By Pramesh Pokharel
“A mountain came down on my country with more energy than the Hiroshima bomb. The World Bank’s answer is a credit line”, says Pramesh Pokharel, Peasant activist, La Via Campesina, Nepal
When I was meeting locals and observing flooded area on the bank of the Trishuli at Bidur in Nuwakot on August 31, still after 5 days of flood, people were still hopeless and helpless. It was the first day when there was attempts to install rope way to link with the people on the next side of the river. The People in Debighat, town, asked me whether or not the government will help to clear the mud and debris from the buried homes. Each day many times, many people in the nearby camps visit the houses to see the remains.
Outside the military barracks, there is a crowd of people, the family members of missing people are printing posters and pasting in the walls. Some of them know that now there is little hope. But they know a how can person be declared dead without a body. I know that without a body of their family members, they even may not be counted as family of victim, just a member of missing family which will ultimately impact relief, transfer the tenancy, and bank account.
Yam Khati, Peasant Activist in Bidur told us that Trishuli river is flowing now at least 5-10m above the previous level. He further add that just below his houses, on the corner of the river, a dead buffalo smells terrible.
Scale of Avalanche
What happened on 26 August 2026 was not a monsoon flood. A mass of rock and ice broke from the north face of Langtang Lirung and plunged about 1,200 vertical metres into the Lhende Khola equivalent to magnitude 5.2 Seismic wave was produced by the collapse itself. The mountain was the earthquake.
Scientists at Tribhuvan University’s Centre for Disaster Studies calculate that the event released more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Satellite analysis puts the wave’s average speed over its first 25 kilometres at about 150 kilometres per hour, reaching some 190 kilometres per hour as it hit the Rasuwagadhi crossing. At points the water and debris rose as much as 80 metres above the normal river level, more than 260 feet, and the flow travelled close to 100 kilometres downstream. The Chinese border complex at Gyirong was described by the first rescuers to reach it as nothing but ruins.
A thousand dead and no bodies to bury
The count as of 1 September is just the initial. More than 1,000 confirmed dead, 3,916 missing, 1,473 injured, 11,814 rescued. In Tibet, 16 dead and 546 missing. Among Nepal’s missing are 583 foreign nationals from 38 countries and some 639 people tied to hydropower project sites, including 933 workers added to the list in a single day at the Upper Trishuli 3A tunnel, where a controlled explosion had to be carried out on 31 August simply to reach them. Hundreds of workers were pulled alive out of flooded tunnels. Hundreds of others are still there in the tunnel, status unknown dead or alive.
Here is the figure that should be read slowly. Of roughly 900 bodies recovered, the Ministry of Health reports that four per cent have been identified. Four. The morgues were overwhelmed within two days and hundreds of unidentified victims are now in a mass grave; a policeman supervising the site told CNN that more than 200 were buried there in a single day. The river carried our dead 240 kilometres into India. Most were recovered in Chitwan, six districts below where they died. Families who reached the district headquarters found no one to identify, and were sent home to wait for a paperwork.
This is what loss and damage means when it stops being a negotiating term. It means a father buried in a numbered trench by a stranger, and a mother who cannot prove he is dead.
Not nature. A model.
The Lhende Khola has now flooded twice in fourteen months. The same mountain produced a debris avalanche in 2015 that buried Langtang village and killed more than 200 people. ICIMOD reports that Himalayan glaciers disappeared far faster in the 2010s than in the decade before. The ice that held that rock face together was laid down over centuries and is being taken off inside a single working life. That is not weather. That is a trend with an address.
Nepal’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions is well under one tenth of one per cent. Our farmers burn almost nothing: they carry manure uphill on their backs, save their own seed, and take a crop off ground a soil scientist would write off. The ice above Langtang was melted somewhere else, over two centuries, in Manchester and the Ruhr and Pennsylvania, and now by data centres, shipping lanes and the industrial soy of a food system built for export rather than for eating. Marx described the rift torn open between town and country when the nutrients of the soil travel one way and never return. We are living that ecological rift at planetary scale: carbon extracted in one hemisphere, consequences deposited in another. This is not a natural disaster. It is a transfer, and every transfer has a beneficiary.
And the state made it worse
The flood did the killing, but our own development model chose where. More than 80 bridges are gone, 35 of them motorable and 45 suspension bridges, along with the entire 42-kilometre road from Betrawati to Rasuwagadhi, a road that was already being rebuilt after the flood of 2025 and has now been destroyed again. Thirteen run-of-the-river hydropower plants took direct structural damage. Some 748 megawatts of capacity was hit and 430 megawatts, over twelve per cent of national generation, went off the grid. Those plants and their labour camps, their tunnels, their access tracks and their spoil tips were built in the narrowest part of a valley that had already flooded, and the workers inside them were never told what was above their heads.
The four automatic hydrological monitoring stations in that corridor, at Syabrubesi, Rasuwa-Bhotekoshi, Betrawati and Malekhu, were themselves destroyed by the flood. Consider what that sentence admits. The warning system was inside the hazard zone, and it was watching for a glacial lake outburst on a mountain that failed at its bedrock. The architecture was pointed at the wrong disaster. Rescue was then hampered because the Nepal Police had no aviation assets of its own and the country had to hire private helicopters to look for its own citizens. The government didn’t allow private sector and foreign experts to come for rescue and search for the first two days. Actually state killed many of the people who could have been rescued.
Then the bill arrived
Nepal’s preliminary official estimate of the damage is Rs 200 billion. The Finance Minister has put rebuilding at four to five billion US dollars, close to a tenth of our entire economy. Into this the World Bank’s country director informed the Ministry of Finance that up to Rs 25 billion could be mobilised for emergency response through its disaster financing instruments.
Read the instrument, not the press release. The Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option is concessional financing. It is a loan. Concessional debt is still debt, and debt is not climate justice. The Transitional Committee of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage itself accepted that support for loss and damage should avoid worsening the debt burdens of developing countries. Here is a country that contributed almost nothing to the cause, that has just buried a thousand people in numbered trenches, and the offer on the table is credit at a good rate. A disaster must not become a new source of sovereign debt. We are being asked to pay interest on a catastrophe we did not cause.
Belem said this out loud
I was at the People’s Summit in Belem last November, with some twenty thousand others, while COP30 met down the road. Our Brazilian comrades cooked twenty-one thousand meals a day for five days from eighty-six tons of agroecological food. Not a gesture: a demonstration that the people told they cannot feed the world are already feeding it, on a fraction of the carbon burned by the corporations that claim the job. The Summit declaration named the cause without embarrassment, as a capitalist, patriarchal, colonial and imperialist system, and delivered a fifteen-point charter to the COP30 presidency. La Via Campesina put it in three words: grants, not loans. Friends of the Earth International, the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice and the debt movements have been saying the same for two decades. Public money, grant-based, polluter pays, no carbon markets, no offsets, no new debt.
Inside the conference centre, COP30 gave no clear signal on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. On agriculture, the two questions that decide our future, whether nature-based solutions become carbon markets and how a just transition is actually implemented, were postponed to 2026. Postponed. And the farmers’ chair was held largely by agribusiness organisations with more money and more staff than any peasant delegation, speaking in our name. Those deferred questions arrive in Antalya this November, and they will arrive over the graves in Chitwan.
What we demand
- Convert the proposed flood financing from loan to grant. The World Bank should announce it this month, not study it.
- Loss and damage paid as reparation, in grants, direct to affected communities, and Nepal supported to access the Fund without new conditionality.
- A public, independent inquiry into why hydropower plants, labour camps and monitoring stations stood in a valley that had flooded fourteen months earlier, and who signed the approvals.
- Hazard monitoring rebuilt for the hazards that now exist, outside the flood path, with peasant and herder observation inside the system rather than decorating its reports.
- Reconstruction on peasant agroecology and food sovereignty, on local seed, living soil and local markets, not on contract farming and land consolidation sold back to us as resilience.
- Implementation of UNDROP, and Article 18 in particular: the right of peasants to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their land. It is the legal ground on which a Nepali farmer can name an emitter.
- Death registration and compensation procedures that work for a woman whose husband is missing rather than confirmed dead.
The debt is owed the other way
The mountain did not betray us. Rock and ice behave according to temperature, and the temperature was set somewhere else, in ledgers, by people who have never carried a load up a hill in Rasuwa. We are told to adapt to a decision we were never part of, and to be grateful for the credit line. We have raised these voices for years but what I have watched hardest is the softening of the words. Struggle became resilience. Reparation became finance. Justice became ambition. Refuse the softening. There is a debt, and it runs from the North to us, not from us to the World Bank. The people to whom it is owed are being buried two hundred at a time, six districts downstream from where they died, by officials who do not know their names.
Pramesh Pokharel is a political analyst, peasant activist and member of the All Nepal Peasants Federation (ANPFA)