Nepal Diaspora Digest

Namaste, diaspora family. On Monday the government stopped searching for the 5,285 people still missing from the Bhotekoshi flood. Today the President signed an ordinance that lets their families have them declared dead after 45 days rather than 12 years. Malaysia rejected Kathmandu’s objection, the Congress voted without Deuba, and the World Bank priced the damage. Dashain begins on Sunday, and in London, New York and Toronto tika falls a day before it does at home.

Where Things Stand

* Search suspended. On 5 October the national disaster council, chaired by PM Balendra Shah, suspended search and rescue “except in emergencies” (The Kathmandu Post).

* The count: 1,455 dead and 5,285 missing, unchanged in a week. “They have abandoned us,” one brother told AP (AP).

* Forty-five days, not twelve years. President Ram Chandra Paudel issued the ordinance on 9 October. A death certificate opens the way to compensation, insurance and inheritance (OnlineKhabar).

* Relief fund: Rs 17.07 billion donated, still only Rs 1 billion released. 1,085 people remain in 17 holding centres (Ratopati).

* 102 children lost both parents, Bagmati Province says (The Kathmandu Post).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Malaysia Says No, and Sets a Date

Malaysia has answered Nepal’s objection to its 25 “principal” agencies: it will hire Nepalis only through the 275 agencies listed on its online system, those 25 plus 250 associates (OnlineKhabar). A memo from Bestinet, the company that runs the system, sets the timetable. 15 October is the last day for biometric registration under the old arrangement and 31 October the last for visa applications. From 5 November only listed agencies can send workers, though applications already in the pipeline won’t be cancelled automatically (Setopati). Kathmandu has ordered the 25 principal firms to hand over five years of accounts. For the 400,000 Nepalis already there, Malaysia’s budget confirms a RM2,000 monthly minimum wage, though not until June 2027 (The Kathmandu Post).

Dashain, From a Distance

About 2.8 million Nepalis work abroad, and only a few thousand make it home for Dashain. Deepak Bhandari, 38, is back from a Qatar supermarket for the first time in four years: “You don’t realise how much you miss home until you’ve been away for a while.” Ganesh Rai of Khotang asked for leave four months ahead to spend Dashain with his children for the first time in a decade. Rajan Khadka has spent eight Dashains on video calls from Johor Bahru. “When you’re away from home,” he says, “Dashain doesn’t feel like Dashain” (The Kathmandu Post). For the rest of us, the calendar committee’s tika times put London (10:55am), New York (10:11am) and Toronto (10:41am) on Tuesday 20 October, a day before Nepal’s 10:26am on the 21st. (OnlineKhabar).

In Brief:

* US visas. Of 3,933 Nepalis picked in this year’s Diversity Visa lottery, only 580 got visas. A court hearing follows on 15 October (NepYork). There’s still no TPS decision. A proposed $70,000 fee on student work permits (OPT) is open for comment until 9 November (NepYork).

* Watch List, again. The US kept Nepal on its trafficking Watch List for a third year and flagged the fraudulent recruitment of Nepalis to fight for Russia (NepYork). Talks with Russia on 7 October covered Nepalis missing or held as prisoners of war, but no outcome was announced (KathmanduPati).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Congress Votes, Deuba’s Chair Stays Empty

The Nepali Congress opened its 15th General Convention at Khula Manch on Sunday, with a seat kept for Sher Bahadur Deuba, who stayed away. Gagan Thapa used his speech to attack the government: “Parliament is not open. It is closed” (The Kathmandu Post). The vote then slipped three times. Organisers were tangled up in 23 types of ballot and nearly 200,000 papers, and delegates finally voted today. There are 811 candidates for 808 posts, with Thapa facing Shyam Krishna Khadgi for president, and the results are due on Saturday, after we go to press (The Kathmandu Post). Whoever wins, the party stays split. Deuba’s camp is holding its own ward conventions, which lead to a rival convention in December, and the Supreme Court has yet to hear its review.

The Rana Affair Widens

Last week’s story was the pre-dawn detention of former Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana. This week it reached the Armed Police Force. AIG Banshi Raj Dahal, its head of operations, visited Rana at about 3am without telling his superiors (The Kathmandu Post). He was suspended on Monday over alleged leaks of security information and dismissed today (OnlineKhabar). On Wednesday money-laundering investigators raided the homes of Rana, his brother and their associates. On Friday the Supreme Court ruled lawful the arrest of Inam Sapkota, a US green-card holder described as close to Rana, who was stopped at the airport on his way to Delhi. “Sensitive state information is not anyone’s private property,” wrote Home Minister Sudan Gurung. Rana has not been charged, and much of the story so far comes from unnamed officials.

In Brief:

* Envoys in the dock. Parliament’s hearing committee questions the 13 ambassador nominees from 12 to 14 October. Of seven complaints, two target the whole slate and the rest target the nominees for Japan and Saudi Arabia. There are none against the picks for the UK, US, India or China (OnlineKhabar).

* Delhi raises its game. India has proposed Sudhakar Dalela, a more senior diplomat than it usually sends, as its next ambassador. Home Minister Gurung flies to Delhi on 12 October for a BIMSTEC meeting, his first trip abroad in the job (The Kathmandu Post).

💸 Economy & Development

Who Pays, Week Three: Rs 559 Billion on Paper

On Monday the disaster council recommended Rs 559.17 billion (about $3.6 billion) for 504 projects, though no breakdown has been published (The Kathmandu Post). The same day in Washington, Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle met World Bank President Ajay Banga, the first such meeting in three decades. Nepal asked for about $1 billion for insurance and social protection. Banga promised “significant” support but named no figure (The Annapurna Express). On Tuesday the Bank cut its growth forecast for this year to 3.7 percent, well short of the government’s 6 percent target. It puts direct damage at $1.66 billion and rebuilding at about $4.8 billion. “This is a moment of opportunity,” said country director David Sislen. (The Kathmandu Post). Next come the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, 12 to 18 October.

Dashain Without the Northern Road

All three overland routes to China are effectively shut going into the festival. Rasuwagadhi went with the flood, China is keeping Tatopani closed, and late-September rain and snow cut the road to Korala. About 500 containers are queued between Lete and the border there (myRepublica). “We are ready to operate from our side immediately,” Infrastructure Minister Sunil Lamsal told MPs, but China has not reopened Tatopani (The Himalayan Times). Shoppers are feeling it. A child’s trouser-and-T-shirt set that cost Rs 1,500 last Dashain now costs up to Rs 2,500, and traders say container charges have doubled. “People come, ask the price and leave saying it is too expensive,” said one New Baneshwar seller (OnlineKhabar). Mutton has hit a record Rs 1,700 a kilo, and traders expect a quarter fewer goats in the Valley (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief:

* Treatment abroad. Nepal Rastra Bank has doubled the foreign currency a Nepali can buy for medical treatment abroad to $30,000 a year. It has also eased the limits on paying for services from overseas (OnlineKhabar).

* Dashain money check. On Friday gold rose to Rs 295,700 a tola, banks bought dollars at Rs 154.56, and NEPSE closed at 2,591.80 (Nepal News).

⭐ Social & Cultural

Going Home, at a Price

Advance bus bookings opened today, with long queues at New Buspark (The Kathmandu Post). From Ghatasthapana on Sunday until 25 October, buses can run on any route in the country (OnlineKhabar). About a million people are expected to leave the Valley by road, roughly half the number in a good year, and long-distance buses must carry two drivers (The Kathmandu Post). Flying is no escape. Kathmandu–Dhangadhi tickets sold for up to Rs 22,180, above the regulator’s Rs 21,600 ceiling and about twice the usual fare (The Himalayan Times). Humla has the hardest journey home. Snow has blocked the Hilsa border since 25 September. On Thursday China opened its side and 144 Nepalis crossed back, and more than a hundred people have since left Hilsa on foot (OnlineKhabar).

Two Bronzes and a Boy from Boudha

The Asian Games closed in Nagoya on Sunday with Nepal 36th: two bronzes, no gold, and well short of the “Mission 2026” target (The Rising Nepal). One of those medals belongs to Tenzing Sherpa, 23, from Boudha, whom few had heard of a month ago. He started karate at 14 and had to stop for two years when money ran short, until his mother and two sisters paid for him to go back. He took bronze in the over-84kg kumite by beating Laos’s Xayasan Vatthana 9-1. “This medal is not mine alone,” he said (The Kathmandu Post). On Friday the cabinet approved his Rs 1.3 million prize, and Rs 390,000 for each member of the women’s kabaddi team that won the other bronze (Nepal News). The cricketers play Canada in Oman on Sunday, and the para athletes compete in Nagoya from 18 October.

In Brief:

* Nine hundred out. When the warnings came on 26 August, principal Rajendra Dawadi got more than 900 students out of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot before mud buried it. About 1,400 are now back in tent classes. “We need more books,” he says (Orato).

* Mountains reopen. Twenty volunteers dug out the Thorong La on 5 October, reopening the Annapurna Circuit (Ratopati). We found no news this week on the Himlung worker still missing, or on compensation for the families of the fifteen who died.

How to Help

* Give through the PM’s Disaster Relief Fund, Nepal Red Cross or your NRNA committee.

* Families abroad with a missing relative can now start the death registration that insurance claims and inheritance depend on.

Our sponsor, belayat.uk, the UK Nepali noticeboard, carries jobs, housing and events. Hosting a tika gathering on the 20th? Post it there.

Next week: the Congress results on Saturday, Ghatasthapana on Sunday, Malaysia’s 15 October cut-off and Wagle in Bangkok.

Until next week, stay connected.

— The Nepali Diaspora Digest Team

nepalidiaspora.net

Namaste, diaspora family. On Wednesday the government formally stopped looking for survivors of the Bhotekoshi flood. Then more rain killed about 35 people, and an avalanche on Himlung killed fifteen Nepali expedition workers. In Japan, the weather put our cricketers out of the Asian Games without their losing a match. Dashain is nine days away. Two corrections to last week appear below.

Where Things Stand

* Rescue is over. On 30 September the disaster authority (NDRRMA) moved to “search and recovery”, which continues at two tunnel sites. Families of the missing can now get relief without the usual 12-year wait; it starts at the ward office (Radio Nepal).

* The count (30 Sep): 1,454 dead, 112 identified, 5,285 missing, down from 5,786 mostly because duplicate names were removed. One missing Malaysian traveller turned up alive after 37 days (myRepublica).

* Correction: we said the Rs 15,000 rent allowance was being paid. The Kathmandu Post found on 30 September that no family had received it (The Kathmandu Post).

* Relief funds: Rs 16.155 billion given, still Rs 1 billion released (Khabarhub).

* Second rain (24 to 27 Sep): 35 dead, 12 of them in Baglung; the Narayani hit a record 11.94m (Nepal News).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Malaysia: Twenty-Five Agencies and a Locked Door

New hiring for Malaysia has been frozen for six weeks, and this week Kathmandu made its objection formal. Nepal asked Malaysia to drop the 25 Nepali agencies its new system named “principal” recruiters, with 250 more working under them. Nepal’s position is that every licensed agency is equal under Nepali law. The 25 firms have asked to withdraw. While the Department of Foreign Employment investigates them, pre-approvals stay on hold. “We are trying to resolve the complexities in Nepal-Malaysia labour relations at the highest level,” said Labour Ministry spokesperson Mira Acharya (OnlineKhabar). Nepal Press estimates that 300,000 jobs over two years ride on the outcome. For the 400,000 Nepalis already there, Malaysia is weighing a rise in the minimum wage from RM1,700 to RM2,000 a month, and foreign workers are covered (The Kathmandu Post).

The Gulf Narrows

Since the Iran–Israel war began on 28 February, new labour approvals for the Gulf are down 52 percent on last year, from 228,165 to 109,249. The UAE fell 59 percent and Saudi Arabia 57; only Oman rose, by 24 percent. With about 60 percent of Nepal’s 1.9 million overseas workers in the Gulf, the effects reach far beyond the people who never left. Arun Rai of Dharan was sent home from Abu Dhabi on unpaid leave. Shankar Lal Shrestha, 55, lost his gratuity when his Qatari employer closed. Remittances still hit a record Rs 2.363 trillion last year, partly because workers sent their savings home when the war started, but fewer departures now will show up later (The Kathmandu Post). If you’re owed wages, get it in writing and go to your embassy’s labour desk before flying home.

In Brief:

* US: still waiting. There’s no decision on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) ahead of Congress’s 9 October reply date. The State Department says it is “a decision for the Department of Homeland Security”. USCIS fees rise from 16 October (NepYork).

* Passports stalled. The passport system’s biometric server went down on Thursday after the government withheld Rs 1.22 billion from its German suppliers. We found no fix announced by Friday. If you’re renewing abroad, check with your embassy before booking travel (Nepal News).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

One Party, Two Conventions

Rain pushed the Nepali Congress’s 15th General Convention back to Sunday 4 October at Khula Manch, with voting on the 7th and 8th. On Thursday, Sher Bahadur Deuba’s faction started its own process, with ward conventions leading up to a central convention on 7 to 9 December. Deuba, Purna Bahadur Khadka and Shashank Koirala are staying away from Sunday’s event. “We had wanted a convention of unity,” said Koirala. Gagan Thapa’s side says it went ahead because no deal could be reached with Deuba. The Supreme Court’s review of its April ruling recognising Thapa’s leadership is still unheard, so each side calls the other illegitimate (Nepal News). The two sides now disagree about ideas too: the establishment’s draft drops BP Koirala’s “democratic socialism” for “social democracy” (The Kathmandu Post).

A Knock at Three in the Morning

Before dawn on Sunday, police took former Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana from his home without a warrant and held him for about twelve hours. The government says he was “taken to a secure location for his safety” after a threat. The Human Rights Commission called it “an illegal violation of constitutional rights”. myRepublica, citing unnamed sources, reported that the order came from the top; the government has not confirmed this (Nepal News, myRepublica). The opposition protested, and two RSP MPs objected online. On Monday, Durga Prasai was arrested for the eleventh time over remarks about an MP whose son died in the Gen Z protests, and the Supreme Court gave police 48 hours to justify it (Khabarhub). Together, the two cases are the sharpest test yet of whether a reform government will keep to the rules itself.

In Brief:

* Session closed. Parliament was prorogued from midnight on Friday after passing 12 bills. “A majority can form a government, but it cannot retain public trust,” said the Congress leader Bhishma Raj Angdembe (Nepal News).

* Home quietly. PM Balendra Shah returned from the UN on Saturday with no new pledges. A visit to India is expected after mid-November (The Kathmandu Post).

💸 Economy & Development

Who Pays, Week Two

In Doha, Nepal was elected vice-chair of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s Board of Governors. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle asked the bank for reconstruction money and got grants to prepare projects plus cheaper loans, but no pledged figure (The Kathmandu Post). Correction: his next stop is the IMF/World Bank meetings in Bangkok (12 to 18 October), not Washington. The International Labour Organization says 21,400 workers have lost their jobs or income, and puts reconstruction at about $4.78 billion (The Kathmandu Post). Insurers have received Rs 20.98 billion in flood claims and paid out Rs 6.74 million. Claims under Rs 500,000 no longer need a surveyor, so if a family vehicle or shop was insured, chase the claim (myRepublica).

Dashain on a Broken Supply Line

Every road to China is now shut. Rasuwagadhi has been closed since the flood, Tatopani is shut for a month, and the rain cut the Korala road in 46 places. More than 700 containers holding about Rs 5 billion of goods are stuck, and cars booked for Dashain can’t be delivered (The Kathmandu Post). Indian Oil raised its prices by about Rs 20 a litre, but the state oil company is holding pump prices until after the festival, at a loss of Rs 3.2 billion a fortnight, so expect a rise after Tihar (Peoples’ Review). The rain also knocked 358MW of power offline, and Nepal now plans to import up to 1,154MW from India this winter (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief:

* Tourists up 12%. September brought 88,248 visitors, with Chinese arrivals more than doubling. But UK arrivals fell 25 percent and US arrivals 14 percent (Nepal News).

* A bridge for Rasuwa. A Bailey bridge is going up at Betrawati, with the road to Syaphrubesi due to reopen by mid-October. The rupee is at about Rs 153 to the dollar (OnlineKhabar).

⭐ Social & Cultural

Fifteen at Base Camp

The climbers hadn’t arrived yet. Early on Sunday, an avalanche buried the base camp of Himlung Himal (7,126m) in Manang. Fourteen kitchen staff and two guides were there, setting up for their clients. Rescuers dug through four metres of snow. “We recovered four bodies, making it clear that no one survived,” said Mingma G, who led the unpaid volunteer recovery team (The Himalayan Times). By Thursday the dead numbered fifteen, from Sankhuwasabha, Khotang, Gorkha and Rukum, and one worker is still missing (AP). No compensation has been announced. These are the lowest-paid people on any expedition, and it is fair to ask the companies, and the government that collects the permit fees, what they will do for the families.

Out Without Losing a Game

Against Japan on Saturday, Nepal made 149 for 4 in 15 overs, with Sundeep Jora on 57 not out and Lokesh Bam on 52 not out. Then the rain came and the match ended as a no-result, which sent Nepal through as group winners. Tuesday’s quarter-final against Sri Lanka was abandoned without a toss, and with no reserve day the higher-ranked side went through (The Kathmandu Post). “Associate cricket spends forever qualifying for the main event,” said coach Stuart Law, “and if higher ranked teams get past in these kinds of situations, it is brutal.” Nepal’s Games end with two bronzes. Next up are seven para athletes training for the Asian Para Games (from 18 October) with no state funding (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief:

* Getting home. Two million people will leave the Kathmandu Valley for Dashain, and the Department of Roads promises repairs “by Dashain”. Ghatasthapana is 11 October and Tika 21 October (The Kathmandu Post).

* A month on. At least 33 pregnant women have had to travel to Kathmandu to give birth. A bank turned one survivor away because his 1986 citizenship photo no longer matches his face (The Kathmandu Post).

How to Help

* Give through the PM’s Disaster Relief Fund, Nepal Red Cross or your NRNA committee.

* The rent allowance hasn’t arrived yet, so for many families a direct transfer from abroad is the only cash before winter.

* Families of the missing must register them with the ward office to get relief.

Our sponsor, belayat.uk, the UK Nepali noticeboard, carries jobs, housing and events. Holding a Dashain gathering, or collecting for Himlung’s families? Post it there.

Next week: the Congress convention opens on Sunday, the US TPS date is the 9th, and Ghatasthapana is the 11th.

Until next week, stay connected.

— The Nepali Diaspora Digest Team

nepalidiaspora.net

Namaste, diaspora family. A month ago the mountain came down on the Bhotekoshi. On Thursday afternoon in New York, which was the small hours of Friday at home, the Prime Minister stood at the green marble podium of the General Assembly and told the world about it. “Climate change does not recognize borders,” Balendra Shah said. “Glaciers and floods do not travel with a visa stamped on passports.” In the fourth-floor gallery, a good number of the people listening were Nepali, and they clapped.

It was the kind of week where the news kept arriving from abroad. Fifty-seven members of the US Congress asked the White House to let Nepalis stay while the country rebuilds. A Boeing from Dubai landed in Pokhara on a scheduled flight for the first time. In Aichi, Japan, a young karateka from a rented room in Boudha won Nepal’s first medal of the Asian Games, the women’s kabaddi team won a second, and on Friday morning Nepal beat Afghanistan at cricket for the first time since 2014.

At home, the missing count went down, and we explain below why that is not the good news it looks like. And as we publish, the rain has come back: flights are grounded, buses out of Kathmandu have stopped, and the Koshi barrage has all 31 gates open. We start, as we have for five weeks, with the count.

Where Things Stand

Figures from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority as of Monday 21 September, unless stated:

* Dead: 1,451. Chitwan 367, Rasuwa 236, Nawalparasi East 232, Nawalparasi West 222, Nuwakot 203, Gorkha 79, Dhading 72, Tanahu 38. By Friday, AP’s count was 1,453 (The Tribune, WTOP/AP).

* Missing: 5,786, including 636 foreign nationals from 35 countries, down from 6,145 last Friday. AP put it at about 5,550 by Friday. This is not people being found alive. On Monday the authority began removing duplicate names: families had registered the same missing person in their home district and in Rasuwa or Nuwakot. Joint Secretary Balaram Niraula has told every district administration to check its list and enter only confirmed names in the Setu App. Expect the number to keep moving, in both directions (Nepal News, Ratopati).

* At the dams: more than 800 workers at hydropower sites are still unaccounted for, Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha told the House on Wednesday. At Upper Trishuli-1 alone, 439 of 1,433 workers are missing (The Kathmandu Post).

* Identified: about 111 bodies returned to families. About 1,292 have been buried after DNA samples were taken, to be exhumed and handed over as matches come through. Police hold 3,283 samples (Nepal News).

* Shelter: the Rs 15,000 monthly rent allowance is now being paid, and people are leaving the camps. Holding centres are down from 37 to 20, with 1,661 people: 786 in Rasuwa, 324 in Nuwakot, 121 in Dhading (Ratopati).

* Land: a government committee has identified 277 plots, about 3,279 ropani (roughly 168 hectares), on which to resettle families who cannot go back: 177 plots in Rasuwa, 94 in Nuwakot, six in Dhading. The criterion is safety first, closeness to the old village second (Nepal Press).

* Counting the cost properly: more than 250 officials with tablets began the full post-disaster needs assessment on Sunday. The House has set up a 15-member special committee on the flood and Himalayan climate change (Nepal News, HimalPress).

* The rain, again: heavy to extremely heavy rain is forecast until Sunday. On Friday domestic flights were halted nationwide, public buses in and out of Kathmandu were stopped, all 31 gates of the Saptakoshi barrage were opened, and schools were closed in Chitwan, Butwal, Biratnagar and elsewhere. Flash-flood forecasts now run 48 hours ahead, up from 24. If your family is on the road, tell them to stop at night (Nepal News, The Kathmandu Post).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

“Glaciers and Floods Do Not Travel with a Visa”

Balendra Shah had been Prime Minister for six months and had never left the country in the job. His first trip abroad was to the United Nations, and his first sentence there was this: “I come before you from Nepal, a distant country in the Himalayas, carrying a close warning for humanity.” In English, he walked the General Assembly through what he called a “Himalayan Tsunami”: at least 1,400 dead, more than 6,000 missing, recovery needs of about 10 percent of GDP, from a country that produces “less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.” “We did not create this crisis,” he said. “Yet we are paying a colossal price for it.” The asks were specific. Money should come as grants, not loans: “When the house is burning, we do not ask the family to complete fifty forms. We act.” And he proposed a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism in which Nepal, India and China share satellite data, monitor glacial lakes together and join up their early warnings: “Let the Himalayas become a laboratory of international cooperation, rather than a frontier of fragmented information.” The sharpest passage was about something else: the gas and fertiliser shortages that wars elsewhere have caused at home. Nepal, he said, had been “hit by the climate we did not warm, and again hit by the wars we did not start.” Then: “We have built a world with flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food.” He ended in Nepali, asking Pashupatinath’s blessing on the world (The Kathmandu Post).

Back home, the reviews were almost unanimous, which in Nepali politics is itself news. “The Prime Minister did not go representing any one party,” said Nepali Congress spokesperson Devraj Chalise. “He went representing the country and spoke the country’s language.” The UML’s Gokul Baskota called it “firm, meaningful, and strong,” and Baburam Bhattarai said the content was “correct!” (Ratopati). The dissent came from the analysts. In Nepal News, Binod Dhakal praised the Himalayan mechanism as genuinely new but noted that it has no secretariat, no funding formula and no sign yet that Delhi or Beijing have agreed to it. He also pointed out that the speech named no dollar figure. His verdict: “rhetoric is not a strategy and eloquence alone cannot finance a recovery” (Nepal News). Writing from New York, Ujjwal Prasai said the stronger message was solidarity rather than accusation, but “a powerful speech at the UN does not, by itself, produce a major achievement for Nepal” (OnlineKhabar). Shah’s only scheduled meeting was with António Guterres, who offered “deep sympathy,” recalled visiting Nepal as a tourist in 1978, and discussed the country’s graduation from least-developed status. Australia’s Anthony Albanese met him on the sidelines. He skipped the dinners. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal did the rest: about forty engagements, and diplomatic relations with Grenada and Namibia, taking Nepal’s count to 187 countries. Earlier in the week, outside the building, Nepali activists had joined a climate-reparations rally. “The floods swept away our homes and lands but not our identity,” said Anisha Buda Magar of the National Indigenous Women Forum. Inside, from the fourth-floor gallery, the diaspora supplied the applause. The New York Times, for its part, wrote about his sunglasses (myRepublica, NepYork, NepYork, The Kathmandu Post, Ratopati).

Fifty-Seven Signatures and a Deadline

Two weeks ago one congressman wrote to Homeland Security asking for protection for Nepalis in the US. This week it was fifty-seven. Representatives Judy Chu, Grace Meng and Raja Krishnamoorthi led a letter to President Trump and Secretary Markwayne Mullin, co-signed by 54 colleagues including Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Elvira Salazar, asking for Nepal to be designated for Temporary Protected Status under the environmental-disaster provision. Failing that, they ask for Deferred Enforced Departure and a pause on removals to the flood districts, with a reply by 9 October. More than 200 organisations have endorsed it, Adhikaar and the National TPS Alliance among them (NepYork, Quiver Quantitative). There is a gap in the campaign, and diaspora groups spotted it: as far as anyone has reported, Kathmandu has not formally asked. On Monday United for TPS Nepal and Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California wrote to Foreign Minister Khanal, who was in New York that week, urging the government to back the request. They estimate 30,000 to 50,000 people could qualify, about 25,000 of them students on F-1 visas. No reply has been reported (NepYork). Aid moved faster than immigration. After Khanal met Under Secretary of State Allison Hooker on Tuesday, Washington announced $31 million more, taking the total past $36 million: $10 million for permanent bridges, $8 million for shelter, water and winter supplies, and $13 million for US-made drones. “After I pressed officials before the Appropriations Committee, $36 million in aid and rescue support is finally being delivered,” said Meng, who says the first offer was one adviser and $500,000 (The Kathmandu Post, NepYork). The State Department’s version is that Nepal at first said it did not need much help. “Initially, the government of Nepal informed us that they believed that their own capacity was enough,” said spokesman Tommy Pigott. “We did see that change.” About 70 Americans are still unaccounted for (NepYork). The TPS that followed the 2015 earthquake ended last year, and this administration has not been generous with new designations. But a bipartisan letter with a date on it is harder to ignore than a single one.

In Brief: Kuala Lumpur, the Gulf, and the ballot box.

* “We do not like syndicates.” On Tuesday, Shah spoke by phone with Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim about the 25-agency recruitment list that has frozen new hiring from Nepal, where the Nepali workforce is already about 400,000 strong. “We do not like syndicates and the middleman system, and this is not acceptable under any circumstances,” Shah said. Anwar promised to “immediately instruct our labour minister.” By Thursday, Malaysia’s R. Ramanan and Nepal’s Ramji Yadav had agreed on a recruitment system that would “close off any room for exploitation and abuse,” and the two countries’ human rights commissions had renewed their migrant-rights pact. The list and Nepal’s freeze are both still in place (The Kathmandu Post, The Star, The Kathmandu Post).

* 60,042. That is how many labour permits were issued in the fiscal year’s second month, 68 percent of them for the Gulf, with the UAE alone taking 18,477. Dhanusha sent the most people and Manang the fewest. myRepublica’s editorial read the figures against the government’s promise to keep young people at home: “The permit data show how far that promise remains from everyday reality” (myRepublica).

* On the ballot. Four Nepali Americans are running for state legislatures in November: Delegate Harry Bhandari and newcomer Satish Chapagain in Maryland, Bishwa Bahadur Shah in New Hampshire, and Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha in New York. In Jackson Heights, Governor Kathy Hochul visited Cafe Catmandoo and Kasthamandap and heard about relatives missing in the flood and neighbours afraid to go to court. “No one should ever be afraid of walking in that door and fearing that someone from ICE is going to wait when they walk outside,” she said (NepYork, NepYork).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Six Thousand Wards, Two Conventions

Last weekend the Nepali Congress held the first round of its 15th General Convention, and more than 6,000 wards showed up. The central election committee counts ward conventions completed in 6,132 wards across 73 districts over Saturday and Sunday. They brought 43,353 women onto ward committees and 10,270 people under thirty, and at least 6,743 Dalit representatives. Party president Gagan Thapa got himself elected a regional representative from Ward 30 of Kathmandu, like any other member. “This time, a small group, including the former president, is outside the process,” said General Secretary Gururaj Ghimire. “Given those difficulties, the turnout and enthusiasm are encouraging” (The Kathmandu Post). The former president is Sher Bahadur Deuba, and his small group is building a party of its own. This week it named central representatives in 76 of 77 districts, coordinated by Shashank Koirala, for a rival convention with ward rounds from 1 October and a central session on 7 to 9 December (OnlineKhabar). Purna Bahadur Khadka, once Deuba’s acting president, put it most bluntly on Sunday: “If no miracle happens, the party’s split is certain. Even so, we are making a final effort to prevent it.” He wants the Supreme Court to hurry up with its review of the April ruling that recognised Thapa’s January special convention, and he says his side will accept whatever it decides. (A correction: last week we counted Khadka among the Deuba loyalists crossing to Thapa. He is in fact boycotting Thapa’s convention, which he calls unconstitutional.) (Nepal News). Shekhar Koirala is telling his people to stay away from both. The rain has now got involved: constituency conventions due on Saturday may slip by three days, and Surkhet and Kailali have postponed. Spokesperson Devraj Chalise says the inauguration at Khula Manch on 2 October will happen “at any cost” (Ratopati, Peoples’ Review). Deuba’s side says the whole process is illegal until the court rules. Thapa’s side says the court has already ruled. Both are, for now, correct about something.

Oli Stays, Bhandari Returns

The UML also spent the week deciding what to do about its leader, and decided to keep him. On Sunday the party’s election-review task force, which had been expected to ask KP Sharma Oli to take responsibility for March’s defeat, dropped its demand for his resignation. Member Damodar Bhandari said they still thought he was responsible; they just weren’t going to force him out (OnlineKhabar). Then came four days of central committee meetings at Rambagh Mahal in Lalitpur, mobile phones banned. Oli presented a political report that said “party reorganisation is not a matter of desire or impulse,” and on Thursday it passed unanimously. The push for change had come from Vice-Chair Bishnu Paudel and General Secretary Shankar Pokhrel, both former loyalists, and the party’s own statute makes it very hard to remove a chair between conventions (The Kathmandu Post). What the meeting produced instead was a promotion. Former President Bidya Devi Bhandari, whose name was floated as a unity figure in last week’s edition, was made “senior leader,” second in the hierarchy, and 33 new central committee members were nominated, 13 of them from other parties. Deputy General Secretary Yogesh Bhattarai tabled a proposal that Oli step down, and it was deferred to “future meetings.” “If Oli gives space to Bidya gradually in the party and moves forward, it may not be polarized,” said analyst Jhalak Subedi. The party also condemned what it called “political retaliation” against its leaders, criticised the government’s flood response and promised protests after Dashain and Tihar (Ratopati, Nepal News). Oli’s week included one more thing. Leaving the Chyasal meeting on Sunday, he told reporters that the “standard convention in journalism worldwide is to first ask whether a question can be posed.” Few reporters anywhere would recognise the convention (OnlineKhabar).

In Brief: A piece of paper, thirteen envoys and a habeas corpus.

* “A piece of paper.” The Constitution turned eleven on Saturday. “However good a constitution may be, it becomes a piece of paper if those entrusted with implementing it are not honest and continuously active,” said Prime Minister Shah. President Ramchandra Paudel asked for “a political culture that respects dissent, learns from criticism and makes the state accountable to citizens.” The leaders split along a familiar line: Rabi Lamichhane and Gagan Thapa are open to amendments, and Baburam Bhattarai warned against amending “in anger or haste” (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

* Thirteen from 4,400. In Nepal’s first open competition for ambassadorships, the cabinet picked 13 envoys from more than 4,400 applicants, among them posts in the UK, the US, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Oman, which are most of the places this newsletter’s readers live. Chiran Jung Thapa goes to Washington and Nishchal Nath Pandey to Delhi. The RPP’s Gyanendra Shahi says six of the nominees break the government’s own rules against recent foreign-funded employment. They now face parliamentary hearings (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

* Courts and bills. The Supreme Court ordered the release of analyst Bharat Dahal, arrested under the Electronic Transactions Act for claiming the Gen Z movement was foreign-backed. His comments, the justices said, were “a peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of thought and expression.” The House passed the Free Legal Aid and National Service Corps bills. And the families of those killed or critically injured in last September’s protests will get free education up to bachelor’s level (OnlineKhabar, Nepal News, OnlineKhabar).

💸 Economy & Development

Dubai Lands in Pokhara

At 6:18pm on Wednesday, a flydubai Boeing 737 MAX 8 landed, taxied through a water-cannon arch and became the first scheduled international passenger flight Pokhara International Airport has ever received. The airport opened on 1 January 2023, cost $216 million in China Exim Bank loans, and has spent almost three years being called a white elephant. More than a hundred passengers got off the first flight, among them workers home from the Gulf, and about 150 got on for the return. On the second day it was 135 in and 146 out. “Flying directly to Pokhara was far more convenient than first landing in Kathmandu and then travelling overland,” said Sita Gharti of Myagdi, home after ten years in Dubai. The government made it worth flydubai’s while. Landing, parking, navigation, passenger-service and tourism fees are all waived until September 2028, ground handling is half price, and jet fuel costs about a quarter less than in Kathmandu. Fares from Pokhara are Rs 3,000 to 7,000 cheaper than from the capital on major routes, and an Emirates codeshare connects on to more than 250 cities. Around fifty hotels are giving passengers 25 percent off for three months. “If we make this successful, we are confident that other airlines will also start services,” said Mukesh Dangol, director general of the Civil Aviation Authority (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News). The Post’s editorial was cautious. Pokhara’s last international route, Himalaya Airlines to Lhasa, was suspended in March 2025. And a first-time migrant worker still has to go to Kathmandu for the medical and the paperwork, at which point “they find it feasible to fly from the capital.” The service is approved to 24 October for now. If your family is in Kaski, Syangja, Parbat or Myagdi, this is the route home, and every full flight makes the next one more likely (The Kathmandu Post).

Grants, Not Loans: Who Pays for the Flood

The Prime Minister’s line in New York was about money as much as climate: “When a climate-driven disaster destroys infrastructure of a poor country, the answer cannot simply be another mega loan or a patchwork of small grants” (Business Recorder/Reuters). This week showed what he is up against. The World Bank made up to $170 million available in emergency financing (Business Recorder/Reuters). The Asian Development Bank cut its growth forecast for this fiscal year to 4.1 percent from 4.5, “largely because of the August 26 floods,” raised its inflation forecast to 5.3 percent and now expects a fiscal deficit of 4.7 percent of GDP, up from 3.4 (The Kathmandu Post). Unlike after the 2015 earthquake, there will be no donor conference. The Finance Ministry will negotiate one lender at a time for a bill of $4.7 to $5 billion over three to five years (The Kathmandu Post). Swarnim Wagle came back from Delhi without an Indian package. Nirmala Sitharaman told him India would decide once the needs assessment is done, which is four or five weeks away. He goes to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Doha on 28 and 29 September and then to Washington, and he wants to talk about “debt-for-recovery swaps” (The Kathmandu Post, Peoples’ Review). The fund the Prime Minister criticised at the UN is the one Carbon Brief looked at. Nepal has asked the UN Loss and Damage Fund for $20 million, which is 0.7 percent of the damage and losses. The fund has 176 applications worth $2.8 billion against $822 million pledged, has paid nothing out, and next meets in December. Spent on reconstruction, said Nepal’s negotiator Raju Pandit Chhetri, it would be “a peanut” (Carbon Brief). One more number explains why the government is allergic to new loans. In the first two months of the year it spent Rs 85 billion servicing debt and Rs 7.66 billion on capital projects. Public debt stands at Rs 2.97 trillion, about 45 percent of GDP (myRepublica).

In Brief: A hacked exchange, a closed border and a warm winter promise.

* NEPSE goes dark. The stock exchange stopped trading on Monday after ransomware hit Data Hub, the data centre used by 72 brokers. It is the third technical failure this year, after two false crashes in February and July. The securities board wants a report by 28 September. “Investors and brokers are always the ones who suffer,” said Narendra Raj Sijapati, a former head of the brokers’ association. Separately, the central bank cut the minimum period banks must hold shares they buy to 45 days (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

* The northern border. On Friday, Infrastructure Minister Sunil Lamsal asked Chinese Ambassador Zhang Maoming for help rebuilding the road to Rasuwagadhi; he says about 600,000 Nepalis depend on the northern crossings. China is “ready to provide all possible support” if Nepal submits a specific proposal. Tatopani has been shut for nearly two months, and the customs chief says China “had not yet provided a clear response.” Meanwhile Korala in Mustang has now cleared 1,090 electric vehicles, up from 641 last week (Khabarhub, Peoples’ Review, Nepal News).

* Power, a loan and gold. The Electricity Authority promises “no load-shedding this winter,” and the 40MW Rahughat plant in Myagdi joined the grid on Friday. Whether VAT on electricity will be scrapped is unclear: the energy minister says it is being discussed, and the finance minister’s office calls reports of a deal “baseless.” For readers abroad, Prabhu Bank has launched a diaspora home loan of up to Rs 30 million over 25 years. Gold fell back below Rs 300,000 a tola, to Rs 298,600 on Friday (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

⭐ Social & Cultural

Nisshin Feels Like Home

Afghanistan beat Nepal by eight runs in the 2014 Asian Games quarter-final, and Nepal had not beaten them at T20 since the World Cup in Bangladesh that same year. On Friday morning at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin, Nepal won with room to spare. Kushal Bhurtel, who opens the batting and bowls a bit of spin when asked, took 4 for 21; Lalit Rajbanshi took the top three in the powerplay and finished with 3 for 13; Afghanistan finished on 102 for 7. Nepal lost Bhurtel for a duck and Aasif Sheikh for two, and then Sundeep Jora (34 off 35, three sixes) and Rohit Paudel (33 not out) steadied it. Gulsan Jha hit the winning run with 16 balls to spare. Nepal moved up to 14th in the T20 rankings. The stands were full of Nepalis from across Japan, and the players went round afterwards to wave and applaud them. If Nepal beat Japan on Saturday at 9am local time (5:45am in Kathmandu, 1am in London), they should be into the quarter-finals (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News, Free Press Journal). The medals had already started. On Wednesday in Toyohashi, Tenzing Sherpa, 23, won bronze in the men’s +84kg kumite, beating Laos’s Xayasan Vatthana 9-1. It was the only medal from Nepal’s eight karatekas. He grew up in a rented room in Boudha with a single mother, Nir Kumari Shrestha Sherpa, who worked several jobs; his two sisters work in Dubai. She found out from his coach’s phone call, because she could not get the stream. “I have no guilt for the sacrifices I made,” she said, “because my children are giving me great reasons to be happy” (The Kathmandu Post). On Thursday, Manamati Bista’s women’s kabaddi team beat Sri Lanka 34-24 to guarantee a medal, then lost the semi-final to India, as they did in Hangzhou, and took a second bronze (Nepal News). There were disappointments. Erika Gurung, the silver medallist in Hangzhou and the team’s best hope of a first-ever gold, lost her bronze bout 8-7. The contingent is 135, about half of last time. At the opening ceremony a week ago, though, when the Nepali team walked in wearing black jackets, the Japanese crowd cheered them loudly, in solidarity after the flood (Asia News Network).

The Children of Rasuwa

Rasuwa’s private schools have published a count of their own. Thirty-eight students are missing: 19 from Gosaikunda Boarding School, ten from Modern Trinity and nine from Highland Residential. Modern Trinity’s founding principal, Suroj Dangol, is missing with them. And 201 parents are out of contact, and about two hundred children in these schools now have a mother, a father or both on the missing list: 46 at Gosaikunda, 42 at Highland, 41 at Namuna Evergreen, 33 at Modern Trinity. Five of the district’s seven private schools have reopened, and the children with no one to go home to are living in the hostels, where the schools have arranged food and free tuition (Nepal News). The government’s damage assessment is worse: 285 students unaccounted for in Rasuwa, and 224 students and eleven teachers in Nuwakot. Twelve schools are gone entirely. Neelkantha Secondary in Rasuwa now houses 80 flood-hit students, with counsellors. “Students have started staying in hostels and continuing their studies,” said Durga Silwal, the district’s education chief (OnlineKhabar). UNICEF says more than 14,000 children have had their schooling disrupted, and 48 temporary learning centres have brought 1,400 of them back into a classroom. “Returning to learning provides children with a sense of stability, routine and hope,” said its representative, Alice Akunga (UNICEF). For the adults, the problem is still getting across the river. With the bridges gone, people in Nuwakot and upper Rasuwa cross the Trishuli in a tuin, a basket slung from a steel cable, and wait their turn to haul the rope. Gokarna Adhikari waited five hours to take his father’s heart medicine across (The Kathmandu Post). One piece of good news to end on. Kabir Maharjan, who spent ten days trapped in the Upper Trishuli 3A tunnel before he was pulled out alive, was discharged from hospital on Friday and went home to Lalitpur, where the neighbours garlanded him (OnlineKhabar).

In Brief: A chariot in the rain, a mountain closed, and a premiere in London.

* Indra Jatra, and Dashain’s dates. The lingo pole went up at Hanuman Dhoka on Wednesday, hundreds of small girls were worshipped as Kumari in Basantapur on Thursday, and on Friday the Kumari’s chariot was pulled through old Kathmandu as the rain threatened, with the President watching. Locals played the traditional Muali music for the first time in about twenty-five years. Dashain is late this year: the calendars put Ghatasthapana on 11 October and Tika on 21 October. Bus bookings will open only after the transport department has assessed the roads and the weather (WTOP/AP, Rising Nepal, Khabarhub).

* Manaslu closes. On Saturday night, an avalanche buried the Camp 3 tent of Indian-German climber Dhruba Jyoti Guha and his guide, Phursemba Sherpa of the Makalu region, under two metres of snow. That makes four deaths this season. After two weeks of snow, the big operators cancelled the season on Tuesday, with 493 climbers holding permits. “In the mountains, nature always has the final word,” said Chhang Dawa Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks (The Himalayan Times, Explorersweb).

* Screens and needles. UK readers: Elephants in the Fog, Nepal’s Oscar entry, has its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 17 October (Vue West End, 12:30pm) and 18 October (BFI Southbank, 6:40pm), and tickets are on sale now. In Trento, Rasuwa-born filmmaker Avash Rijal’s The Witness of Yara won best short documentary, and he dedicated it to the flood’s dead. In Jhapa, 21,746 people had the Japanese encephalitis jab on the first day of the campaign; none of the seven people the disease has killed there had been vaccinated (The Future of the Force, The Kathmandu Post, Radio Nepal).

How to Help

The verified list from four weeks ago still holds: the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund via opmcm.gov.np and nowhere else, Nepal Red Cross, and your NRNA national committee’s own channel rather than a forwarded link. This week’s additions:

* Ask where the money went. The Prime Minister’s relief funds held Rs 15.53 billion by Thursday, including $25.4 million in foreign currency, much of it from you. About Rs 1 billion has been released. If your association gave, it is a fair question to ask what it paid for (Nepal News).

* The allowance has a gap. The Rs 15,000 rent allowance goes to families who owned a home. People who rented a shop or a room get nothing, and more than 2,000 small traders were hit in Nuwakot alone. Januka Mijar sold madals in Bidur for 22 years: “Everything I had built over 22 years was washed away.” A small grant to a named trader through a group you trust goes a long way (The Kathmandu Post).

* The orphaned students. PABSON Rasuwa is coordinating free schooling and hostel places for the 200-plus children whose parents are missing. Shesh Ghale’s MIT Foundation has pledged Rs 578.5 million for children orphaned by the flood. If your organisation wants to fund something specific, a hostel year is specific.

* In the US: the TPS letter asks for a reply by 9 October. If you are a constituent of one of the 57 signatories, thank them; if your representative did not sign, ask why. Advice on eligibility: Adhikaar.

* If someone is missing: khozi.facetagr.com with a clear photograph, and a DNA sample from a close relative at a district hospital. District offices are now merging duplicate entries; if you registered the same person in two places, it is worth telling the district administration office.

Our sponsor, belayat.uk, the UK Nepali community noticeboard, carries jobs, housing and events alongside relief appeals. If your group is organising a Dashain gathering or a trip to the Elephants in the Fog screening in October, post it there.

Next week: Nepal against Japan in Nisshin on Saturday morning, and a cricket quarter-final if that goes our way. The rain warning until Sunday. The stock exchange’s report on the 28th and Parliament back the same day. Wagle in Doha on the 28th and 29th. The Nepali Congress convention opening at Khula Manch on Friday 2 October, with or without Sher Bahadur Deuba. We will keep the count, and we will correct anything here that turns out to be wrong.

Until next week, stay connected.

— The Nepali Diaspora Digest Team

nepalidiaspora.net

All figures in this edition are as reported by Friday 25 September 2026 and are expected to change.

Namaste, diaspora family. Four weeks since the Bhotekoshi came down, and this was the week the numbers moved in opposite directions. On Wednesday the disaster authority added nearly a thousand names to the missing list after checking the district registers, and the count now stands at 6,145. On Thursday morning, at six o’clock, the first car in eighteen days drove through Krishnabhir and the Prithvi Highway was a highway again. A cooking-gas cylinder in Kathmandu got cheaper by lunchtime.

In between, a panel of climate scientists said there is “no doubt” what loosened the mountain; forty of Sher Bahadur Deuba’s own people walked across to Gagan Thapa; Malaysia and Nepal fell out over who is allowed to send 400,000 workers; and Kent gave the Brigade of Gurkhas the Freedom of the County. On Saturday morning in Kuala Lumpur, Aasif Sheikh scored a hundred and Nepal beat the UAE by 44 runs. Bangladesh, 2027. We are going to the Asia Cup.

Tomorrow is Constitution Day and the Asian Games open in Nagoya. On Tuesday the Prime Minister flies to New York. We start, as we have for a month, with the count.

Where Things Stand

Figures from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority as of 7pm on Thursday 17 September, unless stated:

* Dead: 1,410. Of those, 549 are men, 336 are women and 525 are remains that have not been identified. Chitwan 364, Nawalparasi East 232, Nawalparasi West 222, Nuwakot 203, Rasuwa 199 (Nepal News, webindia123).

* Missing: 6,145, of whom 587 are foreign nationals. On Wednesday the authority raised the figure from 5,179 to 6,150 in one step. “We have been collecting details on the missing people from the district offices and revised the data after verification,” said spokesperson Shanti Mahat. The two-definition problem we flagged last week has been resolved in the direction of the larger number (Courthouse News).

* Identified: 110 bodies returned to families. DNA samples: 1,286 from the dead, 1,944 from relatives. The relatives’ samples now outnumber the bodies, which is the right way round and was not the case a fortnight ago.

* The bill: the rapid damage assessment puts it at $4.7 billion, 65 percent of it infrastructure. Thirteen hydropower plants and five solar plants are out, 783 megawatts, a fifth of what the country could generate before 26 August (Nepali Times).

* Housing: the cabinet has approved Rs 15,000 a month for every displaced family of up to four, plus Rs 2,000 for each additional member, until permanent homes are built. Forms have gone to ward offices. Those who would rather have a temporary shelter than cash can choose that instead (Nepal News).

* Shelter: 27 holding centres remain, with 832 people in Nuwakot, 817 in Rasuwa and 94 in Dhading. An Acrow bridge is open at Devighat.

* Solukhumbu: the Hunga Khola dam we reported on Friday began overtopping about three hours after it formed and the immediate danger eased, though police have kept the downstream warning in place (The Kathmandu Post).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Four Hundred Thousand Jobs, Twenty-Five Agencies

There are about 400,000 Nepalis working in Malaysia, the third-largest foreign workforce there after Bangladesh and Indonesia, and since 22 August Nepal has not cleared a single new demand letter for more. The reason is a list. On 21 August, Malaysia’s Foreign Worker Centralised Management System named 25 Nepali recruitment agencies as “principal recruitment agencies,” each allowed up to ten affiliates, and told Nepal about it a week later. Nepal’s Labour Ministry objected the next day, ordered the embassy in Kuala Lumpur to stop certifying demand letters from the chosen 25, and had the Department of Foreign Employment halt prior approvals. There are roughly 1,100 licensed agencies in Nepal. “Equal opportunity, fair competition and business rights must be guaranteed,” said Dik Bahadur Chhetri of the recruiters’ association, which is a fair point and also a self-interested one. This week the ministry escalated: spokesperson Mira Acharya said Nepal “disagrees with the way recruitment agencies have been selected” and asked Malaysia to convene the two countries’ joint technical committee and hand over the selection criteria in writing. Malaysia says the system is about transparency and worker protection. Meanwhile the first month of the fiscal year shows what is at stake. Remittances rose 21.2 percent to Rs 215 billion, but new labour approvals fell to 42,693 from 44,466, and re-entry approvals, workers going back to jobs they already had, rose 17 percent. Fewer first-timers, more returners. That is what a corridor narrowing looks like (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

For those already there, a note. Malaysian immigration checked about 2,500 foreigners at Kotaraya in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday and detained 472, eight of them Nepali. “Hundreds of undocumented workers are being arrested daily,” said Binod Thapa, the former NRNA president in Malaysia. The voluntary Migrant Repatriation Programme, which lets an undocumented worker pay a fine of RM500 and go home without a detention record, has been extended to 31 May 2027. If you have a relative in Malaysia whose papers have lapsed, that programme is a better route out than a raid (The Kathmandu Post).

Seventy Americans, a Letter to DHS, and Tuesday’s Flight

About 70 American citizens remain unaccounted for in the flood zone, three weeks on. Eighteen who had been on the list reached safety by Monday. “The safety of Americans in the affected area remains our highest priority,” the State Department said, adding that the number could still change either way. The United States has now sent a cargo drone to the Armed Police, 5,000 victim-recovery kits, 500 first-aid kits, a four-member military civil-affairs team and FBI forensic specialists to work with Nepal Police on identification, and has put an additional $1 million into that forensic work, taking its aid past $5 million (NepYork). In Washington, Congressman Thomas Suozzi, four of whose constituents are among the missing, has written to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asking for a fresh Temporary Protected Status designation for Nepal “so that eligible Nepali nationals currently in the United States are not forced to return while their country confronts this disaster.” The previous TPS, granted after the 2015 earthquake, was terminated in June last year, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the termination in February. The campaign is being run by attorney Keshab Raj Seadie, whose GoFundMe we mentioned last week; Senator Schumer’s office is said to be looking at it. A letter is not a designation, and this administration has not been in a designating mood. But the request is on the record (NepYork). The Prime Minister leaves for New York on Tuesday, arrives Wednesday, meets António Guterres, is invited to President Trump’s reception that evening, speaks to the General Assembly on Thursday the 24th and is back in Kathmandu on the 26th. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal goes ahead on Sunday. No diaspora event is on the published schedule, and the Nepali American Business and Investment Summit that was to have coincided has moved to 20 to 22 November because of the floods (Nepal News, NepYork).

In Brief: Kent, Riyadh and Pokhara.

* The Freedom of Kent. On Thursday, Kent County Council voted 69 in favour with two abstentions and none against to grant the Brigade of Gurkhas the Freedom of the County, only the second time the honour has been given. The motion came from the council’s Reform UK leader Linden Kemkaran and passed with every party’s support; the 2nd Royal Gurkha Rifles are at Shorncliffe in Folkestone and the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers at Maidstone. “Kent should be really proud of providing a home for many of the Gurkhas,” said Liberal Democrat Richard Streatfeild. Three days earlier, ten veterans’ organisations had met Veterans Minister Calvin Bailey for the first time and given the government until 31 December on pension parity for those who served before 1993 and settlement rights for adult children. “I will try my best from my side,” Bailey told them (Nepal News, KentOnline, South Asia Time).

* A lawyer in Saudi Arabia. Among Wednesday’s cabinet decisions: a power of attorney for a Saudi lawyer to pursue insurance and compensation claims on behalf of Nepalis killed or injured there. Families who have given up on a claim from Nepal now have somewhere to send it (OnlineKhabar).

* Dubai to Pokhara, daily, from Wednesday. flydubai’s FZ1165 leaves Dubai at noon and lands at Pokhara at 6:15pm from 23 September, the first scheduled service from the UAE into the airport, with an Emirates codeshare. If your parents are in Kaski, the Kathmandu transfer just went away (flydubai).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

How Deuba Lost His Own Inner Circle

Three weeks ago we wrote that the Nepali Congress had split in two. This week it split in a way nobody had drawn on the whiteboard: down the middle of Sher Bahadur Deuba’s faction. On Sunday, Gagan Thapa’s central working committee agreed to take in all 31 members of the central committee elected under Deuba at the 14th convention, on condition they join the convention process starting this weekend, and to find room for the 111 office-bearers and members left out after the January special convention. By Wednesday, the Post counted around 40 of Deuba’s people heading for the party headquarters in Sanepa: Mahalaxmi Upadhyay Dina, Gandaki chief minister Surendra Pandey, former Bagmati chief minister Indra Bahadur Baniya and, the one that matters, Purna Bahadur Khadka, the man Deuba had made acting president, who stopped coming to faction meetings in early September and refused to lead a breakaway. “When the whole house has collapsed and turned to ashes,” said Deepak Kuikel, one of the crossers, “there is little point in arguing over which room is bigger.” Deuba’s answer, on Tuesday, was a statement telling leaders and cadres to boycott what he called an “illegal” process, and a separate convention of his own on 7 to 9 December, announced by Shashank Koirala. Shekhar Koirala has declared himself neutral. On Thursday Thapa made the appeal that tells you who holds the cards: “My respected leader and former party president Sher Bahadur Deuba, I would like to make an appeal to you. If the former party president inaugurates the convention on the day it begins, it would be a matter of honour for us.” Ward conventions run in 6,743 wards this weekend, and the 15th General Convention opens at Khula Manch on 2 October. The Supreme Court, which recognised Thapa’s convention in April and agreed in August to review that ruling, has not said when it will. The party has split before, in 1953 and 2002, and come back both times; the difference now is that it is fighting over itself from the opposition benches, facing a government with 182 seats (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, myRepublica, OnlineKhabar).

A Photograph at the Vivanta

While the Congress was subtracting, the left was thinking about adding. On Wednesday, UML secretary Sherdhan Rai posted a photograph of himself with Barshaman Pun of Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s Nepali Communist Party at the Hotel Vivanta in Lalitpur, and two weeks of quiet conversation became public. “The top leaders on both sides appear ready for unity or cooperation,” Pun said afterwards. “At the middle level, we still need to discuss how to move forward and what more needs to be done.” The options on the table run from an electoral alliance to a full merger through a joint convention, and one senior leader told OnlineKhabar that former President Bidya Devi Bhandari is being discussed as the figure who could lead a combined party in place of KP Sharma Oli. Anyone with a memory will recall the last time UML and the Maoists did this, in May 2018, when they merged into the Nepal Communist Party on the back of a near two-thirds majority and lasted three years before the Supreme Court dissolved it and the two chairmen went back to loathing each other. Between them the two parties still run five of seven provinces: UML in Koshi, Bagmati and Lumbini, the NCP in Karnali and Sudurpaschim. Oli, for his part, spent the weekend telling the Federation of Nepali Journalists that the Balen Shah government is “oppressive” and “anti-media” for cutting public-welfare advertising, which is the sort of thing you say when you are looking for allies (OnlineKhabar, Nepal News).

In Brief: Maps, rules and a Monday sitting.

* “Not baggage.” Asked in the House on Tuesday by Congress MP Sita Thapaliya whether the “old baggage” he had spoken of in India meant the 2020 constitutional amendment that put Lipulekh, Kalapani and Limpiyadhura on Nepal’s map, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said the map “represents a shared national commitment” and “cannot be regarded as a burden under any circumstances.” It passed Parliament unanimously; he was not going to be the one to reopen it (The Kathmandu Post).

* Two cabinets. Wednesday’s approved rules to digitise the government’s own decision-making, set advance tax on share gains at 3.5 percent for holdings over a year and 5 percent under, and adopted a procedure for a revolving relief fund. Friday’s moved the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology out of the Agriculture and Environment ministry and into Energy, a week after Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha said he wants to start draining the most dangerous glacial lakes (OnlineKhabar, Nepal News).

* Dates. The House sits again at 1pm on Monday 21 September. Army chief Ashok Raj Sigdel is in Beijing until Saturday for the Xiangshan Forum. And tomorrow, 19 September, is Constitution Day, the eleventh, which will be marked with a government that got there by winning under the document rather than by rewriting it (Nepal News).

💸 Economy & Development

The Road Comes Back. The Border Does Not.

At 6am on Thursday, all traffic was allowed through Krishnabhir in both directions, 18 days after the hillside took the Prithvi Highway into the Trishuli. What they are driving on is a 270-metre gravel track cut into the slope above the collapse by about fifty workers from the Malekhu-Mugling Road Project on 12- to 16-hour shifts, opened to gas tankers on trial from Sunday and to everyone else once the last gravel went down on Wednesday evening. “Krishnabhir has always been a difficult landslide zone,” said roads director-general Bijaya Jaishi. “The new track is not a long-term solution.” It gets two weeks of monitoring before blacktopping; the 12-kilometre road on the far bank between Benighat and Fisling has 1.5 kilometres left and a four-month target; a tunnel or a bypass bridge will be decided within six months. The effect was immediate: the Oil Corporation dropped the transport surcharge and a Kathmandu cylinder went from Rs 2,165 back to Rs 2,060 the same day. The Post’s editorial, published while the track was still being gravelled, made the point that will outlast it: the diversion had meant ten hours for the hundred kilometres from Hetauda, and the Army’s Kathmandu-Tarai expressway, begun in 2017, is less than half built. Then there is the other road. Forty kilometres of the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi highway and 41 bridges are gone; the Department of Roads puts the damage at Rs 30 billion and rebuilding at Rs 50 billion, and wants a temporary track to the Chinese border before Dashain. It will not get the border. Tatopani, the other crossing, has been shut by China since 29 August on landslide grounds and traders say it will not reopen before the festivals. Everything is coming over the 4,650-metre Korala pass in Mustang instead: 641 electric vehicles and 434 containers in fifteen days, Rs 1.78 billion in customs revenue, and a queue of more than 200 vehicles at a border post with no proper customs yard, four to five days to Kathmandu against four to five hours from Tatopani. The Dashain EVs, electronics and apples are somewhere on that road (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, myRepublica, Nepal News).

“No Doubt”: The Case Nepal Takes to New York

The Prime Minister will stand up in the General Assembly on Thursday with a number, $4.78 billion, and, since Wednesday, with a finding. World Weather Attribution, the consortium that works out how much climate change contributed to a given disaster, published its analysis of Langtang Lirung this week. Its answer, in Friederike Otto’s words: “There is no doubt that climate change is one of the drivers.” The mechanism is what Nepali scientists have been saying for a month, now with figures. July and August were the warmest on local record, about 5°C above normal. The freezing line on the high Himalaya has been climbing roughly 100 metres a decade, exposing permafrost that had held the rock together for tens of thousands of years. Unusually heavy snow last winter added meltwater; the 2015 earthquake had probably already cracked the face. “When you combine high-elevation permafrost degradation with glacier retreat and record summer heat,” said Utrecht’s Walter Immerzeel, “the structural integrity of these mountain walls is compromised.” What came off was 116 million cubic metres, moving at up to 100 miles an hour and cresting 300 feet, five times the size of India’s Chamoli disaster of 2021. The study’s recommendations are practical and cheap by comparison: radar and satellite scans of every river corridor with infrastructure in it, rock-movement sensors, seismometers, cameras. Nepal’s own preparation for New York happened in Jomsom, where 431 local governments met on Monday and Tuesday and issued the Gharapjhong Declaration from the bank of the Kali Gandaki, asking that climate finance be called what they think it is, compensation for loss and damage, not aid. “Nepal will not only ask for assistance at international forums,” said Environment Minister Gita Chaudhary. The Loss and Damage Fund has about $350 million available against $800 million pledged, which is less than a tenth of this one flood. That is the argument. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle is making a version of it in Delhi this weekend, where he saw Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday and S. Jaishankar on Friday and is asking about concessional loans on the 2015 model, when India put up a billion dollars (Al Jazeera, Inside Climate News, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The first month’s numbers, the winter’s electricity, and a new fifty.

* Rs 215 billion in, prices up. The central bank’s first-month report is a mixed sheet. Remittances up 21.2 percent to Rs 215.05 billion ($1.4 billion). Exports up 61.7 percent, with shipments to China nearly quadrupling. Reserves at $25.84 billion, enough for 21.8 months of imports. But inflation has jumped to 5.96 percent from 1.68 percent a year ago, with cooking oil and ghee up 15.6 percent and transport up 13.2 percent, and the trade deficit is up a quarter. If you are sending money home this Dashain, it is buying less than it did last Dashain (Nepal News).

* 654 megawatts from India. New Delhi has approved exports of up to 654MW to Nepal for 18 hours a day from 13 September to the end of December, most of it on the Dhalkebar line, to cover a dry-season shortfall the Electricity Authority puts at 350 to 400MW after the flood. Some of what still works cannot get out: the destroyed Nuwakot substation has stranded 176MW. The Authority’s board has also voted Rs 50,000 immediately and half-salary for six months to the families of its 47 staff and workers still missing. “This money cannot heal such a deep wound,” said Energy Minister Shrestha, “but I hope it provides some relief” (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

* Land, and a note. Real estate transactions grew 4.74 percent last fiscal year after a contraction the year before, and the value changed hands nearly doubled to Rs 721 billion; in Kathmandu Metropolitan City the number of deals rose 156 percent. The central bank also put a new Rs 50 note into circulation on Friday, with Everest on it, a rhododendron watermark and a snow leopard, and gold went back over Rs 300,000 a tola (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

⭐ Social & Cultural

Potatoes in Gre

Twenty-four days after the flood, three wards of Amachhodingmo Rural Municipality in upper Rasuwa are eating potatoes. Wards 1, 2 and 3, around Gre village, roughly 960 households, lost their suspension bridges on 26 August and have been reachable since only by the smallest helicopters, which carry fifteen sacks of rice a trip. The larger World Food Programme aircraft go to wards 4 and 5. “Only after repeated appeals did some relief reach wards 4 and 5,” said the municipality chair, Buchung Tamang. Wards 1 to 3 have had between 30 and 70 sacks each. The rice people had is gone or has rotted. “We have been surviving on potatoes in the morning, during the day and at night,” said Jandra Tamang, whose husband Tashi Wangden died in the flood. Lakpa Kami Tamang, the ward 2 chair, who lost eight members of his family: “We are now starving.” The school hostel, which housed more than 200 children, has closed because it cannot feed them, and residents have started asking to be moved down to the displacement camps, which is not a thing people say about their own village unless they mean it. Lower down, the problem is the opposite: as Bidur’s schools reopened, families who had been sleeping in classrooms were asked to leave, and the collective shelters now hold twenty or more to a room. Sabitri Tamang of Aangitar, who lost eight relatives and has one son left, remembers “a black plume of muddy water” coming from the sky. The land they were promised for resettlement has not been identified, and the cash allowance announced this week is for rent in places where there is nothing to rent. The Nepali Times counted the other losses: of more than 80 temples, shrines and ghats the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project had recorded along the river, 21 are gone entirely, the cremation ghats among them. “Heritage in this part of the world is also a method of caring for people in trauma,” said the project’s Rajan Khatiwoda. In Gre, they would settle for rice (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times).

313, a Century, and Bangladesh Next Year

It rained in Kuala Lumpur, as forecast, and it did not matter. Nepal batted first at Bayuemas Oval on Saturday and made 313 for 9, the kind of total that last week’s edition doubted this batting order had in it. Aasif Sheikh made 102 off 106 balls, eight fours and four sixes, his second one-day century; Gulsan Jha hit 52 off 38 at the end; Arjun Kumal 43 and Rohit Paudel 40 did the middle. Rahul Chopra’s unbeaten hundred kept the UAE in it until Karan KC, with three wickets, and Lalit Rajbanshi, with two, finished them for 269 in the last over. Nepal won by 44 runs, took the ACC Premier Cup for the second time, and with it the only place on offer at the 2027 Asia Cup in Bangladesh, where the full members will be waiting. Somewhere in the middle of it, captain Sandeep Lamichhane took his 300th international wicket, the first Nepali to get there, 158 in one-day cricket and 142 in T20s, and was named player of the series for the second Premier Cup running. The team landed in Kathmandu on Sunday night to a crowd at the airport and Paras Khadka, who used to do this for a living and now does it as CAN secretary: winning abroad, he said, proves the standard. Most of the same squad, with Dipendra Singh Airee as captain, is now in Japan, where the Asian Games open in Nagoya on Saturday; Nepal’s men play Afghanistan on the 25th and Japan on the 26th at Nisshin. The women’s volleyball team, at its second Games, has already lost in straight sets to Japan and Indonesia and goes into the classification round, though the 21-25 and 20-25 sets against Indonesia were closer than the scoreline (CricTracker, Gulf News, Nepal News, Radio Nepal, OnlineKhabar).

In Brief: An Oscar entry, a birth on a pavement, and a needle in Jhapa.

* Elephants in the Fog goes to the Academy. Nepal’s selection committee chose Abinash Bikram Shah’s Cannes prize-winner over Gauthali as the country’s entry for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards. A shortlist is a long way off; the entry is the first step Nepal has usually stumbled on. Meanwhile the Post surveyed a year of Gen Z art: Swoopna Suman’s farewell song “Yaad Haru Ma,” Neetesh Jung Kunwar’s “Speechless,” Katha Ghera’s playback theatre on 8 September, and a year-long exhibition, “के”, at Kaalo.101 in Lalitpur, open Wednesday to Sunday, 4 to 6pm, until next 8 September (Nepal News, The Kathmandu Post).

* Rs 3,200. Babita Kumari Paswan, 30, arrived in labour at the government hospital in Rajbiraj at 1am. Staff asked for Rs 3,200 for tests; her husband had Rs 2,000. She gave birth to a boy on the pavement outside, over a drain, at about 4:30am. Six staff have been suspended and the Health Minister has been to the House about it. Delivery has been free in Nepal since 2009; laboratory tests are not, and that gap is where she fell (The Kathmandu Post).

* Jhapa, Manaslu, Palpa. Japanese encephalitis has killed seven of 13 confirmed cases in Jhapa, and from Monday more than 500,000 people over 30 will be vaccinated at 900 centres; if your parents are there, tell them to go. On Manaslu, 466 foreign climbers hold autumn permits and the ropes are fixed to Camp 3. And the 237 inmates of Palpa prison have sent Rs 83,000 to the Prime Minister’s relief fund, earned from handicrafts, sewing and weaving (Nepal News, Nepal News).

How to Help

The verified list from three weeks ago still holds: the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund via opmcm.gov.np and nowhere else, Nepal Red Cross, and your NRNA national committee’s own channel rather than a forwarded link. This week’s additions are things to tell people rather than places to send money:

* The housing allowance exists. Rs 15,000 a month per displaced family, plus Rs 2,000 per extra member, with forms at the ward office. If your relatives are in a shelter or with family in another district, make sure someone has filled one in.

* If a relative worked for the Electricity Authority at any of the 13 damaged projects and is missing, the family is owed Rs 50,000 now and half-salary for six months. That covers daily-wage and contract workers, not only permanent staff.

* If someone is missing: khozi.facetagr.com with a clear photograph, and a DNA sample from a close relative at a district hospital. Nepal Tourism Board hotline 1234 (toll-free in Nepal) or 1144.

* Upper Rasuwa needs rice, not blankets. If your organisation is deciding what to fund, Amachhodingmo wards 1 to 3 are the most specific unmet need published this week, and the constraint is helicopter capacity. Ask the Red Cross or WFP Nepal what they can lift.

Our sponsor, belayat.uk, the UK Nepali community noticeboard, carries relief appeals and vigil notices alongside its jobs, housing and events listings. If your group is marking Constitution Day or Dashain, post it there.

Next week: Constitution Day and the Asian Games opening on Saturday, the Congress ward conventions this weekend, the Prime Minister’s speech in New York on Thursday, Indra Jatra from Wednesday, and Nepal against Afghanistan in Nisshin on Friday. We will keep the count, and we will correct anything here that turns out to be wrong.

Until next week, stay connected.

— The Nepali Diaspora Digest Team

nepalidiaspora.net

All figures in this edition are as reported by Friday 18 September 2026 and are expected to change.

Namaste, diaspora family. This is the third week since the Bhotekoshi came down, and the first in which the digest returns to its usual four sections. The flood is still in all of them.

On Tuesday, Nepal marked one year since the police opened fire on students outside Parliament in Baneshwar. It was a public holiday. The families came to the old Parliament building; the Prime Minister did not. Meanwhile the diaspora has raised more than $10 million on GoFundMe alone, and a grandmother in Trisuli Bazar told a reporter she cannot afford milk for the child in her arms. A minister resigned over gas cylinders. Sauraha’s hotels are running at five percent. And on Saturday morning, Nepal play the UAE for the only place in the 2027 Asia Cup.

The count, as of Friday morning: 1,385 dead and 5,130 missing.

Where Things Stand

Figures from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority as of 11am on Friday 11 September, unless stated:

* Dead: 1,385. Chitwan 364, Nawalparasi East 228, Nawalparasi West 222, Nuwakot 199, Rasuwa 185, Gorkha 77, Dhading 70, Tanahun 38, and two who died in treatment in Kathmandu (The Tribune).

* Missing: 5,130 on the authority’s wider count. The government’s narrower figure remains 3,916.

* Identified and returned to families: 102 of 1,367 bodies and partial remains recovered by Wednesday (The Kathmandu Post).

* Trishuli 3A: the search of the main tunnel was called off on 4 September, hours after last week’s edition went out. A seven-member team reached every section and found one more body and nobody else (The Kathmandu Post).

* Power: 83 percent of supply restored in Rasuwa, 95 percent in Nuwakot; a 60-metre temporary bridge over the Tadi at Devighat (The Kathmandu Post).

* A new warning, Friday: a landslide has dammed the Hunga Khola at Gudel in Solukhumbu. The river is now overtopping it toward the Dudhkoshi, and police have told people downstream to stay off the banks in case the blockage gives way (The Kathmandu Post).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Ten Million Dollars, and No Milk in Trisuli Bazar

NepYork went through 111 GoFundMe campaigns for the flood this week and found more than $10 million raised on that platform alone. Bhutanese Americans in Columbus, Ohio, had passed $105,000; a family appeal in Waratah, Australia, was near $70,000; campaigns in Edmond, Oklahoma, and Lexington, Massachusetts, stood at $59,000 and $51,000; Keshab Raj Seadie’s drive in New York was over $64,000 and going to the Prime Minister’s fund. Nepali Samaj Fort Wayne sent $22,000. A football club in Austin sent $2,000. The government’s two relief funds had taken in about $80 million by Monday. Of that, about $6.5 million had been released to the disaster authority. Which is how you get to Lila Devi Joshi, 60, in Trisuli Bazar, who lost her home, her shops and most of her family, and is now raising a sixteen-month-old grandson: “I don’t even have money to buy milk for the child.” Or Inam Tamang in Mailung, a heart patient whose wife has diabetes, whose road to a pharmacy no longer exists: “We cannot live by eating relief food alone. Tomorrow, the children have to go to school.” The money is not the problem. Getting it from a bank account in Kathmandu to a tent in Nuwakot is. If your community is deciding where its next collection goes, that is the question to put to whoever receives it (NepYork).

A footnote on the newest channel. Cryptocurrency is still illegal to trade in Nepal, so a group including former US ambassador Scott DeLisi’s Engage Nepal, Polygon and Cross River Bank built a route around it: coins donated to NepalRelief.org are converted to dollars in the United States and wired to the Prime Minister’s fund by SWIFT, so no crypto ever crosses the border. Ripple has pledged $300,000 and the Solana ecosystem has raised about $167,000. As of Monday, $500 had actually arrived (The Kathmandu Post).

New York, in Two Weeks

The cabinet confirmed on Thursday that Balendra Shah will be in New York from 22 to 26 September and will address the General Assembly on the 24th, his first trip abroad since taking office in March. He goes with a number. The Foreign Ministry put the cost of reconstruction at $4.78 billion on Friday: $57.67 million needed in the next six months, $4.71 billion after that, against a UN estimate of $158 million for buildings alone. “The total estimated requirement for reconstruction is approximately $4.78 billion,” said spokesman Lok Bahadur Chhetri. The Prime Minister also goes with a first result. The UN’s Loss and Damage fund has confirmed $20 million for Nepal under its start-up window, on proposals filed before the flood; the separate emergency appeal filed on 31 August is still waiting on the fund’s 26-member board, and small-island and African members have been pressing the developed-country members to convene. The Foreign Ministry is talking about a climate ambassador and a year-round negotiating unit, language that would have sounded ambitious a month ago. For readers in the New York area, the timing is deliberate: the Nepali American Business and Investment Summit runs at the JFK Marriott from 25 to 27 September with Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal as chief guest, so the government will be in the room with the diaspora that has just funded much of its relief effort (Business Standard, The Express Tribune, The Kathmandu Post, NepYork).

In Brief: Two notes for readers in the United States, and one for New York.

* The immigrant visa pause is over. We covered the January suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, Nepal included, when it happened. On 21 August, Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York struck it down, ruling that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had exceeded his authority, and the State Department confirmed on 1 September that the pause “is no longer in effect.” Cases refused under it go back to consular officers for a fresh look. That is not an approval, and other grounds for refusal still apply, but if your family’s case was frozen, it is moving again (NepYork).

* The citizenship test may change. DHS has listed a proposed rule, “Protecting the Integrity of Naturalization through Enhanced Educational Standards,” on its regulatory agenda, with a draft pencilled in for December. It talks about clearer English and civics standards, possibly outsourcing the test to third parties, and “proper assimilation.” Nothing changes until a final rule is published, and that is a year away at least (NepYork).

* Jackson Heights, and a book sale. Nepali businesses on Roosevelt Avenue ran a two-day fair last weekend in the car park of Gorkhali restaurant, with every dollar going to the Prime Minister’s fund; the organiser waived stall fees for vendors who gave away all their takings. Nepali authors in New York hold a relief book sale on 13 September (NepYork, NepYork).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

One Year Since Baneshwar, Two Versions of It

Tuesday was the first Gen Z Martyrs’ Day, a public holiday. Families of the dead gathered at the burned-out old Parliament in Baneshwar, where the shooting began on 8 September last year. Twenty-seven people died that day, 76 across the two days. Home Minister Sudan Gurung attended. Prime Minister Balendra Shah did not. Activist Pawan Khadka was taken into police custody after criticising the government’s record from the stage. Ganesh Chaulagain, whose son Shreeyam was a Grade 12 student, said an elected government “has no room left for excuses.” The government has declared 45 of the 76 dead martyrs: 42 protesters and three police officers. Who the other 31 were, and who answers for them, is where the two versions begin. KP Sharma Oli, in a video message, said 9 September was a day of “terrifying destruction” in which “criminal groups infiltrated the peaceful demonstration.” Pushpa Kamal Dahal called the whole thing “mysterious.” Congress president Gagan Thapa was the only party leader to ask for both days to be investigated equally, and to admit his own party’s part in what caused them. The Human Rights Commission and the Karki Commission both documented abuses on both days; neither set of recommendations has been fully acted on. Al Jazeera counts more than 900 people still jailed for the arson, unofficially 1,600. Gen Z activist Aayush Basyal notes that 25 of 29 activists invited to a constitutional amendment meeting in May stayed away, and warns of “a second wave of public disenchantment.” Liza Adhikari, 21, shot outside Parliament that day and still recovering from surgery in India: “Maybe, if I had listened to my parents that day, this wouldn’t have happened” (The Kathmandu Post, Al Jazeera, The Rising Nepal, Global Voices).

If you read one long piece this week, make it the Kathmandu Post’s reconstruction of the five days when the Army’s Jangi Adda headquarters became the country’s political centre: the cabinet that met on the evening of 8 September and made no decision about 21 dead, the curfew that was not reissued until 8:30 the next morning, the Army deploying at 9pm without a formal order, the prime minister chosen by a Discord vote, and the midnight meeting at which the Army chief floated the former king as a “stakeholder” (The Kathmandu Post).

A Minister Falls Over a Gas Cylinder

On Wednesday, Industry, Commerce and Supplies Minister Gauri Kumari Yadav told the House Industry Committee that Kathmandu’s cooking-gas shortage would not end “until the industrialists are brought to heel,” proposed revoking the licences of all 58 gas bottling companies (”in a country like ours, we don’t need more than two”), and asked a fair question badly: “We sent 48,000 cylinders to Kathmandu the other day, but no one here has received more than 19,000 or 20,000. Where did the rest go?” The Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce called the remarks “highly objectionable, irresponsible and unfortunate.” On Thursday she resigned, citing personal reasons, the third minister to leave Balendra Shah’s cabinet since it was formed in March. The shortage she was describing is real. Imports fell by more than a third between March and May when the Iran war tightened supply, and had only just recovered when the Prithvi Highway fell into the Trishuli at Krishnabhir on 30 August. The Oil Corporation says 63,383 cylinders reached the Valley over two days last week; the queues at the depots say otherwise. Commercial supply to restaurants and canteens has been suspended, a transport surcharge has taken a cylinder to Rs 2,165, and a “command post” of district officers, the corporation, the bottlers and the police now tracks trucks from dispatch to depot. The Post’s editorial on Friday asked the government to investigate the supply chain properly rather than blame the landslide, and to subsidise induction cookers. Yadav’s successor will inherit the same numbers (The Kathmandu Post, IANS, The Tribune, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: Elsewhere in Singha Durbar.

* Lamichhane wants a committee, and some manners. RSP chair Rabi Lamichhane asked the House on Wednesday to declare the flood a national climate disaster and to set up an all-party parliamentary committee to oversee recovery. He also asked for action against people abusing survivors online for criticising the state: “When people are in deep pain and facing an unexpected loss, they may even question God. How, then, can we expect them not to question the government?” (The Kathmandu Post).

* Congress pushes its calendar. The ward-level conventions that were to open on 9 September now begin on the 19th, municipal rounds on the 23rd, regional on the 26th, with the 15th general convention itself still set for 2 to 4 October (Radio Nepal).

* An adviser, and a bill. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has brought in Bishwo Parajuli, a veteran of the UN system with a disaster-management background, as honorary humanitarian adviser until mid-December. The House passed the Law Commission amendment bill without opposition on Friday and sits again on 15 September (myRepublica, Nepal News).

💸 Economy & Development

Sauraha at Five Percent

Nothing happened to Chitwan’s jungle. Something happened to its bookings. Hotel occupancy in Sauraha, which has 125 hotels and beds for 8,000 people a night, is below five percent in what should be the start of the season. The 65-room Royal Tulip has had 80 percent of its reservations cancelled; the Soaltee Westend at Patihani has lost 40 percent through November. “Tourism has been hit because reports have spread internationally portraying the situation in Nepal as disastrous,” said Suman Ghimire of Jungle Safari Lodge. Pokhara’s hotels report up to 30 percent cancellations, and the Mustang Chowk bus park, which normally sends 24 coaches a day to Kathmandu, is sending none because the highway is cut. Lumbini’s Indian package market has gone quiet. September to November brings 40 percent of Nepal’s annual arrivals; the Post’s editorial reckons a 10 to 15 percent hit to the year’s receipts if the perception holds, on top of 207 hotels and restaurants damaged in the four flood districts, 199 of them destroyed. The perception is the part readers abroad can do something about. Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan, Lumbini, the Annapurna and Everest regions are open and undamaged. Langtang, Gosaikunda, Helambu and the Rasuwa road are not. If someone asks you whether Nepal is safe to visit this autumn, that is the accurate answer (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, NepYork).

Rs 723 Billion, and the First Rs 3 Billion

The rapid damage assessment by the Planning Commission and the disaster authority has landed at Rs 723 billion, about $4.7 billion, which is what the Foreign Ministry’s $4.78 billion figure is built on. Against it, the first international money with the word “climate” attached is the Loss and Damage fund’s $20 million, roughly Rs 3 billion. The education slice shows how the total is built: Rs 2.34 billion to replace 18 schools, 11 of them gone entirely, for more than 9,000 children, with Rs 105 million needed at once and the rest over years; five private-school associations have promised Rs 1 billion for a thousand scholarships through Grade 12 for children who lost parents. The Post asked the harder question this week, which is how a country that has to rebuild every few years is supposed to afford to build better. “Higher disaster risks mean increased cost of development,” said ICIMOD economist Mani Nepal, arguing that money spent on adaptation now is cheaper than the same money spent on reconstruction later. Hydrologist Anil Aryal made the point that infrastructure built this year will stand for 50 to 80 years in a climate nobody has modelled. And Geeta Pandey of KIRDARC described “a painful distance between an impressive legal framework and the reality faced by communities.” None of that is new. What is new is that the numbers are now large enough that someone in New York might listen (The Express Tribune, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The road, and two numbers from before the flood.

* Krishnabhir, before Dashain. The Prithvi Highway has now been shut for two weeks at the slip. A 250-metre track cut into the hillside above the collapse is being gravelled, but Infrastructure Minister Sunil Lamsal admits “it is not a long-term solution.” The real plan is a 12-kilometre road on the far bank of the Trishuli between the surviving bridges at Benighat and Fishling, which the ministry wants open before Dashain in mid-October, and a tunnel study once the monsoon ends. Krishnabhir slid in 1999 and 2000 too (The Kathmandu Post).

* IT is where the foreign money wants to go. Of 1,116 projects that received foreign investment commitments in the fiscal year to July, 727 were in information technology, worth Rs 5.8 billion; tourism was a distant second at 227, manufacturing had 63, energy four. If you are a Nepali abroad thinking about putting money into the country, that is where your peers already are (OnlineKhabar).

* One exporter in 25. That is how many Nepali firms sell abroad through e-commerce, according to SAWTEE, which reckons garment exports alone could grow 25 to 35 percent if they did. The blockers are the usual ones: freight costs, no way to take a card payment from abroad, and no logistics partner to handle returns (The Kathmandu Post).

⭐ Social & Cultural

A Portal for the Missing

By Wednesday, 1,367 bodies and partial remains had been recovered and 102 had been given a name and returned to a family. That gap is now being worked from two directions. Nepal Police have taken 2,570 DNA samples, half from remains and half from relatives, with forensic teams from India, China, Singapore and South Korea helping to process them; spokesperson Abi Narayan Kafle says DNA “remains the only reliable option for badly damaged remains.” The other direction is a website. Samir Panthi of the Kathmandu firm Nowtrkit, with two engineers from the Indian face-recognition company FaceTagr, has built khozi.facetagr.com, where a family uploads a photograph of the missing person with their name, age, sex, last known location and any distinguishing marks. The system compares it against photographs of the recovered and returns five to ten candidates for a human to check. About 500 missing people have been registered and 90 bodies have been matched so far; the algorithm is 99 percent accurate on the living and considerably less so on the dead, for reasons that need no explaining. The 335 unidentified bodies buried at Devghat on 29 August were photographed and sampled first, so a match there can still bring someone home. This is one of the few things a relative abroad can do directly: the portal takes uploads from anywhere, and a DNA reference sample can be given by any close relative at a district hospital in Nepal (The Kathmandu Post).

Oman for 60, UAE on Saturday, Nagoya Next Week

Nepal’s cricketers bowled Oman out for 60 in Thursday’s ACC Premier Cup semi-final at Bayuemas Oval in Kuala Lumpur, defending 147 with 87 runs to spare and finishing the job inside 29 overs. That puts them into Saturday’s final against the UAE at 7:15am Nepal time, and the prize is bigger than the trophy: the winner takes the tournament’s only place at the 2027 Asia Cup. Nepal have won four of five matches here, losing only to Hong Kong, and hold an 18-14 edge over the UAE across formats, including both ODIs in Kirtipur earlier this year. Rohit Paudel’s anchoring and Dipendra Singh Airee’s record against the UAE in tight games are the reasons for optimism; a batting order that left its bowlers to defend 147 in a semi-final is the reason for caution. Rain is forecast. A week later the same core, with Airee as captain, flies to Japan for the Asian Games, where Nepal’s cricket group contains Afghanistan on 25 September and Japan on the 26th. The full contingent of 135 athletes in 21 sports, 57 of them women, was farewelled by Sports Minister Sasmit Pokharel on Thursday; kabaddi sends 24 and wushu 10. The Games open in Aichi-Nagoya on 19 September (myRepublica, OnlineKhabar, OnlineKhabar).

In Brief: Schools, a screen, and a hospital bill.

* Bidur went back to school. Sixty-five of Bidur Municipality’s 79 schools reopened on Wednesday, two weeks after the flood; five are destroyed and nine are still sheltering displaced families. “The children from flood-affected areas can attend whichever school is most convenient for them,” said Deputy Mayor Prabha Bogati. “They should not worry if they do not have a school uniform.” Around 600 children across Rasuwa and Nuwakot are still unaccounted for (The Kathmandu Post).

* Elephants in the Fog, on a Kathmandu screen. The Licchavi Cinema Festival runs from 11 to 15 September at Licchavi House in Boudha, with Abinash Bikram Shah’s Cannes prize-winner alongside Wenders, Tarkovsky, Payal Kapadia and Deepak Rauniyar. “Nepal has produced films screened at Cannes and Berlin,” said curator Abishek Budhathoki. “Yet access to serious cinema on proper screens remains limited here” (Nepali Times).

* No co-pay, no ID. The Health Insurance Board has waived co-payments and identification requirements for anyone seeking treatment in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading for the 90 days the three districts remain disaster crisis zones. Tell your relatives there (The Kathmandu Post).

How to Help

The verified list from two weeks ago still holds: the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund via opmcm.gov.np and nowhere else, Nepal Red Cross, and your NRNA national committee’s own channel rather than a forwarded link. Three additions this week:

* Ask where it went. Roughly $80 million has been given to the government funds and roughly $6.5 million has reached the disaster authority. If your community gave, it is reasonable to ask your embassy or your NRNA committee what has been disbursed and to whom.

* If someone is missing: register them at khozi.facetagr.com with a clear photograph, and arrange for a close relative in Nepal to give a DNA sample at a district hospital. Nepal Tourism Board hotline 1234 (toll-free in Nepal) or 1144.

* Give to the school fund if you want something specific. The Rs 2.34 billion education bill and the Scholarship Bank for children who lost parents are the most clearly costed needs published so far.

Our sponsor, belayat.uk, the UK Nepali community noticeboard, is still carrying relief appeals alongside its jobs, housing and events listings. If your group is organising a collection or a vigil, post it there.

Next week: the cricket final, the Asian Games from the 19th, Indra Jatra from the 23rd, and the Prime Minister’s week in New York. We will keep the count, and we will correct anything here that turns out to be wrong.

Until next week, stay connected.

— The Nepali Diaspora Digest Team

nepalidiaspora.net

All figures in this edition are as reported by Friday 11 September 2026 and are expected to change.

Namaste, diaspora family. This is the second week of the Bhotekoshi disaster, and the digest is still given over mostly to it.

The count passed a thousand on Tuesday. By Thursday noon the national disaster authority had recorded 1,252 dead, and only 95 of those bodies had been identified and returned to a family. On Friday morning, nine days after the water came, soldiers dug through the last of the debris blocking a hydropower tunnel in Nuwakot and brought two men out alive. About 115 of their colleagues are still inside.

This edition covers the search, the graves, a Parliament that turned on the government, a foreign minister who said “compensation” on Monday and stepped back from it on Friday, the first relief package for businesses, and the people carrying all of this: an 83-year-old priest in Rasuwa, a valley cut off for the second time in eleven years, and Nepalis from Leicester to Seoul who cancelled Teej and sent the money home instead.

We have also let a small number of non-flood items back in as briefs, where they matter to readers abroad. Everything else waits.

Where the Count Stands

The figures are still moving, and different bodies are still counting differently. This is how the week ran:

* Sunday 30 August, 3pm: 788 bodies recovered; 2,502 missing (NDRRMA, via The Tribune)

* Monday 31 August: 903 dead; 4,247 unaccounted for (NDRRMA, via The Kathmandu Post)

* Tuesday 1 September: 1,003 dead; 3,916 missing (ABC News)

* Wednesday 2 September: 1,204 dead; 1,114 bodies recovered (The Tribune; the Prime Minister to Parliament)

* Thursday 3 September, noon: 1,252 dead; 4,216 unaccounted for; 95 identified (NDRRMA, via The Kathmandu Post)

* Friday 4 September: 1,259 dead (ANI, via The Tribune)

The “missing” figure is the one to treat with most care. The Prime Minister told Parliament on Wednesday that 3,916 people were out of contact. The disaster authority’s wider count, which includes everyone reported unreachable by a relative, has gone above 5,000. Both are honest numbers describing different things. Chitwan, more than a hundred kilometres downstream, still holds the largest share of the dead: 355 by Thursday. On the Tibetan side, Chinese authorities report 21 dead and 541 missing, figures we cannot check (The Kathmandu Post).

🏔️ The Search

Nine Days Underground

At about 7:30 on the morning of 26 August, Kabir Maharjan rang his wife from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, where he had worked for seven years. An hour later the flood arrived. Down in the control room, Sanjay Sah, a 30-year-old mechanical foreman from Saptari, did what his job required. “I told everyone to run,” he said afterwards. “In doing that, my time was lost. In the end, I could not get out.” On Friday morning, after Nepali Army and Armed Police teams had dug through 50 to 60 metres of boulders and mud, both men walked out of the tunnel and were flown to Kathmandu in stable condition. “He has returned with a second life,” Hira Shobha Maharjan said. “We could neither eat nor sleep.” Sah believes three or four people near him may still be alive, with others deeper toward the powerhouse. Arnold Dix, the Australian tunnel engineer who led the Silkyara rescue in 2023 and is now advising in Nuwakot, has spent the week insisting that “silence is not evidence of death. It is only the absence of a signal.” About 115 workers are still thought to be in Trishuli 3A’s main tunnel, and roughly 500 across twelve projects. At Upper Trishuli 1, the largest construction site on the river, 557 of 1,433 people on site are still unaccounted for (Euronews, The Kathmandu Post).

Graves With Numbers

The hardest arithmetic of this disaster is now identification. Of the 1,252 bodies recovered by Thursday, 95 had been matched to a name and given back. Nepal Police say around 400 are partial remains. The river carried people so far, and the monsoon heat is so unforgiving, that morgues in Chitwan filled within days. So the state has begun burying the unidentified in forest trenches outside Bharatpur under Red Cross protocols: each body in its own place, a tag fixed to a remaining limb, a sequential code beginning BHF-01, a concrete marker, a GPS fix, a photograph and a video record. A DNA sample is taken from every one before burial. Families of the missing can give their own sample at any district hospital, and if it matches, the body can be recovered and returned for proper rites. A 19-member Indian forensic team has been working alongside Nepal Police since Monday. Some families have objected that burial is not the Hindu way; others have performed cremation rites over kusha-grass effigies while they wait. Writing in the Kathmandu Post, geneticist Dibesh Karmacharya argued that this is the moment to build a single coordinated identification system, combining DNA with fingerprints, dental records and belongings, rather than improvising district by district (The Tribune, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: Three things the search has taught us this week.

* The satellites saw it coming. Geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech ran European Sentinel-1 radar data from 8 January to 18 August through the slope above Lhende Khola. The glacier and the rock beneath it were creeping at around 10 millimetres a month, and speeding up. “The acceleration is more important than the velocity,” he said. Nobody was watching that slope, because Himalayan warning systems are built for lakes bursting, not for mountains letting go (Gizmodo, ABC Australia).

* The risk has not passed. Rain is continuing in the upper catchments and the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology kept the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli at high flash-flood risk on Thursday, with moderate risk on smaller rivers in 32 districts. The barrier lake that worried everyone last week drained slowly and was largely empty by 30 August (The Kathmandu Post).

* Six hundred children. Education officials in Rasuwa count 280 students unaccounted for; Nuwakot counts 300 to 350. Twelve schools are gone entirely, 22 teachers and staff are missing, and in one ward of Amachhodingmo 58 parents are. “In some cases we have located surviving parents who cannot find their children,” said Bidur’s school inspector Navaraj Sapkota, “and in other instances surviving students are searching for missing parents” (The Kathmandu Post).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Still Missing, and Coming Home

Around 590 foreign nationals from more than thirty countries remained unaccounted for as of Wednesday, most of them last known to be in Rasuwa on the Gosaikunda and Kailash routes; a further 300 have been rescued, 273 of them by Army helicopter. The American figure, which the State Department put at 90 last week, had come down to about 75 by Tuesday, with 14 confirmed safe and no confirmed American deaths. Thirty-three Latvians, 33 Britons, 38 Australians and 32 Canadians are still on the lists. On the Tibetan side, some 2,500 Kailash pilgrims have been flown out through Lhasa. The week’s quiet good news came at Tatopani on Thursday, when Chinese officials handed 114 Nepalis who had been stranded in Gyirong back across the border at Liping, most of them from Rasuwa, and three buses took them to Kathmandu and on to whatever is left of home. Another 33 are expected to follow. If your relative is among the missing, the Nepal Tourism Board hotline remains 1234 (toll-free in Nepal) or 1144, and your own foreign ministry is running casework (The Kathmandu Post, ABC News, The Tribune).

What the Diaspora Did in Week Two

The first week was vigils. The second has been money, and organisation. In Britain, Tamu Dhin UK has pledged more than Rs 10 million, part of it from a charity trail walk on 11 to 13 September; the Nepalese Doctors’ Association UK gave Rs 1.1 million, IME London gave Rs 1 million and waived fees on relief transfers, and Bexley Nepali Samaj raised £6,500 at a single vigil. The two rival NRNA UK committees are each raising separately, one of them describing its role as “watchdog” over the other’s money, which tells you something about the state of that organisation. In South Korea, about 60 Nepali groups are collecting; twenty migrant workers from Sudurpashchim pooled 920,000 won between them, and NRNA Korea is setting up a memorial space near Dongdaemun. “Those of us earning money abroad should help our homeland when it is going through such hardship,” one of them said. In Canada, Teej celebrations in Toronto, Brampton and Calgary were called off, and the Nepali Canadian Women’s Society of BC turned $15,000 of ticket sales into relief. Canberra cancelled its 400-person Teej on 6 September. And inside Nepal, schoolchildren in Achham, Kapilvastu, Rautahat and Kathmandu gave up their snack money, a few hundred rupees at a time (OnlineKhabar, The Korea Times, CP24, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: Practical notes for readers abroad.

* Where the money goes now. After a week of criticism, relief distribution in Rasuwa and Nuwakot was handed on 1 September from the security forces to local governments, working through six-party committees. The Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund stood at about Rs 7.77 billion on Wednesday. The police warning about fake accounts and QR codes we carried last week still stands: take bank details only from the Prime Minister’s Office website (The Kathmandu Post).

* The Prime Minister goes to New York. Balendra Shah will lead Nepal’s delegation to the UN General Assembly, his first foreign trip since taking office in March, to put the flood before the world as a climate case. The high-level debate opens on 22 September. Expect community events around it (The Kathmandu Post).

* If you are in the United States, note the date. The new public charge rule takes effect on 18 September. From that day, immigration officers may weigh any means-tested benefit, including food or housing assistance, when deciding a green card or adjustment application, and applications postmarked on or after that date fall under the new test. If you are close to filing, talk to a lawyer this week (Federal Register).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Parliament Turns on the Response

The House gave Wednesday to the flood, and the government did not enjoy it. Nepali Congress parliamentary leader Bhishma Raj Angdembe accused ministers of having “got caught up in social media” while failing to reach communities in time, and said families searching for relatives had been verbally abused. Pushpa Kamal Dahal put it in a sentence: “The army was mobilised, but the people were not.” He also went after Balendra Shah’s manner in the chamber: “He comes and leaves without looking at anyone’s face; what kind of attitude is this?” UML’s Ram Bahadur Thapa proposed two task forces, one for foreign aid and one for reconstruction. The criticism had been building outside the House too. On Monday, 31 civil-society figures including Kanak Mani Dixit and former minister Bimala Rai Paudyal signed a statement attacking the “one-door” relief system for sidelining elected local governments and civil society, and asking for parliamentary oversight of the relief fund and unrestricted media access. The government had, in fact, already conceded the central point: relief distribution went to local governments the same day. The Prime Minister’s reply on Wednesday was numbers, 11,993 rescued and 1,114 bodies recovered, thanks to India and China, and one flat denial: that refusing foreign help “was never considered” (OnlineKhabar, OnlineKhabar, Swarajya).

“Justice and Compensation,” Then a Step Back

On Monday, Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told Kantipur Television that Nepal was “shifting our diplomatic framework from ‘aid’ to ‘justice and compensation’. This is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of legal and moral liability.” The Finance Ministry, he said, had written to the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage asking for urgent release, since waiting for the fund’s board to meet in December “would be too late.” Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has put the eventual rebuilding cost at up to Rs 762 billion, around $5 billion. Indian and international outlets read the interview as Nepal demanding money from India, China and the United States, the three largest emitters, and by Friday Khanal was clarifying: no compensation had been asked of any of the three, and “our call has been for the global community to look at this disaster from the perspective of climate change.” The retreat is understandable. India has flown in more than 70 tonnes of relief and a forensic team; China has promised 30 bridges. But the argument is not going away. Barshman Pun of the opposition communists wants the Prime Minister to “assert our rights and demand compensation” in New York, and the science published this week, showing the slope was measurably accelerating for months, will be cited on both sides (The Week, The Tribune).

In Brief: Elsewhere in government.

* The phones. Nepal Telecom lost 83 towers and more than 60 kilometres of fibre at Timure; Ncell lost three sites outright. For days, calls needed several attempts and dropped mid-sentence. An Integrated Disaster Communication Plan was drafted after the 2015 earthquake. It was never implemented (The Kathmandu Post).

* Ten thousand megawatts, on the record. Energy Minister Biraj Bhakta Shrestha tabled the Nepal–India long-term power trade agreement in the House on Thursday, the 2024 deal that frames Nepal’s plan to export 10,000MW within a decade. Law Minister Sobita Gautam tabled the UN high-seas biodiversity treaty alongside it (Radio Nepal).

* Congress, Saturday. The Nepali Congress central committee meets on 5 September to discuss the flood and preparations for the party’s 15th general convention (Nepal News).

💸 Economy & Development

The First-Phase Package

The cabinet on Friday approved what it called the first phase of a recovery package for businesses in the Bhotekoshi basin. Firms whose trucks, buses or equipment were destroyed can deregister them and import replacements duty-free within six months; goods lost in transit can be replaced the same way. The tax filing deadline for the affected is pushed to 11 November, destroyed commercial property becomes a full business deduction, individuals directly affected are exempt from income tax on their estimated returns for the year just ended, and companies’ relief donations count as CSR spending. Banks must offer a one-time restructuring to flood-hit borrowers, and loans for replacement equipment are capped for a year at base rate plus half a percentage point. Insurers are told to pay up to 50 percent on a preliminary survey. The scale of what is being insured is coming into view: claims filed with Nepali insurers reached Rs 25.87 billion across 583 policies by Monday, most of it hydropower. The Independent Power Producers’ Association puts hydropower damage at Rs 25 to 30 billion; the Electricity Authority says “hundreds of billions.” Both are guesses until someone can reach the sites (The Kathmandu Post, Insurance Business Asia, The Kathmandu Post).

Power Exports Halved, Trade Over a 4,650-Metre Pass

Nepal was exporting about 1,000MW to India and Bangladesh when the river came down. It is now sending around 650MW, and the Bangladesh line, which was fed by the Chilime and Trishuli plants, is “effectively at zero,” acting NEA chief Dirghayu Kumar Shrestha said. A further 73.75MW from three western projects cannot be sold to India because Delhi’s approvals lapsed over the summer and were not renewed, a reminder that last year’s Rs 29.32 billion export record depended on paperwork as much as water. Trade with China is in worse shape. Rasuwagadhi is a riverbed, Tatopani closed to cargo on 31 August over landslide risk, and everything now goes through Korala in Mustang, a crossing at 4,650 metres with twelve customs officers, no X-ray machine, no scanner and no yard. It cleared Rs 14.4 billion of imports last year against Rasuwagadhi’s Rs 45.73 billion. Around 375 containers are being rerouted there from Kerung and Nyalam, freight has risen from Rs 250,000 to Rs 300,000 a container, and the road to Kathmandu takes two to three days. “We don’t have basic customs infrastructure or sufficient manpower,” said Mustang customs chief Bidur Chudal. Dashain is five weeks away (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The bill keeps arriving.

* Cooking gas. The Prithvi Highway caved in at Krishnabhir on Sunday, three days after the flood first cut it. Kathmandu uses 35,000 to 40,000 LPG cylinders a day and is getting about 24,500. A cylinder is expected to rise Rs 100 on transport costs alone, and the Restaurant Association says its members will start closing if supply does not improve next week. A bypass track above the collapse is planned (The Kathmandu Post).

* #NepalCalling. The tourism ministry launched a campaign on Wednesday to stop autumn cancellations, after one Thamel hotel lost 20 percent of its bookings in a week. August arrivals were 85,444, down 3.65 percent on last year, and September to November normally brings 40 percent of the year’s visitors. Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan, Lumbini, Annapurna and Everest are open. Langtang, Gosaikunda, Helambu and the Tamang Heritage Trail are not (The Kathmandu Post).

* Where 8,317 households will live. Around 15 settlements were destroyed outright, and the National Planning Commission has begun a master plan for rebuilding them somewhere safer. “People cannot return to settlements that have been swept away,” said disaster authority chief Dharmaraj Upreti. Baburam Bhattarai and former reconstruction chief Sushil Gyewali both warned, from earthquake experience, that moving people far from their land does not work (The Kathmandu Post).

⭐ Social & Cultural

The Priest of Bharkhu

Thulo Bharkhu and Sano Bharkhu sit hundreds of metres above the Bhotekoshi in Rasuwa, high enough that the water never reached the houses. It reached the people anyway: 33 residents of the two villages were on the road, at the border, or at work below when it came. Their chief Buddhist priest, Singi Nurpu Lama, is 83. Among the dead are his eldest son, Chhelewangdi Tamang, and two daughters-in-law, Chhengku Tamang and Pratima Lama. None of their bodies have come back. Buddhist rites are performed on the seventh day, and so, without bodies, he has been going house to house performing them: a framed photograph draped in white cloth, butter lamps, incense, food set out for the dead. In the seventh week there will be a combined ceremony for all 33, “so their souls can rest in eternal peace.” Asked how the village decided to stop waiting, he said: “It was not an easy job to accept that our missing family members are no more. But how long could we wait?” For every family abroad whose relative is on a list rather than in a morgue, that is the question of the coming month (The Kathmandu Post).

Langtang, Cut Off Again

The Langtang Valley was not touched by the flood. Its river is a different one. But every road, bridge and trail that connected it to Dhunche has gone, and the valley’s 450 residents in 116 households, nearly all Tamang, are as isolated as they were after the 2015 avalanche buried the old village and killed around 300 people. It now takes two days on foot to reach Dhunche. The health post has medicines until about Dashain. Residents estimate food for a month to six weeks, and are already worried about cooking gas, salt and rice. Fifteen to twenty trekkers are still waiting for helicopter seats out. “There are no roads left,” said local MP Mohan Acharya. “It is impossible to bring supplies by vehicle.” Langtang took until 2018 to recover last time, and last year it drew 53,000 visitors. The October and November season, which pays for the year, is now in doubt not because the trail is damaged but because nobody can reach its start (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The wider picture, and two things that carried on.

* The appeal. The government and the UN have agreed a four-month Humanitarian Flash Appeal. OCHA counts 84,270 people affected across 17 municipalities, with 10,000 households in acute need; UN Women says 43,000 women and girls need immediate help and warns of trafficking risk in the camps. WHO is watching for dengue and scrub typhus. “Disaster meets inequality,” said UN Women’s Christine Arab. “The people already left behind are often the first to be swept away” (UN News).

* Cricket. Nepal beat hosts Malaysia by six wickets at Bangi on Thursday in the ACC Premier Cup, bowling them out for 103 with Karan KC taking 4 for 23 and Arjun Kumal making an unbeaten 45. It was a second straight win after Bahrain. Hong Kong is next, on Sunday (OnlineKhabar).

* Asian Games. Nepal is sending 140 athletes in 23 sports to Aichi–Nagoya, which opens on 19 September. The athletics squad of six includes Santoshi Shrestha and Purnalakshmi Neupane; the aim, set before the flood, was a first gold and a double-digit medal count (OnlineKhabar).

How to Help

Last week’s edition carried a full list of verified channels, and all of it still holds. Three updates:

* The official fund is the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund. Bank details and QR codes are on the Office of the Prime Minister’s own page at opmcm.gov.np and nowhere else. Nepal Police are still reporting fake accounts and cloned QR codes.

* Distribution on the ground is now run by local governments in Rasuwa and Nuwakot rather than the Army. If you are funding a specific village, your contact there should now be dealing with the municipality.

* Diaspora channels named this week: NRNA UK’s GoFundMe (under president Rajendra Pudasaini), Tamu Dhin UK, the Nepalese Doctors’ Association UK, NRNA Korea, and the Nepalese Community Society of Vancouver Island. Give through your own community’s official page, not a forwarded link.

If someone you know is missing: Nepal Tourism Board 1234 (toll-free in Nepal) or 1144; Tourist Police +977 9851289445. Families of the missing can give a DNA reference sample at any district hospital in Nepal, or through your foreign ministry’s casework team; several embassies are collecting them.

Namaste, diaspora family. There is only one story this week, and it is the hardest one this digest has had to write.

At about twenty to nine on Wednesday morning, a piece of glacier roughly six hundred metres wide came off the flank of Langtang Lirung and fell more than a kilometre onto the valley floor. What it set loose tore down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli, took the border town of Timure off the map, and has killed more people than any single disaster in Nepal since the 2015 earthquake. Many of you have spent this week refreshing casualty lists and calling numbers that do not ring.

This edition is given over entirely to what happened, what it has cost, what we still do not know, and how to help. We have set aside everything else.

A note: this is a developing story

The figures below are still moving, and that affects how you should read them.

Search teams cannot reach much of the affected area. Bodies are being recovered up to 150 kilometres downstream, days after the event. And different agencies are counting different things, which is why totals published on the same afternoon do not match. Here is how the count has moved:

The last two rows are worth pausing on. On the same Friday afternoon, Nepal Police and the national disaster authority published counts differing by 49 dead and more than 1,400 missing. Both are internally consistent — each district breakdown adds up to its own total. They are counting differently: bodies recovered and logged by police, versus deaths confirmed through the disaster authority’s reporting chain, with “missing” defined narrowly in one system and broadly in the other.

Neither figure is wrong, and neither is final. Higher numbers are already circulating in international coverage, and the toll is likely to rise as access improves and the missing are reclassified.

We have used the NDRRMA figures as our anchor, named the agency and the time beside each number, and flagged where sources disagree. Please do the same when you share this. And please avoid circulating unverified lists of names — families are identifying relatives from photographs this week, and a wrong name travelling fast through a WhatsApp group does real harm.

🏔️ What Happened

Twelve Hundred Metres, Straight Down

The trigger was not rain. Satellite analysis indicates a section of glacier roughly 610 metres wide sheared away near Langtang Lirung and fell about 1,200 metres to the valley floor. The impact shattered the ice and mobilised rock, water and sediment into the Lhende Khola, a tributary that rises inside Tibet about 20 kilometres northeast of the Rasuwagadhi border post. The US Geological Survey has been clear that the seismic signal registered that morning, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2, was produced by the landslide itself and not by an earthquake, Nepal’s foreign minister had initially said the reverse, an early error worth remembering as more claims circulate. What arrived downstream was not a flood in any ordinary sense. Debris moved at roughly 50 metres per second, around 180 km/h. A helicopter pilot described waves of five to six metres. It reached Gyirong Port on the Chinese side seven minutes after the collapse (The Kathmandu Post, ThePrint).

The River Carried the Dead a Hundred Miles

The single most important thing to understand about this disaster is where the dying happened. Timure, Syabrubesi and the border settlements were destroyed — but only 12 bodies had been recovered in Rasuwa district itself by Friday. The rest were found far downstream, along the Trishuli and the Narayani, in districts most people would not associate with a Himalayan glacier at all. Of the 538 deaths confirmed by the disaster authority at 3pm Friday, 221 were recovered in Chitwan, 134 in Nawalparasi East, 46 in Gorkha, 37 in Nuwakot, 33 in Dhading, 28 in Tanahun and 27 in Nawalparasi West. Read that carefully: these are the places bodies were found, not where people lived or died. Most were swept from the border area and carried a hundred miles and more. Seven bodies have since been recovered from rivers in Maharajganj and Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh, across the Indian border. It is a grim measure of the force involved, and it is why the search will run for months (The Kathmandu Post, Outlook India).

The People Who Went In

More than 9,000 security personnel were deployed in the first days, roughly 4,200 from the Nepali Army, with police deployment reported at 8,380 — though these counts moved as well, the disaster authority’s early updates putting the total at 7,415. By Friday they had rescued or assisted 1,473 people across Nuwakot, Rasuwa and Dhading, at least 351 of them lifted out by helicopter from valleys where the road had simply ceased to exist. Some of those closest to it never had the chance to respond at all: 45 Nepali Army personnel, 28 Nepal Police, 13 Armed Police Force officers, 15 customs staff and 4 immigration officers are themselves among the missing, most of them at their posts at the border complex when the wave came through. Downstream, hospital and morgue staff in Chitwan and Pokhara have been working past capacity for three days, and recovery teams are still walking the banks of the Trishuli and the Narayani, finding people a hundred miles from where they were swept in (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The threat that has not fully passed.

* The barrier lake. The avalanche dammed the river behind it, forming a lake of roughly 2 million cubic metres at the confluence of the Chhochen Khola and Purepu Tsangpo, with another 3 million expected to drain in over three days (Al Jazeera).

* And here the accounts diverge. Rasuwa Chief District Officer Narendra Pariyar said on Friday that the Nepali Army had informed him the lake had breached. The government’s spokesperson, Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel, said there was no information that the dam itself had collapsed and that China had indicated no immediate major threat. Both statements were made the same day. Treat the situation as unresolved (The Kathmandu Post).

* What a breach would mean. A sudden release would send “a fast-moving debris-laden flood with very little warning for downstream communities,” warns Pawan Bhattarai of Tribhuvan University — into a valley now full of rescuers, survivors camped near the water and hydropower crews in tunnels. Helicopters are staged at Dhunche for aerial reconnaissance (Al Jazeera).

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

Who Is Missing

Of the 977 people the disaster authority listed as missing on Friday, 517 are foreign nationals and 127 are Nepali citizens living abroad who were home visiting. Rasuwagadhi is the overland gate to Kailash Manasarovar and the road toward Gosaikunda, and late August puts pilgrims, trekkers and returning families on that route in numbers.

Nepal Tourism Board’s tally of missing tourists runs to 540 foreigners from 31 countries inside Nepal, plus around 260 more in Tibet’s Gyirong county — roughly 667 travellers in total. The reported breakdown includes 288 Indians, around 100 Chinese, 65 Americans, 53 Ukrainians, 51 to 55 Malaysians, 33 Britons, 25 Canadians and 25 to 34 Australians, with smaller numbers from Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Germany, Latvia, South Africa, Japan and New Zealand, and sixteen further countries reporting at least one. Note the ranges: the US figure was reported as 90 earlier in the week before the tourism board settled on 65, and Australia’s foreign minister gave 34 where the board lists 25. There has been better news too — 117 foreign tourists were rescued from Rasuwa, among them 85 Indians, 16 Chinese, 9 South Koreans, 2 Americans and 2 Italians. If someone you know was on that road, the Nepal Tourism Board lines are 1234 (toll-free) and 1144, and Tourist Police can be reached on +977 9851289445 (The Kathmandu Post, Reuters factbox).

Support from Abroad

Away from the rescue itself, the organised response from the diaspora moved quickly. The NRNA convened an emergency meeting and committed Rs 50 million in immediate assistance, formed a relief and rescue committee under President Dr Hemraj Sharma, and moved to deploy a medical team for primary treatment and medicines; founder president Dr Upendra Mahato pledged a specialist team of doctors with supplies. National committees in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, Seychelles, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China have all pledged funds. In Canberra, the Australia–Nepal Friendship Society held a candlelight vigil on the Parliament House lawns on Friday evening; NRNA New South Wales called one in Sydney for Saturday; and a large Nepali cultural celebration planned for September in Australia was cancelled outright, its budget redirected to relief. In the United States, the Embassy in Washington and the Consulate General in New York issued a joint appeal. Nepal’s diaspora numbers more than 2.1 million, and a good deal of the early fundraising and medical coordination this week ran through it (OnlineKhabar, The Australia Today, NepYork).

In Brief: Around the response.

* Help from outside. Pledges include £5 million from the UK, $5 million each from the Asian Development Bank and South Korea’s Doosan Group, €2 million from the EU, $2 million from the UN’s emergency fund, $1 million each from South Korea and Sri Lanka, $500,000 and a disaster response adviser from the United States, and CHF 1 million from the IFRC. India has delivered more than 47 tonnes of material across two consignments; Bangladesh sent tents, dry food and body bags (UN News).

* Eyes from orbit. The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters and the EU’s Copernicus system have both been activated — which is how the glacier collapse was identified as the cause so quickly (Al Jazeera).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

The Warning That Never Came

Nepal has a flash-flood warning system on this river. It did not fire. The reason is uncomfortable and worth understanding, because it determines whether this happens again. The network is built around water-level gauges designed for monsoon flooding — a river rising over hours, which is the hazard Nepal has historically faced. A glacier collapse produces a wall of debris moving at 180 km/h, and the upstream stations that might have caught it were swept away before they could send anything. Worse, the hazard did not begin in Nepal at all. It began roughly twenty kilometres inside Tibet, on a mountain no one had been asked to watch. After the July 2025 Rasuwa flood, also from the Chinese side, Nepal built a channel to exchange information about that river; it covered water, not mountains. As a Kathmandu Post column put it this week, Nepal is far better at tracking floods “once they enter monitored rivers than detecting the high-mountain hazards that create them,” and any serious cross-border system has to extend beyond weather to river blockages, glacial-lake instability, landslides and ice-rock avalanches. Xi Jinping has publicly called for improved warning systems. Whether that becomes a bilateral mechanism with instruments on it, or a sentence in a communiqué, is the question worth watching (The Kathmandu Post, Nature India).

The State’s Response, and What Parliament Wants Next

The mobilisation has been substantial. Figures here move too — the disaster authority reported 7,415 security personnel deployed in its early updates, and later counts put the total above 9,000, including some 4,200 from the Nepali Army. By Friday, 1,473 people had been rescued or assisted across Nuwakot, Rasuwa and Dhading. The government has declared the area a disaster zone for three months, ordered free medical treatment through the health ministry, the army and government hospitals, and directed the Finance Ministry to prepare a relief and rehabilitation package for affected households and businesses. Rs 10 million each has gone to Rasuwa and Nuwakot and Rs 5 million to Dhading as immediate district grants. Prime Minister Balendra Shah and his entire council of ministers are depositing a month’s salary into the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund, and Shah travelled to Nuwakot on 27 August. A Rescue Coordination Centre is running at Tribhuvan International Airport under Law Minister Sobita Gautam. In Parliament, the Prime Minister’s scheduled question hour was set aside so the House could turn to the disaster; members on both benches pressed for faster search and recovery, clear compensation, and a real cross-border early-warning mechanism rather than another committee. The response has been creditable. The preparedness that should have preceded it is what is now under scrutiny (The Kathmandu Post, OnlineKhabar).

In Brief: Context that makes this harder to file away as bad luck.

* We were told. ICIMOD, headquartered in Kathmandu, published two reports in March this year warning that accelerating glacier melt across the Hindu Kush Himalaya was raising the risk of exactly this class of disaster. Glaciers in the region have lost up to 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975, and the rate of loss has doubled since 2000 (Down To Earth).

* The glue is failing. “Permafrost has been the cryospheric glue that’s held the rock and the ice and the glaciers together for millennia,” says Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado Boulder, “and now we’re getting increasing evidence that it’s being weakened by warming trends” (PBS NewsHour).

* A one-sided picture. Almost everything known about the Tibetan side comes from Chinese state media, which has focused on military relief; residents’ own videos from Gyirong were removed from Chinese platforms. Around 260 travellers and 558 people in total are reported missing there — figures we cannot independently check (Al Jazeera).

💸 Economy & Development

Four Hundred and Thirty-One Megawatts, Gone

Six weeks ago this digest reported Nepal’s best year ever in electricity: Rs 29.32 billion in exports and an Rs 18.76 billion trade surplus in power. A good portion of the machinery behind that number is now under silt. The Nepal Electricity Authority counts twelve operational projects totalling 431.1 megawatts knocked out — 406.1 MW of hydropower plus a 25 MW solar plant — with Rasuwagadhi (111 MW) the worst hit, its powerhouse and substation reported destroyed, alongside Chilime, Upper Trishuli 3A, Sanjen, Trishuli, Langtang, Mailung and Devighat. Transmission took a beating too, including the Chilime 220 kV hub tower. Counting projects under construction, the damaged total reaches 901.1 MW. The Energy Ministry puts the loss at about 8 percent of national generation capacity; the NEA’s own framing is above 12 percent of a hydro fleet of roughly 3.2 gigawatts. The timing is the problem: Nepal’s run-of-river plants generate least in the dry winter months, exactly when this capacity would have mattered most. Kul Man Ghising has warned that prolonged outages at major plants put nationwide load-shedding back on the table, and the authority is reported to be weighing additional imports from India. For households at home, and for everyone abroad paying their bills, that is a consequence of this flood that will arrive in January (OnlineKhabar, myRepublica).

Rasuwagadhi Is a Riverbed, and Dashain Is Six Weeks Away

“There is no infrastructure left there; everything has been reduced to a riverbed,” says Jayant Kumar Agrawal of the Nepal Overseas Exporters and Importers Association. He is describing Nepal’s principal overland trade gate to China. Somewhere between 200 and 300 containers were destroyed or swept away, along with hundreds of container trucks and vehicles from the customs yard — including more than 700 vehicles imported specifically for Dashain and Tihar. Nepal brought Rs 45.73 billion of goods through Rasuwagadhi last fiscal year, and Rs 31.74 billion came from China in Shrawan alone. Fourteen customs officials are missing. The crossing had only partly recovered from the July 2025 flood that destroyed the border bridge, and none of Nepal’s three main China trade points were fully operational even before Wednesday. Traders are rerouting through Korala in Mustang, where daily traffic has jumped from one or two containers to eight or ten — but transport costs roughly double, prices are expected to rise around 50 percent, and the customs office there is running ten staff against eighteen sanctioned posts. The sea route via Kolkata takes six weeks. If you send money home for the festival, expect it to buy less this year (OnlineKhabar, myRepublica).

In Brief: The bill, so far — and every figure here is preliminary.

* The headline number. The government’s initial estimate of infrastructure damage is Rs 200 billion, around $1.3 billion, explicitly described as preliminary with no full assessment yet completed. Businessman Binod Chaudhary has suggested the eventual cost could reach $5 billion (OnlineKhabar).

* Roads and bridges. At least 22 concrete bridges and five Bailey bridges were washed away, and the Department of Roads says the entire 42-kilometre road from Betrawati to the Rasuwagadhi border has been destroyed at multiple points. Replacement Bailey bridges are already going in (OnlineKhabar).

* The rebuild money. The World Bank has signalled up to Rs 25 billion in emergency assistance, the largest single commitment so far (Nepal News).

⭐ Social & Cultural

“Beautiful Timure Was Reduced to Ruins”

The people who lived through it were, for the most part, at work. Raju Budhathoki, a customs agent from Manthali in Ramechhap, was asleep in Timure when the ground moved. “I was asleep when the whole hillside suddenly started shaking as if there had been an earthquake,” he said from a hospital bed in Trishuli; he ran in the clothes he was wearing and tore his hand open on a police post fence. Prakash Gautam, another customs agent, from Gokarneshwar in Kathmandu, heard the rumble and then lost the light entirely as the market went under. He ran without knowing where. Airlifted out on Thursday morning and taken to Bidur, he said simply: “The injury does not matter. At least I survived.” Tulsi Bahadur Bhandari from Dolakha was caught in the black mud and thrown sideways into the hillside by the current — “if the current had not thrown me towards the slope, I would not be alive today.” Kapil Pakhrin watched police posts, customs offices, hotels, shops and parked vehicles go past him. One agent described bodies scattered in the water and a town that no longer existed: “beautiful Timure was reduced to ruins” (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News).

The Quiet Crisis in Bharatpur

Because the river carried the dead so far, the hardest logistical problem of this disaster is not rescue but identification. Morgues across the affected districts hold thirty to fifty bodies between them; Pokhara’s facilities, built for 88, were already holding 93 brought in from downstream. “By the numbers, we are already above capacity,” said Kaski Chief District Officer Kuman Singh Gurung. Authorities have converted an unused institute building on Vidhyut Road in Bharatpur-10, Chitwan into a temporary facility for around 250 bodies, cooled to 2–6°C with air conditioning and dry ice; Devghat’s electric crematorium is the fallback if that fills. Remains keep for only ten to fourteen days even refrigerated, so police are photographing, fingerprinting and taking DNA samples, recording clothing, jewellery and tattoos, and circulating photographs publicly so families can compare them against missing-person reports. DNA goes to the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and the Police Central Forensic Science Laboratory. Where no one comes forward, bodies will be buried with a tag number so they can be matched later. For families abroad, this is the practical reality: identification may take weeks, it may require a DNA sample from a relative, and free accommodation is being arranged for families travelling to Chitwan to search (The Kathmandu Post, Outlook India).

In Brief: Two last notes.

* The autumn season, precisely. The Nepal Tourism Board advises postponing travel along the Galchhi–Nuwakot–Rasuwa–Syabrubesi corridor. But the geography matters: the flood came down the Bhotekoshi, while the main Langtang Valley trekking trail follows a different river, and the walking route above Syabrubesi is largely intact. The damage is on the road corridor. Langtang’s season runs October–November, which gives repair crews some weeks. The overland route to Kailash Manasarovar via Kerung is finished for this season. If you are booked, talk to your operator before cancelling — Langtang’s guides and teahouse families rebuilt once already after 2015 (operator advisories).

* The programmes that were cancelled. Nepali community organisations from Sydney to Washington have called off September cultural events and redirected the money to relief. If your local society does the same, that is why (The Australia Today).

How to Help

First, a warning worth reading before you give anything. On 27 August, Nepal Police issued an alert about scams targeting flood donations. They describe fake bank accounts set up under the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund name, counterfeit QR codes copying government formats, bogus pages and groups on Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram and Viber, phishing calls offering to “register” people for relief in exchange for personal details, and links built to harvest one-time passwords. Their advice is simple: take account details only from the Prime Minister’s Office official website or its verified accounts, never trust a QR code or account number that arrives in a forwarded message, never share a PIN or OTP with anyone, and if a message claims a relative urgently needs money, call that person directly before sending a rupee. Suspected scams go to the Nepal Police Cyber Bureau. Fundraising fraud clusters in the first 48 to 72 hours after a disaster, which is exactly where we are (The Kathmandu Post).

With that in mind, these are the channels we were able to verify independently:

* Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund — the official government fund, covering rescue, treatment, relief, rehabilitation and infrastructure restoration. Bank details and QR codes are published on the Office of the Prime Minister’s own page: opmcm.gov.np. Take them from there and nowhere else.

* Nepal Red Cross Society — more than 200 staff and volunteers already working in the affected districts, with a donation portal of its own. The IFRC has released emergency funding through its disaster response fund and is accepting donations too.

* Direct Relief — rated A+ by CharityWatch and four stars by Charity Navigator, with 90 percent of its cash budget going to programmes and a cost of $5 to raise each $100 (EIN 95-1831116). It has a dedicated Nepal floods response (Charity Navigator).

* GlobalGiving — four stars from Charity Navigator; its Nepal Flood Relief Fund passes money to vetted local partners on the ground.

* Save the Children — A− from CharityWatch, four stars from Charity Navigator, and long established in Nepal.

* Also accredited against all twenty BBB Standards for Charity Accountability and currently raising for Nepal: the American Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, International Medical Corps, Oxfam America, Project HOPE, UNICEF USA and World Relief (Give.org).

* NRNA — through your own national committee, using that committee’s official channels rather than a link someone forwarded you.

If you would rather check something yourself before giving, both CharityWatch and the BBB’s Give.org have published guidance specific to this disaster, and the Kathmandu Post has a running list of verified channels.

If someone you know is missing: Nepal Tourism Board on 1234 (toll-free) or 1144; Tourist Police on +977 9851289445. Contact your own foreign ministry as well — several are running dedicated casework for this event. If you are asked to provide a DNA reference sample, that is a normal part of the process described above, not a sign of bad news.

Namaste, diaspora family. This was a heavy week, and the heaviest news lands squarely on our own people: Washington has formally ended Temporary Protected Status for Nepalis, leaving thousands of families who have built lives in America since the 2015 earthquake without legal footing. Closer to home, gold set yet another record, the Nepali Congress is now heading for two rival conventions, and the monsoon has claimed 85 lives. There is better news too, from Guangzhou and from a football pitch. Let’s get into it.

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

The US Ends TPS for Nepalis

It’s official, and it is the hardest news this newsletter has carried in a while. On 15 August, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Temporary Protected Status for Nepal is terminated , ending a designation granted on 24 June 2015 in the aftermath of the Gorkha earthquake. Around 12,700 Nepalis held TPS before the phase-out began and roughly 5,500 have since adjusted to permanent residency , which, by simple subtraction, leaves something in the order of 7,000 people exposed. DHS has told those affected to make immediate arrangements to depart the US. Nepal is one of 13 countries named in the same action. The remaining routes , family or employment sponsorship, or asylum , all carry a far higher evidentiary bar. If this touches your family, get proper legal advice now rather than later. (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News)

Guangzhou Delivers: An 85% Rule and a Rs 1 Trillion Bond

Better news from the 11th NRNA Asia-Pacific Regional Conference, held in Guangzhou from 14 to 16 August. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle announced that the Securities Board of Nepal has drafted amended regulations letting government–NRN joint ventures raise up to 85% of paid-up capital through public offerings denominated in foreign currency. One caveat worth holding onto: the amendment has gone to the finance ministry and still awaits Cabinet approval, so nothing is in force yet. The vehicle is the NRN Nepal Development Fund, targeting a minimum of Rs 10 billion , 5% government, 10% founding promoters, 85% open to diaspora investors, with individual stakes from Rs 100,000 to Rs 100 million. More than 500 delegates also endorsed a “Diaspora Bond” worth Rs 1 trillion annually for infrastructure, and restated the two demands that never go away: NRN citizenship rights, and voting rights for Nepali citizens abroad. Years of lobbying, one Cabinet signature from becoming real. (The Kathmandu Post, Kantipur)

In Brief: The recruitment freeze ends, and two quieter changes that will touch your paperwork.

* The recruitment shutdown is over. Agencies called off all protest activity on 17 August after talks with the Ministry of Youth, Labour and Employment, averting a total halt to deployments that was threatened for 23 August. The ministry committed to amending the Foreign Employment Act within two months; new service fees will be set only once that law is revised. Workers currently pay Rs 150,000–500,000 for Gulf and Malaysia placements and up to Rs 1.2 million for Europe. (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post)

* A Passport Act amendment debated on 18 August would let private firms collect biometric data from Nepalis abroad , currently the preserve of embassies. The case for it is stark: Japan’s Nepali population has reached 342,000, up from 97,000 in 2021, yet the embassy has grown from three diplomatic staff at its opening 61 years ago to just four today. RSP lawmaker Rima Bishwakarma warned the bill “lacks clear standards for preventing the misuse of sensitive personal data.” (OnlineKhabar, The Kathmandu Post)

* The Foreign Ministry has finalised a Rs 150 million procedure to rescue and repatriate stranded Nepalis, allowing up to Rs 1.2 million per person. It is aimed at those who travelled irregularly and therefore hold no insurance , the group most exposed in Southeast Asian scam compounds, from which around 860 Nepalis were recently rescued in Cambodia. (OnlineKhabar)

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Two Conventions, One Party

The Nepali Congress is now openly heading in two directions at once. Gagan Thapa’s Central Working Committee resolved on 19 August to hold the 15th general convention on 2–5 October, moved back from an earlier 9 September date, deploying 85 election officers across 77 districts with ward conventions now set for 9 September itself. The next day, the Deuba-aligned faction met at Dr Shashank Koirala’s Maharajgunj residence and resolved to petition the court to stop the whole process, arguing it cannot proceed while the Supreme Court rehears the party-legitimacy dispute it agreed on 6 August to review. Thapa’s offer was conciliatory , “If there are concerns about irregularities, bias or doubts over membership, I am ready for an open discussion” , but the machinery on both sides is now moving independently. (The Kathmandu Post, OnlineKhabar)

Bagmati Flips as the Oli–Dahal Deal Bites

This is the week the Oli–Dahal power-sharing directive of 11 August stopped being a piece of paper. Bagmati Chief Minister Indra Bahadur Baniya of the Nepali Congress resigned on 17 August rather than face a floor test after UML withdrew support; on 20 August, UML’s Kiran Thapa was appointed in his place on the claimed strength of 63 lawmakers , a claim that got RPP’s provincial parliamentary leader expelled, since the party’s central leadership said it had authorised no such support. In Koshi, the Congress pulled its 29 lawmakers to the opposition benches on 19 August, forcing Chief Minister Hikmat Kumar Karki to a confidence vote. The same day, Karnali’s Mangal Bahadur Shahi survived his trust vote 21–13 with two neutral , 21 being the bare minimum in a 40-member assembly , and Sudurpaschim’s Khagaraj Bhatta won more comfortably, 31–15. One province changed hands, three more governments were put to the test, all inside a single week. (The Kathmandu Post, OnlineKhabar, The Kathmandu Post)

In Brief: A religious turn, a summons, and an investigation that reaches the inner offices.

* At its national gathering in Sukedhara, the Deuba faction adopted a five-point declaration promoting Sanatan religion as a national identity , replacing a draft that had described Nepal in multi-religious terms with no religious-identity clause. It is a break with the Congress’s secular line, and it drew objections from Bimalendra Nidhi and Krishna Prasad Sitaula. Deuba’s own framing was blunt: “I am a Hindu, I am a Hindu, I am a Hindu.” (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News)

* Speaker Dol Prasad Aryal has scheduled a direct question-and-answer session with Prime Minister Balendra Shah in Parliament for 26 August, resolving the standoff over his absence. Every parliamentary party gets at least one question, with up to 15 more allocated by party strength. Expect him to be pressed on his remark that Nepal had also encroached on Indian territory. (The Kathmandu Post)

* The CIAA has widened its asset investigation to the personal secretaries of three former prime ministers , Rajesh Bajracharya (Oli), Bhanu Deuba (Deuba) and Ganga Dahal (Dahal) , writing to more than 20 agencies for banking, property and shareholding records. It is the first sign the accountability drive is reaching the money-handling entourages rather than only the principals. (The Kathmandu Post)

💸 Economy & Development

Gold Breaks Its Record Again

If you thought Rs 300,000 a tola was the ceiling, think again. Fine gold hit Rs 313,400 per tola on 20 August, up an extraordinary Rs 9,300 in a single day from Rs 304,100 the day before, according to the Federation of Nepal Gold and Silver Dealers’ Association. Silver climbed to Rs 4,855. The path was not a straight line , gold actually fell Rs 2,700 on 19 August before spiking , but the direction is unmistakable, and it is roughly Rs 5,500 above the record set only nine days earlier. International markets are driving it, with gold quoted around USD 4,512 an ounce. For families financing a wedding or remitting for jewellery ahead of the festivals, the arithmetic keeps getting worse. (Khabarhub, OnlineKhabar)

The IMF’s Verdict: Stable, But Watch the Cooperatives

Nepal has completed its first IMF-supported programme in nearly two decades, and mission chief Sarwat Jahan delivered the assessment on 20 August. The headline numbers are genuinely good: inflation down from 7.7% in FY 2022/23 to 1.7% in the first half of FY 2025/26, and international reserves up from nine months of import cover to more than twelve. She credited modernised monetary policy, stronger bank supervision, fiscal transparency and upgraded anti-money-laundering frameworks , achieved through government transitions, two earthquakes and the floods of 2024 and 2026. But she flagged savings and credit cooperatives as an ongoing vulnerability, which will not surprise anyone who has followed that story, and named private investment, job creation and governance as the unfinished work. “Macroeconomic stability,” she said, is “only a baseline rather than the ultimate destination.” (The Kathmandu Post, Nepal News)

In Brief: Profits without lending, investment without capital, and one very large dam.

* Nepal’s 20 commercial banks earned Rs 69.78 billion in FY 2025/26, up 32% , but almost entirely from bad-loan recoveries and lower provisioning rather than lending. Net interest income rose just 1%, the non-performing loan ratio worsened to 5.35% from 4.51%, and roughly Rs 1.5 trillion of excess liquidity sits idle while industries run at 42% capacity. As Bankers’ Association president Santosh Koirala put it, the growth is “almost entirely driven by notable recoveries of bad loans.” (The Kathmandu Post)

* Foreign investment commitments collapsed 84% in the first month of FY 2026/27 , just Rs 3.77 billion approved, against Rs 24.10 billion a year earlier. The number of projects actually rose to 191 from 127, so the collapse is in ticket size, not appetite: last year’s figure was inflated by a single Rs 20.45 billion meat-processing project with no equivalent this year. IT led on volume with 128 projects. (OnlineKhabar)

* The 420 MW Tila-2 project in Kalikot, Karnali reached financial closure on 17 August , Rs 70.07 billion, funded by eleven banks with Everest Bank as lead, expected to generate 2,318.79 GWh a year. Notably, 20% of shares are reserved for project-affected residents and the general public. (The Rising Nepal)

⭐ Social & Cultural

The Monsoon Has Taken 85 Lives

Nepal Police figures released on 15 August put the monsoon death toll at 85 between mid-April and 14 August , 35 in landslides, 26 by lightning, 19 in floods, four in heavy rain and one in an avalanche , with nine missing, 196 injured and 1,735 families affected. The worst single incident was at Thabang in Rolpa, where a landslide destroyed 12 houses in Kotalbara, burying 13 people , 10 bodies recovered, three still missing. Days later a landslide in Jajarkot killed four more and cut off around 150 people, in a district still rebuilding from the November 2023 earthquake that killed 154 across Jajarkot and Rukum West. By 18 August, 691 people from more than 450 households were sheltering in camps in Bheri Municipality, where doctors treated 90 flu and fever patients in a single day. “Rainwater has contaminated almost all drinking water sources,” said public health inspector Nisha Thapa. (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post)

The Diaspora Paid the Medical Bills

Here is what our community does when the state doesn’t. Aashish Rai, a midfielder from Itahari injured playing for Nepal, was left with a mishandled injury needing rehabilitation in Bangkok and further surgery , while ANFA sat financially paralysed by the FIFA suspension. So overseas Nepali football clubs simply organised the money themselves. Malaysia-based N Penang FC, Himalayan FC and Nepbourne FC raised about Rs 1.2 million; Nepal United FC in Australia gave Rs 81,000; Spice Purbeli FC in Japan has pledged a share of the proceeds from its tournament on 30 August. With a GoFundMe alongside, it has come to roughly Rs 2 million so far. The National Sports Council managed Rs 150,000, with another Rs 100,000 promised. Rai’s response says everything: “What should I make of Rs 150,000?” Meanwhile 19 boys at the ANFA academy hostel in Lalitpur are living on rice, lentils and plain biscuits. (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post)

In Brief: A world-stage finish, a worsening outbreak, and a farewell.

* Horaa Esports finished eighth at the PUBG Mobile World Cup grand finals in Paris, taking 109 points across 18 matches with the placing undecided until the very last game. They banked USD 127,500, about Rs 19.4 million. Better still, Shital Rai , “SleepY” , was named the tournament’s second-place MVP with 31 eliminations, his second consecutive appearance on the World Cup MVP list. (OnlineKhabar, OnlineKhabar)

* Japanese encephalitis has now killed at least 16 people, with 63 confirmed cases among 878 acute encephalitis cases across 22 districts, as of 17 August. Jhapa has the most deaths at five. Every one of the 16 who died was unvaccinated, and the outbreak is moving westward. If you have relatives in the Tarai, this is worth a phone call. (Radio Nepal)

* Nirmal Purja will be buried in the United Kingdom, where his wife and daughter live, in a service restricted to family, friends and invited guests , expected on 26 August, though the family has not formally announced it. Elite Exped has asked that no independent programmes be organised around it. A private goodbye for a very public man. (Kantipur)

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Namaste, diaspora family. It’s been a week of things stopping and things soaring; the agencies that send Nepalis abroad have downed tools entirely, gold has blown past Rs 300,000 a tola with festival season still weeks away, and Sher Bahadur Deuba is booked on a Thursday flight home into a money-laundering investigation he left behind in February. There’s grief in here too: the tribute runs for Broad Peak are still going. Let’s get into it.

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

The Recruitment Pipeline Grinds to a Halt

For the first time in years, the machinery that moves Nepalis abroad has simply stopped. The Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies suspended all overseas recruitment from 7 August, after a 15-day ultimatum to the government expired without movement. Their 15-point list is long, withdraw disciplinary action against 771 manpower companies, build a “scientific” service-fee structure, amend the Foreign Employment Act 2007, replace the widely ignored “free visa, free ticket” policy, rein in airfares, and post labour attachés wherever 5,000 or more Nepalis work. The immediate trigger was blunter: Rs 50,000 fines slapped on 39 agencies on 4 August for routing workers through Indian airports. The freeze lands on an already shrinking flow, 406,404 new labour permits in FY 2025-26, down 19.7% on the previous year. (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post)

San Francisco’s Consulate Closes for Good

If you’re on the US West Coast and have paperwork pending, this one is urgent. The Consulate General of Nepal in San Francisco issued its final public notice on 7 August: every passport, visa and consular service ends on 31 August, with permanent closure from 1 September. Anyone who filed on or before 6 July has been urged to collect their passport before the shutters come down. The closure is part of a wider Foreign Ministry decision to shut several diplomatic missions, and it leaves one of the largest concentrations of Nepalis in America i.e. California with no local post at all. At a moment when US immigration paperwork errors carry unusually high stakes, that is not a small loss. (Nepal News)

In Brief: Three stories about the cost of leaving, and where Nepalis are leaving to.

* A Kathmandu Post investigation from Rukum East traced two families who spent Rs 13.5 million and over Rs 10 million each paying around Rs 8.5 million in agent fees alone to route their sons to the US via Dubai and Brazil. Both young men arrived in January 2025 and were detained; both have now spent roughly 19 months inside. Agent fees for the “donkey route” have climbed from around Rs 800,000 to Rs 1 million a decade ago to nearly Rs 10 million today. (The Kathmandu Post)

* Shanta Kumar Shrestha, 36, of Sindhupalchok and Nischal Tamang, 25, of Chitwan were killed by a train in Bacău, Romania in the early hours of Sunday 2 August, while crossing the tracks with colleagues to reach a 24-hour store. Two others survived. Romania is now a major European destination for Nepali workers, European permits have risen 21-fold in a decade, and the Gulf’s share of Nepali migration has fallen to 64%. (Nepal News, Nepali Times)

* The NRNA European Regional Conference opened in Dublin on 10 August, gathering community leaders and national coordination council representatives from across the continent, timely, given that Europe is now where the diaspora is growing fastest. (Nepal News)

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Deuba Comes Home, and the Congress Fight Reopens

Sher Bahadur Deuba lands at Tribhuvan International at 12:25 on 13 August, five and a half months after leaving on 25 February. The timing was deliberately moved from a late-night slot so his supporters could fill the airport in daylight. He returns with the Department of Money Laundering Investigation still pursuing him and his wife, former foreign minister Arzu Rana Deuba, arrest warrants were issued on 7 April, Interpol declined Nepal Police’s Red Notice requests, and the Supreme Court then blocked execution of the warrants on jurisdictional grounds. Days earlier, the same court reopened the war over who actually leads the Nepali Congress, granting a review of the April ruling that recognised Gagan Thapa as president. Thapa stays in post for now, but the Deuba camp has shelved its breakay-party plan and is calling for the convention process to pause until the court rules, with ward conventions due to begin on 18 August. (The Kathmandu Post, The Kathmandu Post)

Balen Shah Finally Opens the Door

Since taking office on 27 March, Prime Minister Balendra Shah had refused to meet foreign ambassadors one-to-one, an unusual, deliberate freeze that became a running question about whether an outsider could run a conventional foreign policy. On 11 August it ended. Shah received Indian Ambassador Naveen Srivastava and Chinese Ambassador Zhang Maoming in separate meetings at Singha Durbar, and both arrived carrying invitations from their prime ministers. Talks with India covered unblocking stalled Indian-funded projects, the Janakpur–Ayodhya rail link and Buddhist circuit connections; talks with China covered development partnership and Beijing’s “sensitivities.” Srivastava added a personal nudge: “Since I am retiring at the end of September, it would be a great pleasure if you visit India by then.” Shah committed to nothing beyond going “at an appropriate time.” (The Kathmandu Post)

In Brief: A missing treaty, a backroom carve-up, and four names entered into the national record.

* Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told parliament on 10 August that the government has no clear information on whether Nepal even holds official copies of the 1816 Sugauli Treaty or the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Searches of the national archives, the Department of Archaeology and the Narayanhiti Palace Museum turned up nothing. The treaty is the documentary foundation of every Nepali claim over Kalapani, Lipulekh and Limpiyadhura. (The Kathmandu Post)

* KP Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” issued a five-point directive on 11 August setting out how they will share provincial power, governments formed on assembly seat share, ministries distributed proportionally, the party without the chief ministership picking first. Under the three-point agreement reported on 7 August that sits behind it, UML leads Koshi, Bagmati and Lumbini and the CPN leads Karnali and Sudurpashchim, with Madhesh and Gandaki still unsettled. (Khabarhub, Spotlight Nepal)

* The cabinet on 11 August declared four people killed in last month’s Tarai unrest as martyrs: Om Prakash Mehta, Jaya Prakash Mehta and Rabindra Kumar Mehta of Sunsari, and 15-year-old Ganesh Kumar Yadav of Siraha. A Himal Southasian investigation found the Armed Police Force discharged roughly 25 live rounds during the 26 July confrontation in Dewanganj. Curfews and restrictions remain in force in Sunsari and other towns across Madhesh. (myRepublica, Himal Southasian)

💸 Economy & Development

Gold Blows Past Rs 300,000 a Tola

If you were planning to send money home for jewellery this festival season, brace yourself. Fine gold hit Rs 307,900 per tola on 11 August, up Rs 6,400 in a single day, and up Rs 11,000 across just three trading days. The metal climbed back above the Rs 300,000 mark on Sunday 9 August, jumping Rs 4,800 in a single session, and has kept going. Silver moved with it, reaching Rs 4,780 a tola. At Nepal Rastra Bank’s selling rate of Rs 152.79 to the dollar on 10 August, a single tola of fine gold now costs about USD 2,015. For remittance-receiving households, where gold has always been the default savings vehicle and the standard wedding and Dashain gift, this is a genuine squeeze arriving at precisely the wrong moment on the calendar. (Nepal News)

The Cooperative Depositors Nobody Is Counting

The government has started paying savers back, but only at the 29 cooperatives formally declared “troubled.” The National Campaign for the Protection of Cooperative Depositors says 619 cooperatives have affected members and more than 500 have stopped returning deposits entirely without ever being classified, which means their savers have no route to a refund at all. Since May, the Problematic Cooperatives Management Committee has returned or settled Rs 710 million for around 11,000 depositors, prioritising the smallest balances. The scale of what sits behind it is sobering: a parliamentary investigation found 40 cooperatives alone carried Rs 87.89 billion in liabilities, including Rs 71.30 billion of public deposits. Police have arrested 669 people over cooperative embezzlement in a decade; 1,540 suspects remain absconding. A great deal of that trapped money is remittance money, parked by families chasing better interest than the banks offered. (The Kathmandu Post)

In Brief: Where the money went, and where it isn’t going.

* For the first time ever, Nepal imported more silver than gold by value, Rs 32.74 billion against Rs 29.15 billion in the fiscal year to mid-July, with silver volumes up 108% to 104.29 tonnes while gold volumes actually fell. The largest single share, roughly a third, came from Dubai, cleared through customs as “silver powder.” (The Kathmandu Post)

* Nepse lost Rs 70 billion in market value over the week, sliding 35.45 points to 2,650.09 as 11 of 13 sub-indices fell. Only hydropower and trading finished up. As analyst Ajay Singh Thapa put it, “over the past three or four years, investors have not received adequate returns.” (The Kathmandu Post)

* 76,172 Nepalis have applied for 7,002 jobs in South Korea under the Employment Permit System, nearly 11 applicants per position. That ratio tells you most of what you need to know about the state of the domestic labour market. (Nepal News)

⭐ Social & Cultural

Still Mourning Broad Peak

Two weeks on, Nepal has not stopped grieving. On Saturday 8 August, hundreds ran a 5K from Baluwakhani Community Park to Bouddhanath Stupa, organised by Nepal Marathon, in tribute to the climbers killed in the 30 July avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan. There was a butter-lamp vigil and a two-minute silence. Among the dead are Nirmal Purja, the most globally recognised Nepali climber of his generation, whose funeral will be held in the UK, along with Nima Sherpa, Nawang Thindu Sherpa, Pur Bahadur Gurung, Kili Pemba Sherpa and Gyalu Sherpa. “All those who died in the Broad Peak avalanche are our national heroes,” said organiser Ayush Tamang. The mountains gave up other secrets this week too: melting snow at Yalung Ri in the Rolwaling range exposed five bodies from the November 2025 avalanche, including guides Padam Tamang and Mer Karki. (Nepal News, The Kathmandu Post)

Nepali Football Is Literally Going Hungry

This is the story that should make every one of us wince. FIFA’s suspension of ANFA, imposed in late June over third-party interference, has cut off funding to four Goal Project academies housing more than 100 children, 21 at Satdobato, 30 in Butwal, 29 in Rautahat, 30 in Dharan. One academy employee described the result plainly: “Students who ate chickpeas and eggs before training now have only tea and biscuits.” Butwal’s acting director Shankar Malla said it had been over three months since they paid the grocer, with school fees due before Dashain. The clock is running on something bigger, too: unless the suspension lifts by 30 September, Nepal misses the SAFF Championship in Bangladesh, having played every one of the 14 editions held so far, it would be the country’s first absence. Five major football events have already been forfeited this year. The deadlock is procedural, between ANFA and the National Sports Council. The cost is not. (OnlineKhabar, The Kathmandu Post)

In Brief: A comeback, a first, and a warning.

* Sandeep Lamichhane is back as ODI captain, named to lead Nepal at the ACC Premier Cup in Malaysia from 30 August, his first national captaincy since 2022. He replaces Rohit Paudel, who won 31 of 63 matches in charge. Lamichhane remains Nepal’s leading ODI wicket-taker with 154 in 77 matches, though he went wicketless on the recent Netherlands tour. (The Kathmandu Post)

* Horaa Esports have qualified for the PUBG Mobile World Cup grand finals in Paris, 14–16 August, finishing fourth in their group. They have already secured roughly Rs 90 million just by reaching the final 16, from a USD 3.025 million prize pool. Something to actually watch this weekend. (The Kathmandu Post)

* Monsoon watch: heavy rain on 10 August blocked the BP, Mechi, Araniko and Mid-Hill highways among others, with night movement restricted on the BP. Separately, Japanese encephalitis has killed nine and infected 37 in under a month, mostly in Koshi. Vaccination campaigns in 11 high-burden districts are delayed to April 2027 by procurement problems, worth knowing if you’re travelling to the Tarai. (Radio Nepal, The Kathmandu Post)

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Namaste, diaspora family. This was a hard week, and we will not pretend otherwise. As we write, search teams in Pakistan’s Karakoram are still looking for Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja and several Nepali climbers swept off Broad Peak by an avalanche, and his tracker was still showing movement on Friday morning. Back home, communal violence in Sunsari spread across four Tarai districts and left three people dead, with the Prime Minister and Home Minister criticised for reaching the scene days too late. Doctors across the country shut their outpatient doors for two days. Hold your people close this week, and let’s get into it.

🌍 Diaspora & Globalisation

A Missile in Kuwait, a Family in Terhathum

The war that has been showing up in our lives as a fuel price now has a Nepali name attached to it. Som Kumar Tamang, 44, from Terhathum in eastern Nepal, was killed on July 30 when an Iranian ballistic missile struck a Chinese company’s building in northern Kuwait. He had worked there as a driver since 2022. He is the second Nepali killed since the conflict across West Asia escalated, after Diwas Shrestha of Gorkha died in the UAE. Kuwait’s defence ministry said emergency procedures were launched immediately; Nepal’s embassy in Kuwait is working with Kuwaiti authorities to repatriate his body. What makes this land so heavily is the arithmetic behind it. Roughly 186,000 Nepalis work in Kuwait, about 4 percent of that country’s entire population, and most of them cannot simply leave a contract because a region has become dangerous. When we talk about remittances, this is the risk sitting quietly underneath the number (The Kathmandu Post).

Saudi Arabia Shuts the Visa Window

A licensing fight in Kathmandu has become a cancelled flight for thousands of families. Saudi Arabia has stopped issuing work visas to Nepalis in five job categories, including loading and unloading, portering, cart operation and construction, after Nepal’s government sealed the Industrial Training Institute in Basundhara, ruling it had no legal authority to run the Skill Verification Programme tests the Saudis now require. Saudi Arabia took about 77,000 Nepali workers last year, so the freeze is not a small one. Recruiters say the deeper problem is the testing itself: the official Saudi fee is $50, roughly Rs 7,500, but the operator was collecting Rs 10,000, and a worker who fails has to pay again. “A private institution has created a monopoly in the name of skill testing, piling financial burden on workers,” said Mahesh Kumar Basnet of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies. Talks with the Saudi embassy are underway. Until they land, aspirants sit at home with loans already taken (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: Three more notes from the community abroad.

* The Australian door narrows. Australia has rejected about 64 percent of offshore student visa applications from Nepal, the highest rate on record. Just 2,700 of 7,500 applicants were approved between January and May, against 7,167 of 8,028 a year earlier, after Nepal was moved to Australia’s highest-risk assessment band. The application fee, A$2,500, is not refunded when you are refused (The Kathmandu Post).

* Two shifts for the passport queue. The Department of Passports is moving to two shifts to clear its delivery backlog, and the Cabinet has cleared an amendment to the Passport Act for registration in Parliament. Anyone who has waited abroad on a renewal knows why this matters (The Kathmandu Post).

* A crown in Virginia. Deepika Sharma of Maryland was crowned Miss Nepal North America 2026 on July 25, with runners-up from Michigan, South Carolina and Texas. We flagged the finale last week; it landed just outside Washington, in Clifton, Virginia (Glamour Nepal).

🏛️ Politics & Governance

Three Dead, Four Districts, and a Government That Arrived Late

It began on the night of Sunday, July 26, at Kaptanganj in Dewanganj, Sunsari, where Bolbam devotees carrying holy water from the Koshi Barrage passed a mosque playing loud music, on top of an earlier quarrel over a community flag on an electricity pole. Crowds formed with sticks, stones and iron rods. Police fired warning shots and then live rounds, killing Om Prakash Mehta; Jaya Prakash Mehta, 20, died later of his injuries. By Thursday it had spread, and Ganesh Yadav, just 17, was shot dead in Siraha’s Golbazar. Curfews now cover Sunsari, Saptari, Siraha and Dhanusha, with prohibitory orders in Parsa and a curfew reimposed in Birgunj. The hardest detail is the one about the state: the Sunsari district police chief and the Koshi Province police chief were both on leave as it unfolded. Prime Minister Balendra Shah met security chiefs on day four and convened the National Security Council on day five, and Home Minister Sudan Gurung reached Sunsari on day four (The Kathmandu Post).

The Bill Comes Due in Parliament

The political reckoning arrived on July 30, when the House of Representatives sat for the first time since passing the budget. Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, the Nepali Communist Party and Shram Sanskriti Party jointly demanded that both the Prime Minister and the Home Minister resign over Sunsari. “Why did the prime minister and home minister not treat the Sunsari incident seriously from the beginning?” asked human rights advocate Mohna Ansari. A seven-point agreement signed on July 31 promised martyr status for the dead, Rs 1 million to each family, jobs, an impartial investigation and a memorial park, and the families initially refused to accept the bodies anyway. Meanwhile the House returned with almost nothing to legislate: 8 bills in lower house committees, none pending in the upper house, against a stated government target of 166 bills for the year. A government elected on the promise of a rebuilt state is now being asked, from two directions at once, where the state actually is (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: The rest of the week in governance.

* Maps on the table in Lucknow. Nepal and India will hold the 13th meeting of the Survey Officials’ Committee in Lucknow from August 12 to 14, approving the workplan and budget agreed at the last Boundary Working Group and reviewing GPS base stations. Kalapani and Susta remain outside its remit (The Kathmandu Post).

* An election chief, finally. The Parliamentary Hearing Committee unanimously approved Man Bahadur Karki as Chief Election Commissioner, with Guru Prasad Wagle and Rajiv Subba as commissioners, and sent the confirmation to the President’s Office. A quiet appointment with loud consequences ahead (Nepal News).

* Seventeen years later. A senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official has been charged over the alleged misuse of travel documents in a case dating back 17 years, a reminder of how slowly accountability moves even in a crackdown era (The Kathmandu Post).

💸 Economy & Development

The War Reaches the Petrol Pump

The same conflict that killed Som Kumar Tamang is now working its way through every shop in Nepal. Wholesale inflation hit 8.47 percent in the month to mid-June, a 39-month high, up from just 1.56 percent a year earlier. Energy prices alone rose 48.14 percent. Since the February 28 US and Israeli assault on Iran, petrol has gone from Rs 156 to Rs 219 a litre, diesel from Rs 139 to Rs 237, and a cylinder of LPG from Rs 1,910 to Rs 2,160. Consumer inflation is still a more modest 5.22 percent, but wholesale prices lead retail ones by two or three months, which puts the real squeeze right around Dashain. “There is a tendency to pass the entire increase in costs to consumers, and often even add extra margins,” warned Nara Bahadur Thapa, a former Nepal Rastra Bank executive director. If you are planning what to send home this festival season, plan for it to buy less (The Kathmandu Post).

Nepal Now Imports Its Dinner

Here is a number that should stop us all. Nepal’s food import bill reached Rs 434.26 billion in the fiscal year just ended, making food the country’s second-largest external dependency after petroleum. Crude edible oil accounted for Rs 168.26 billion, much of it re-exported to India, followed by rice and paddy at Rs 39.53 billion, seeds at Rs 38.99 billion, vegetables at Rs 38.35 billion and fruit at Rs 34.73 billion. For scale: in 2009-10 the entire food import bill was Rs 44.43 billion. A country of farmers now buys its rice abroad, in part because the hands that used to plant it are in Doha and Kuala Lumpur, and in part because farming stopped paying. “Like petroleum products, we are now almost entirely dependent on imported food,” says Nahendra Khadka of the National Peasants Coalition. India’s sugar export restrictions, in force through September, are already driving smuggling ahead of the festivals (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: A few more entries for the ledger.

* A life, priced properly. The Cabinet cleared a bill raising the compensation ceiling for victims of domestic air accidents to $100,000, a serious increase in a country where most of us take a domestic leg on every trip home (The Kathmandu Post).

* Markets steady, hundi busted. NEPSE rose 12.96 points to close the week at 2,685.54, ending four straight losing sessions, while the central bank absorbed Rs 30 billion of excess liquidity. Separately, the CIB arrested a 49-year-old man on July 27 over an alleged illegal remittance network, the informal hundi channel that still competes with the banks many of us use (Nepal News).

* Dal bhat goes abroad, properly this time. The Nepali restaurant chain Jimbu Thakali opened its first outlet outside Nepal, in India. A small thing, but a welcome inversion of the usual story: a Nepali brand travelling, not just Nepali workers (The Kathmandu Post).

⭐ Social & Cultural

Broad Peak Goes Quiet

Around 9am on Thursday, July 30, an avalanche swept a ten-member international team high on Broad Peak, the 8,047-metre giant beside K2 in Pakistan’s Karakoram. Among them was Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja, 43, the Nepal-born British climber who summited all fourteen 8,000-metre peaks in 189 days in 2019 and who, more than anyone alive, changed how the world sees Nepali mountaineers. As of Friday night, three bodies had been recovered, including Nepali climber Pur Bahadur “Yukta” Gurung and Oman’s Nadhira Al Harthy, the first Omani woman to summit Everest. Drones sighted six more climbers on Friday afternoon, their condition unknown. Purja’s tracking device kept registering movement until Friday morning, and no one is willing to close the door on that. Also unaccounted for are Kili Pemba Sherpa, Nima Sherpa, Gyalu Sherpa and Nawang Thindu Sherpa. “It’s not like Everest. Communication out there is very limited,” said Changdawa Sherpa. We are publishing while the search continues, and we are hoping (The Kathmandu Post).

The Day the Doctors Closed the Door

On July 25 at Narayani Hospital in Birgunj, a 45-year-old heart patient died in the emergency ward. Relatives allegedly stormed the hospital, vandalised it and assaulted Dr Pramod Ram. What followed was unprecedented: the Nepal Medical Association shut all outpatient services nationwide, at government, private and community hospitals alike, for two days, leaving hundreds of thousands of patients turned away with only emergency care running. The strike ended on July 29 with a five-point agreement under which the Home Ministry will prosecute those responsible under the Health Workers and Health Institutions Security Act, 2009. Neither side comes out of this clean, and both are trapped in the same shortage: too few doctors and nurses, too many desperate families, meeting in an understaffed corridor at the worst moment of their lives. It is also, quietly, part of why so many Nepali medics end up staffing hospitals in our cities instead of theirs (The Kathmandu Post).

In Brief: Three last notes to close a heavy week.

* Winless in Utrecht. Nepal finished the ICC World Cup League 2 tri-series without a victory, losing to Namibia by 3 runs on July 27 (211/7 to 208/6) and to the Netherlands by 57 on July 29. Four matches, no wins, and a batting order that has some thinking to do before the next assignment (ESPNcricinfo).

* An award for watching the hills. AFP correspondent Anup Ojha won second prize at the Asian Development Bank Institute’s Developing Asia Journalism Awards 2026, for a story on Nepal’s AI-powered landslide warning system, chosen from 79 entries across 17 countries (The Kathmandu Post).

* MaHa, half of it anyway. Madan Krishna Shrestha returned to the Paleti stage after 18 years, sharing it with his son Yaman. For anyone who grew up on MaHa Jodi cassettes in a flat far from home, that sentence does a lot of work (The Kathmandu Post).

Let’s connect

Enjoying this issue? 📩 Share it with a friend & let’s keep Nepalis worldwide in the loop! Got thoughts? Hit reply—we’re all ears! Or let us know what you think via our Feedback form or follow us on Facebook | LinkedIn

P.S. Got a story or issue you’d like us to cover next week? Drop us a reply — we’re building this space together.

About Nepali Diaspora Digest:

The Nepali Diaspora Digest connects the global Nepali community with curated news, insights, and stories that matter most. Join us as we celebrate and explore the diverse voices and achievements of Nepalis worldwide.

Partner shout out

belayat.uk: helping Nepalis connect in the UK on jobs, housing, events and finding local Nepali owned businesses