keep moving. Wednesday’s spread between 17 dead and 95 dead is a sign that bodies are still being found in different districts and that some early tallies mixed confirmed deaths with people listed only as missing. What is already firm is the geography. The flood started on the Tibet side, ran the Bhote Koshi into the Trishuli, and took the border towns that sit on the only road that joins those two valleys.