Cover Story | Mega Dams, Military Infrastructure, Zero Accountability: How China Manufactured Nepal’s Tragedy

For Savita Shrestha Adhikari, time stopped at 8:14 am on August 26, when she last spoke to her husband, Krishna Bahadur Adhikari. A safety officer at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project in Nuwakot, he informed her that he was going to inspect a tunnel.

Around the same time, a catastrophic glacier collapse and massive ice-rock avalanche on the Nepal-Tibet border triggered a flash flood, which swept away everything in its path, including the hydropower project where Adhikari and hundreds of others were working.

Three days after the disaster, Savita was standing near a barricade at the Trishuli army camp, along with hundreds of anxious families. Unbothered by the loud whirring of choppers and the stench of bodies hanging in the air, her eyes were fixed on rescue workers wading through knee-deep slush to look for survivors. She hoped for a miracle: that her missing husband would be pulled out alive. “He had joined this company just two months ago. Had he not joined …” she says, tears rolling down. The rest of the sentence vanished in a space between acceptance and a fading hope.

Far away in Dhunghe Bazar, Prem Lamichhane and his wife were desperately shovelling mud, slush and stones from their four-storied hardware shop, looking for any undamaged goods. Once a booming business worth Rs 4 crore, it was now referred to in the past tense. “Everything gone,” he says.

Outside a hospital in Kathmandu, Surendra Yadav cried inconsolably while pointing to the photo of his missing brother. Posted at a police station in Rasuwa, he was now one among hundreds of photos pinned on the “missing” board.

Many such heartbreaking stories are tumbling out of Nepal, where a series of cascading events led to the furious flow of water, ice, rock and debris flattening villages, swallowing concrete buildings, bridges and trees, sweeping away people and automobiles and burying animals.

With its 40 bridges and 40 km of road washed away, drinking water systems damaged, telecommunication lines broken down and 14 hydropower plants knocked out, the disaster has set Nepal back by at least a decade. The emotional cost is profound. Its hospitals and mortuaries are overwhelmed and shelter homes are packed beyond capacity. While many people have been reduced to body parts or DNA numbers, survivors are telling stories of desperate scrambles to safety and hopeless efforts to find loved ones in towns swallowed by silt. Everyone has lost something. Or someone. People are being buried en masse. Those who haven’t been able to find their loved ones are burning symbolic effigies on funeral pyres.

Official statistics put the number of dead and missing at 1,380 and 5,000, respectively (as on September 8). However, Nepal will be updating this data for a long, long time. Those who lost their lives include locals, foreigners and busloads of Hindu pilgrims en route to Kailash Mansarovar. Around 1,000 are missing at damaged hydropower projects.

A $45-billion economy still recovering from the 2015 earthquake, pandemic slump and the recent political instability, Nepal has suffered losses worth thousands of crores. The floods will squeeze a country that’s heavily dependent on tourism while forcing a costly period of rebuilding—the amount needed is nearly a tenth of its economy, as per Nepal’s finance minister Swarnim Wagle. The tragedy is a huge challenge for the new regime, headed by 36-year-old Balendra Shah.

As Nepal limps back to normalcy, it is asking questions. Though the trigger was natural, what led to devastation of this magnitude? Who caused this manmade natural disaster?

Fingers are automatically pointing to China. Nepal’s powerful neighbour has poured billions of dollars into the country since the 2015 earthquake in the name of rebuilding and development. Although many of its infrastructure projects run through sensitive regions, that has not stopped China. Its insatiable appetite for infrastructure across the Himalayas is emerging as an ecological risk not just for Nepal but for the entire South Asian region.

The calamity in Nepal offers a stark warning of the risks of China’s large, opaque projects, delayed information and environmental disruption. The country is putting millions of lives and billions of dollars of economic activity in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal at stake.

There is a “water bomb” ticking in India’s backyard—China’s Medog hydropower project on the Brahmaputra River, situated in the seismically active Himalayan zone, is projected to become the world’s largest hydroelectric dam. Any misfortune at the site will submerge India’s Northeast and Bangladesh. Yet, China won’t stop constructing it.

China is a $19.5 trillion economy. If it’s on a development spree in the sensitive Himalayan region, it should also take accountability. It’s Nepal today. Will it be Bhutan and Bangladesh tomorrow? Or India?

Data Blockade

Three days after the calamity, in towns, villages and marketplaces in Nuwakot, people asked if it was preventable. Was the warning delayed? Was the catastrophe solely the result of an extreme natural event, or did failures in preparedness, monitoring and cross-border communication magnify its impact?

The trigger for these discussions was the problematic stance taken by China just the day after the tragedy. It was quick to dismiss Nepal’s claim that the collapse of a “geologically disastrous dam” on the Chinese side triggered the massive devastation in Nepal and said that a glacier collapse on the Nepali side triggered a huge mudslide.

China’s attitude fanned rumours. “Locals believe that Chinese authorities knew about the danger eight hours in advance,” says Ashok Sah, a wholesale trader. Experts, however, weigh in. “It was Beijing’s responsibility to inform Kathmandu about any natural disaster occurring in Tibet, since Nepal is a downstream country,” says journalist and strategic affairs commentator Parshuram Kaphle, accusing China of deflecting questions about the flood’s origin.

Allegations against China have not emerged out of thin air.

Just three months before the tragedy, Nepal had sought deeper cooperation from China. Officials and scientists from both sides met in Kathmandu on May 27 to discuss glacier inventories, hazard mapping and joint risk reduction. “We wanted data about early movements of glaciers,” says Sauhardra Joshi, a hydrologist at Nepal’s Flood Forecasting Division.

While China claims it was prompt in sharing information and has maintained close communication with weather agencies in Nepal, the fact remains that Nepal received no warning before or after the tragedy. The low-lying areas were caught unaware.

The first practical warnings came from people at Rasuwagadhi and not China, says Rijan Bhakta Kayastha, glaciologist and former professor at Kathmandu University. “It was after these warnings that Nepal checked river levels and discovered that monitoring equipment was overwhelmed. The episode points as much to gaps in local detection, redundant communications and last-mile evacuation as it does to the wider shortage of cross-border data,” he adds.

On September 3, eight days after the calamity, Beijing reiterated that it would continue sharing information on barrier lakes, glacial-lake risks and emergency hydrological monitoring. But after the recent experience, can Beijing be trusted?

The Himalayan system is extremely complex and difficult to understand. Hence, regular analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery could provide early indications of instability, says Vishnu Prasad Pandey, professor (water resources) at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University. “This is not just a concern for one river; the entire Himalayan region and many river systems across South and Southeast Asia are interconnected and face similar risks. That is why stronger cooperation among Himalayan countries is essential,” he adds.

There used to be a data-sharing mechanism between India and China, which does not exist now. Cooperation historically relied on periodic memoranda of understanding (MoUs) for the Brahmaputra, signed in 2002, and the Sutlej, signed in 2005. Under these pacts, China is meant to provide water level, discharge and rainfall data twice daily during the flood season from stations in Tibet.

India’s Ministry of Jal Shakti and Ministry of External Affairs have noted that Beijing has withheld routine water-flow and hydrological data since 2022-23. This mirrors past suspensions during geopolitical flashpoints like the 2017 Doklam stand-off and the 2020 Galwan crisis.

The lack of real-time upstream data from Tibet leaves downstream areas in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam vulnerable to flash floods, artificial lake bursts and sudden flow alteration. India has been in talks with Beijing for a formal long-term water-sharing and data-transparency agreement. As of today, both nations lack a legally binding treaty, leaving routine ecological data vulnerable to shifting geopolitical tensions.

China’s massive cascade hydropower station has heightened New Delhi’s anxieties regarding downstream flow transparency, sediment trapping and construction safety in a seismically active zone.

The Medog Hydropower Station is set to be the “most powerful dam ever”. Built on the Yarlung Tsangpo River (known as the Brahmaputra in India), it promises clean energy, economic uplift and strategic might. But beneath this triumphant narrative lies a troubling silence. The 60,000-megawatt project, expected to triple the power produced by China’s Three Gorges Dam—presently the biggest—will be commercially ready by 2033. The Three Gorges dam displaced over 1.3 million people, flooded historical and cultural sites and restructured entire ecosystems. The Brahmaputra river belt sustains the livelihood of an estimated 130 million people in India and Bangladesh. Any breach in the Medog dam is likely to impact millions in the region.

Like India, China also had a data-sharing arrangement with Nepal, particularly in connection with floods, landslides, glacial lakes and other Himalayan hazards. Nepal kept seeking a more formal and frequent system for receiving information, but it remained on paper. The recent disaster stresses the need for effective data-sharing, says Kayastha, the glaciologist.

While Beijing withheld data, the Nepal tragedy reveals that it is also fudging numbers and information.

Is there a Cover up?

How many people died in China, or Tibet—a previously self-governing region that China took over by force in 1950 and has administered ever since? We will probably never know. According to Chinese state media, the official death toll on the Tibetan side is 43, with 519 reported missing. However, Chinese authorities have imposed “administrative penalties”—which can range from warnings and fines to short detentions—on people claiming online that the casualty numbers are a lot higher than reported. The coverage of Chinese state media outlets has largely focused on the government’s rescue and relief response.

Concerns over information controls have extended beyond disputed casualty figures. In order to shape the public narrative and hide inconvenient truths, Beijing has also resorted to a digital crackdown. As survivors tried to upload raw footage of the deluge, China’s state-backed information control apparatus swung into action, executing a sophisticated operation—the erasure of the catastrophe’s visual evidence.

Reports indicated that eyewitness videos showing the destruction at Gyirong Port disappeared from Chinese social- media platforms shortly after being uploaded. The footage of the collapsing border gate was also blocked from being shared on WeChat. Reports have also emerged of flood videos disappearing from Chinese social-media platforms, raising further concerns about censorship and transparency.

Amit Tamang, a local businessman, says several of his social media posts questioning China were removed without his knowledge. In Kathmandu, journalist Kaphle publicly criticised Beijing on his social-media handle X. His posts, which accused China of failing to provide crucial information, subsequently disappeared. “The global community knows that these construction activities are detrimental to the environment and can make the Himalayan region more fragile. China is now trying to divert the criticism as the entire world has started questioning it,” Kaphle says.

Tibetan public-security authorities have confirmed that at least 10 people were penalised for posts related to the disaster. The state-run Tibet Daily newspaper reported that two individuals were investigated on charges of spreading online “rumours” after they shared claims that more than 1,000 people had been swept away near the border.

Rights groups and Tibetan campaigners have also accused Beijing of restricting independent reporting and limiting access to affected areas, making it difficult to establish the full scale of the disaster. The controversy has further intensified because journalists face severe restrictions in Tibet. Foreign reporters generally cannot travel there independently, while residents may face punishment for sharing information with journalists or posting material authorities consider false.

While China has already sent tunnel experts to Nepal to examine the cause of the flood, the area nearest to the flood in Tibet, out of bounds for observers, remains a black hole. The human toll of the tragedy continues to mount. However, geopolitical ramifications are also looming and may decide a great deal about what the future of the Himalayan region will look like.

China’s Claim on the Third Pole

Beijing has spent the past decade describing the Tibetan Plateau as Asia’s water tower and the Earth’s Third Pole, framings that assert Chinese stewardship over a shared resource. The August 26 flood is a hard test of that claim on both sides of the border.

The Third Pole, comprising of the Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding mountains, represents one of the largest masses of ice, snow and permafrost on earth. Climate change is turning the Tibetan Plateau into a source of cascading danger for everyone downstream, from Nepal to India and Bangladesh.

And yet, China is expanding rapidly in Tibet. The Qinghai-Tibet railway reached Lhasa in 2006 and was extended to Shigatse in 2014, while plans envisage further links towards Gyirong and other border points.

Highways, bridges, long tunnels, airports, logistics parks, dry ports, hydropower plants and high-voltage transmission systems have reduced isolation and improved Beijing’s ability to move goods, tourists, officials and military resources across the plateau. The planned Shigatse-Gyirong-Kathmandu railway gives the ruined crossing wider significance, with much of the difficult Nepali section expected to run through tunnels or over bridges.

The flood has already prompted questions about its vulnerability. For India, the line also has strategic relevance because infrastructure presented as commercial connectivity can strengthen the logistics and mobility available to the Chinese state near the Himalayan frontier.

The regional government said Tibet had 1.21 lakh km of roads by the end of 2022. Beijing presents this as poverty reduction and national integration, pointing to improved access to markets, hospitals, schools and emergency services.

Kaphle points to China’s extensive infrastructure development in Tibet and argues that such projects should be accompanied by sophisticated glacial and disaster-monitoring systems.

However, the glacial and hydrological data from the Tibetan Plateau, the information often needed to anticipate flooding, is also treated as strategically sensitive by China and is closely held.

“What happens on the Tibetan Plateau is not simply China’s domestic matter. It affects the water security of millions across South and Southeast Asia,” says Tenzin Dolma, research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute, Central Tibetan Administration, Dharamshala. “As Tibet’s glaciers retreat and its landscape is increasingly engineered, the risk of sudden cross-border water disasters cannot be ignored.” (See page 32)

Buying Silence

The mountains had already said what they had to. Across the valleys, the evidence of human tragedy was difficult to miss. Roads had disappeared into ravines, houses had been swallowed by mud, bridges twisted out of shape and rivers carried downstream the debris of villages. Even as wailing mothers mourned their lost children and fathers cried out for the heavens to fall, there was a peculiar silence among Nepal’s intelligentsia and academia.

As your correspondent travelled through some of the worst-affected valleys in Nuwakot and Rasuwa, attempts to speak to people who might reasonably have been expected to have an opinion—engineers, academics and government officials—yielded remarkably guarded responses. Most spoke readily enough about the rain, the landslides, poor planning and the peculiar vulnerabilities of building in the mountains.

But the conversation changed when China entered the picture.

The reason for the deafening silence among sections of Nepal’s intellectual and academic establishment may not be difficult to find. Over the years, China has poured money into Nepal’s institutions, infrastructure and development projects, using its deep financial resources to cultivate influence and soft power. The question is whether that largesse has also helped narrow the space for independent scrutiny, particularly when the questions turn uncomfortable for Beijing.

In the Himalayan country, where China’s physical footprint has grown with remarkable speed, the most revealing story may therefore not be what people are saying about the disaster, but what they appear reluctant to say.

China’s soft power card, especially its systematic invasion of education and intelligentsia, has worked.

More than a decade ago, a number of private institutions offering Chinese lessons sprang up, and locals were encouraged to learn the language. It even pushed for the setting up of the Confucius Centre at Kathmandu University to spread Chinese language and culture.

China entered Nepal aggressively around 2015, with investments and a promise to rebuild the nation. But before that, it needed to win over its people. And it needed to target them young—school and college students.

As per the Chinese embassy in Nepal, each year, China awards more than 200 scholarships to Nepali students and researchers under the Youth of Excellence Scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and other programmes. Thousands of Nepali students currently study at Chinese universities. They are enrolled in medical, engineering and technology courses, but the programme’s purpose goes beyond education. By training young Nepalis, China exposes future professionals to its language, culture, institutions and governance.

The goal is long-term influence and not immediate diplomacy. Scholarship recipients return to Nepal’s hospitals, universities, bureaucracy, businesses and policymaking circles, forming alumni networks that strengthen Beijing’s ties with the country’s intelligentsia.

Beijing calls this cultural diplomacy and educational cooperation. In practice, though, Chinese exchange programmes promote state narratives, discourage discussion of sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan and human rights and may limit academic freedom. Such concerns have led to the closure or restructuring of several China-backed education initiatives in Europe and North America. In Nepal, however, these programmes keep expanding, making higher education an increasingly important arena of Chinese influence over the country’s future opinion-makers and professionals.

The dragon nation is using this strategy not just in Nepal but in other South Asian countries inlcuding, Pakistan, Bangladesh as well as Sri Lanka.

China has invested or committed tens of billions of dollars in South Asia, with total estimates exceeding $65 billion in Pakistan alone. Trade between China and South Asia surpassed $200 billion in 2025.

In the Himalayas, China’s BRI centres on trans-Himalayan connectivity projects, designed to link China with South Asia, particularly Nepal and Pakistan. Beijing is rapidly building a networked infrastructure system across Tibet and towards Nepal that combines highways, tunnels, bridges, railways, border ports, logistics hubs, hydropower stations and high-voltage transmission lines into an integrated corridor. The rapid expansion of infrastructure in the fragile Himalayan environment has compounded existing climate-related risks.

Roads, railways and power corridors can fragment fragile Himalayan habitats, while tunnels, blasting and construction can disturb slopes, groundwater and permafrost; large dams can alter river flows, sediment transport and aquatic ecosystems. These risks are particularly serious in a landscape increasingly affected by glacier retreat, unstable slopes and extreme weather.

International think tanks, environmentalists and policymakers have been warning China against expanding in the Himalayan mountain system. They warned that Beijing’s aggressive construction of dual-use military and energy assets is creating irreversible ecological, geological and geopolitical risks for South Asian neighbours, particularly India, Nepal and Bhutan.

China will, however, still go ahead and complete its mega dam project on the Brahmaputra. In 2025, a total investment of Rs 14 lakh crore was announced for the construction of five power stations. Since then, there has been little public information about the project.

A recent paper published in the state-linked, Mandarin-language journal Sedimentary Geology and Tethyan Geology identifies serious geological hazards at the construction site. The geologists conclude that the terrain has a “loose structure and weak cohesion” and warn that fault movement or an earthquake could easily trigger large-scale instability, threatening both the reservoir and surrounding infrastructure.

Indian policymakers have their task cut out. Countries presently involved in a ‘dam race’ across the Himalayas should weigh in too.

Dam War

The Himalayan range has long been a natural frontier. Now it is becoming a playground for hydropower. One country outpaces all—China.

The country sits upstream of many of the rivers that sustain India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much of Southeast Asia. The Tibetan Plateau is the source of the Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, Mekong, Salween, Yangtze and Yellow rivers. A 2020 report published by an Australia-based think tank noted that China’s control over rivers in the Tibetan Plateau effectively gives it a chokehold on India’s economy. Of the five countries along the Himalayan arc, only Nepal and Pakistan have opened their hydropower sectors to Chinese state capital and contractors. India prohibits Chinese investment, technology and engineering firms in its hydropower sector, a restriction rooted in the unresolved border dispute and hardened after the 2020 clashes in Ladakh. Bhutan has no formal diplomatic ties with Beijing.

Official data from China says the country has built around one lakh dams so far and it accounts for roughly 50 per cent of the world’s large dams. Before 1949, it had only 22 dams. Nepal earns $200 million each year by exporting hydroelectricity to India and Bangladesh. India also has substantial hydropower infrastructure of its own across Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim.

In short, the dam war in the Himalayan region is intensifying. This has put the entire region at risk. The associated road building, slope cutting and tunnelling are impacting the sediment load and landslide incidence in the Himalayas, says Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher on the Brahmaputra River basin.

Emphasising that a dam should not be built on the lower reaches of the Brahmaputra in a seismically active region in Tibet, that too so close to the Indian border, Uttam Kumar Sinha, an Indian strategic-affairs scholar and one of India’s prominent commentators on transboundary rivers and water security, says: “China will go ahead and build the dam as it is in their territory. We have to accept the fact. They will not stop because it concerns us.”

For India and Bangladesh, any major alteration of the Brahmaputra’s flow, sediment or flood dynamics could have profound consequences for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions, says Jagannath Panda, the head of the Stockholm Centre for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs, a research institute that focuses on the politics and society of South Asia.

Last year, when the construction of the Medog dam began, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu expressed concern that China could use it as a “water bomb” and if water is released, the entire Siang belt would be destroyed.

Noting that India’s has propsed a hydropower dam on the Siang River, which would act as a buffer against sudden water releases from China’s dam and prevent flooding in their areas, Kumar says: “It will have three benefits—energy security, flood management and strategic resilience.”

At a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar underlined New Delhi’s concerns over the mega dam and called for greater transparency and regular sharing of hydrological information from China.

An expert-level mechanism meeting between India and China is scheduled to be held this month. Former diplomat Ashok Kantha says India should press for full technical details of Medog—cascade design, tunnel specifications, seismic modelling—and for its environmental impact studies to be shared. “A project of this size, this close to the border, this seismically active, cannot proceed in secrecy. The meeting should also press for data sharing,” he says. (See page 18) People living across the Himalayas and along its foothills deserve accountability, transparency and information on ecology and rivers, says Rahman. But are countries obliged to take responsibility?

Who Takes the Blame?

What happens under international law when a disaster crosses a border? A state does not become automatically responsible just because something goes wrong within its national jurisdiction. The emphasis must be on whether the state concerned took all reasonable measures, given the circumstances and available scientific evidence to mitigate or prevent such a risk.

Navigating these issues diplomatically is tricky. In the initial days, the Nepali narrative suggested the floods may have been caused because of Chinese infrastructure building. After the Chinese embassy clarified on September 5 that the task of data sharing is complicated because risks are dispersed across the Himalayas, Nepal changed the narrative and said the two countries have been cooperating closely since the disaster.

Similarly, Nepal flip-flopped on the issue of repatriation.

While Nepal’s foreign minister Shishir Khanal initially argued that the country should not be expected to shoulder the financial burden of disasters caused by a climate crisis to which it has contributed comparatively little and asked China, US and India—the “major greenhouse-gas emitters”—to take legal and moral liability, he later clarified that Nepal wasn’t seeking compensation but only appealing to the global community to look at this disaster from the perspective of climate change and the impact it’s having in Nepal.

During PM Shah’s trip to New York later this month for the UN General Assembly, he is likely to push for climate justice, reconstruction assistance and stronger international protection for the Himalayan region. Nepal’s concerns are valid. It contributes less than 0.1 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions and 0.05 per cent of global carbon-dioxide emissions. These concerns open a window to a larger discussion on geopolitics and climate change.

Climate Crisis

How prepared was Nepal? How prepared will it be in the future? Nepal has learnt its lesson. It is planning to rebuild an early-warning system for landslides on part of its border with China, installing seismic sensors, cameras and a satellite link. What about Bangladesh and Bhutan? On paper, India operates a multi-agency early warning system coordinated across national scientific bodies to detect and mitigate extreme weather and natural disasters. Yet, the Dharali flash floods happened in 2025 and the glacial lake outburst floods in Sikkim in 2023 killed 100.

Hence, calling the Nepal tragedy simply a “natural disaster” misses the larger story. Recent flooding demonstrated how a single extreme event can simultaneously damage connectivity, economic activity and disaster-response capacity. Infrastructure is critical to all countries but designing things around yesterday’s climate and geological assumptions can become tomorrow’s liability.

Climate justice is a legitimate part of the recovery debate, but it must be paired with accountability and disaster preparedness. Floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters will occur again and again. The question is whether states in the region can improve at cooperating and prioritising people.

The tragedy, therefore, represents a choice. The Himalayas can become a theatre of strategic competition or a laboratory for climate-resilient regional cooperation.

The world is mourning Nepal today, but tomorrow it will move on. People of Nepal will soon begin the arduous task of rebuilding. Brick by brick. People will learn to live without their loved ones. They will accept that those missing may not come back. Ever. Prakash Bhujal will finally stop looking at his mobile screen and accept the fact that his brother, Milan, a truck driver on the Kathmandu-Rasuwagadhi route, will never call again. All he will remember is the last time he heard Milan’s voice, just a few hours before the ice-rock avalanche erased his existence.

Anish Kumar is strategic affairs editor, Outlook