Nepali Times

After completing his SLC exams in April, 21-year-old Balram Dhungana like many young boys in his village of Mataiya, Kanchanpur, migrated to the neighbouring Indian state of Uttarakhand in search of a job. He could earn up to Rs 300 a day working around the Kedarnath Temple complex and his poor parents would have one less mouth to feed.

Once he got there, Balram found work at a hotel and called home to relay the news. The last time he spoke to them, he had promised to take his grandmother on pilgrimage next year with his savings. Since that ill-fated 11 June afternoon, however, there has been no news of Balram.

The flash flood, caused by massive cloudbursts over western Nepal and Uttarakhand in mid-June last year, was the worst natural disaster in the region since the 2004 tsunami. Within moments, entire settlements, roads, and bridges were swept away, thousands were trapped in the wreckage and more than 5,000 locals, pilgrims, and migrant workers lost their lives.

According to an investigation carried out by the Nepali embassy in Delhi and released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August, around 5,000 Nepalis were in Uttarakhand at the time of the floods. Of these, 3,900 were coolies, 158 hotel owners, the rest were shop-owners or on pilgrimage. The report lists 165 Nepalis to be ‘missing’.

Indian government data puts the death toll at 5800, among which 92 were Nepalis, and says 4,863 are missing. But experts working in Uttarakhand claim the figures are much higher. “Both countries don’t want to provide compensation, so they are making up numbers,” explains R Shreedhar, a researcher who has been studying the plight of Nepali workers in Kedarnath since 1996.

Shreedhar says up to 10,000 Nepalis work menial jobs in the Char Dham circuit of the Garhwal Himalaya during peak season in July. According to his estimates, at least 5,000 Nepalis are missing. While authorities on both side of the border privately concede that the Nepali men are dead, their families in Kanchanpur are still clinging on to hope.

When 14-year-old Suresh Chaudhary didn’t turn up even months after the floods, his father Bishnu went from police station to government office all the way to the consulate in Delhi to find him. “I don’t have any more photos of Suresh because I gave them all to the police hoping they would locate him,” says the visibly distraught father.

Surat Khadka, 32, told his parents he was going to Kedarnath to earn money and look for a bride. Surat began working in Delhi and Mumbai since he was 15 and his family was keen to see him marry and settle down.

Seven months have passed since the tragic event, yet there is no trace of their son. The Khadkas called friends and relatives in Uttarakhand to find out if anyone had seen him, but to no avail. Surat’s father has taken refuge in alcohol to cope with the loss. Besides the embassy’s report, there has been no serious attempt by the Nepali government to find out the whereabouts and status of its citizens. Even the few private search operations remain stuck in bureaucratic red tape.

“Indian officials first told us to bring referral letters from the Nepali government. Once we got the necessary documents, we went to Banbasa in Uttarakhand. From there we were sent to district headquarters in Champawat. The administrators there suggested we meet Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna in Rudraprayag district,” recounts Gopal Gurung, who led a search party to find missing Nepalis. “After a long wait, we finally managed to talk to the CM and he helped us gain access into the flood-hit areas.”

Since the team couldn’t find anything substantial, they went to see Bahuguna again, but weren’t as lucky the second time around. As the two governments continue to conveniently push campaigners like Gurung into a bureaucratic maze, hundreds of families in this far-western Tarai district live with the anguish of not knowing whether their loved ones are dead or alive.

Read also:

Manmade disasters

No need to panic, AJAZ ASHRAF

Fatalism and disasters, AJAZ ASHRAF

---

History’s currents

No one knows exactly how much loss Darchula had during the floods. Many houses are still dangling over the riverbank and yet more are being rebuilt in landslide prone areas. But cloudbursts aside, many other settlements and agricultural lands in Nepal are already sitting on ready-to-flow topsoil.

In the floods during 2013’s monsoon, 112 people were killed and 9,962 people from 1,743 families were displaced. And in the last three decades, over 7000 people lost their lives to monsoon triggered floods and landslides.

The worst such calamity was in 1993 when floods in the Kulekhani reservoir area destroyed a power station and roads and bridges to the capital were swept away and over 1,200 people were killed. Nine years later, a landslide in Matatirtha, on the south-western rim of the Valley itself, killed 13 people.

In 2008, the flooding Kosi river overran the barrage on the East-West highway, displacing 70,000 people, isolating Eastern Nepal and pushing load-shedding to 18 hours a day after electricity transmission lines were also knocked over.

One and half years ago in Pokhara, a landslide under the Macchapuchhre flushed through the Seti River and swept away picnickers and trekkers. Only 20km downstream from Kharapani, which was hit the hardest, lies the tourist hub of Pokhara, itself spread on the site of a five-hundred-year-old flood site.

From 1971 to 2009, as many as 55 municipalities across the country were inundated. Among these, the towns that lay in the hilly regions of Nepal were just as prone to landslides as floods due to bank encroachment and mismanagement of embankments, while settlements in the Tarai suffered from a lack of infrastructure to drain floodwater.

And as the swollen rivers ate away river banks metre by metre, agricultural land, homes, roads, and bridges followed suit. Towns like Butwal, Putalibajar, Hetauda, Kamalamai, Panauti, Waling, Narayan, Khandbari, Prithvinarayan and Kathmandu, some of which house administrative offices of their districts, are among the most prone to loss of life and property to monsoon-time calamities.

Bachchu BK