Before Development, Nepal Must Learn to Manage Crisis

Author: Prakash Bhattarai

On the morning of 26 August, a glacier collapsed above Langtang and sent a wall of ice, rock and water down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. By the end of September, more than 1,400 Nepalis were confirmed dead and more than 5,000 were still missing. The government’s own assessment puts the cost of rebuilding at about Rs 723 billion.

The flood was the worst of this year’s crises, but it was not the only one. Within months of the new government taking office, people in Kathmandu watched the state demolish settlements, communities in the Terai faced religious tension, and families queued for cooking gas. Each of these pulled the government’s attention, money, and energy away from everything else.

None of this is new. Since 1990 Nepal has moved from one crisis to the next, and every government has spent a large part of its life putting out fires. This leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion. In the coming years Nepal cannot realistically plan for a rapid and big push kind of modern development. Its first job is to become good at preventing and managing crises. Done well, that work will not delay development. It may be the only road that leads to it.

Three and a half decades of putting out fires

The list since 1990 is long. A ten year armed conflict took around 17,000 lives and was followed by an even longer transition that ended only with the constitution of 2015. That same year two earthquakes killed nearly 9,000 people and left a recovery bill worth about a third of the economy. Within months, an undeclared blockade along the Indian border cut off fuel and medicine for more than four months.

COVID 19 then disrupted jobs, schools and hospitals for close to three years. The Gen Z protests of September 2025 cost more than 70 lives and left Parliament, courts and government offices in ashes. These are the crises everyone remembers.

Others rarely make the front page but cost just as much over time. About four Nepali workers die abroad every day, 1,583 in fiscal year 2024/25 by the Foreign Employment Board’s count. Nepal Police recorded 2,549 road deaths in 2024/25, around seven a day. Floods and landslides return every monsoon, and dengue now reaches hill districts that rarely saw it before.

Taken together, these tell a plain story. Our crises have not become fewer or simpler. They are piling on top of each other and growing more tangled.

Why the crises keep piling up

Not every crisis has the same roots, and lumping them together hides what can be done about them. Some come from nature. Nepal sits on an active fault line, its young mountains are unstable, and a warming climate is making glaciers, rivers and monsoon rains harder to predict.

Some come from outside our borders. A blockade, a pandemic or a sudden drop in Gulf jobs can hit Nepal hard whatever our own leaders do.

The third kind is made at home, and it is the one that should worry us most. Roads are cut into fragile slopes without drainage, and the slopes come down. Hydropower camps, hotels, and houses rise on riverbanks we know will flood, which is why hundreds of workers at hydropower sites were among the missing in August. Even a glacier collapse becomes a national disaster largely because of where and how we build, who is left poor and exposed, and how slowly the state reacts.

Behind these home made crises sit three habits of our politics. First, governments old and new have tried to capture the state rather than build systems, filling key offices with loyalists and weakening the very bodies that must respond when things go wrong. Second, there is no shared national vision for dealing with crisis, so each government undoes or ignores what the last one started. Third, the money never matches the need, and every crisis eats into budgets already stretched thin.

The new government’s test

The government led by Prime Minister Balen Shah took office in March carrying more public hope than any in recent memory. That goodwill has bought it patience. It has not freed it from the old pattern.

Take the demolitions. From late April, bulldozers cleared riverbank settlements in Kathmandu, and within weeks more than 3,500 structures had come down. The Prime Minister said people had to be moved off flood prone land, which is a fair goal. But evicting families before a proper place to go was ready turned a prevention measure into a crisis of its own.

In late July, a quarrel over loud music and religious flags in Devangunj, Sunsari grew into clashes across Koshi and Madhesh provinces. At least three people died and several towns lived under curfew for days. The government’s first response was widely seen as slow.

The gas shortage shows how crises now feed on each other. Supplies were already shaky after conflict in West Asia forced rationing of half filled cylinders from February. Then the August flood washed away part of the Prithvi Highway, and the Valley was getting about 25,000 cylinders a day against a need of about 40,000.

The flood itself exposed how thin our preparation is. The first text alerts went out about 38 minutes after the glacier collapsed, too late for many downstream. Helicopters could not reach the village of Tiru in Rasuwa until 15 days after the disaster. Rescue and relief reached many people, but it was uneven, and the public argument over it was bitter.

Why the big leap dream does not fit

The government’s ambitions are large. Its finance ministry speaks of a 100 billion dollar economy within seven years and growth of about 7 per cent next year. Few would object to such goals. The question is whether a country living through this many shocks can plan as though the shocks will not come. The numbers say it cannot. This year’s federal budget sets aside about Rs 431 billion for capital spending, the money meant for roads, power, schools and hospitals. The rebuilding bill for the August flood alone is estimated at Rs 723 billion, far more than that whole allocation. Recovery will mean new loans, delayed projects and promises quietly dropped.

If nothing changes, a growing share of public money and political energy will go into responding to crises rather than regular development. That is not a pessimistic forecast. It is what the last 35 years already show.

This is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument against treating development and crisis as two separate files. Much of our crisis is produced by the way we develop. We measure progress by growth figures, ribbon cuttings, and private profit, and we leave schools, hospitals and housing to the market. That model builds roads that slide, towns on floodplains and a young workforce that has to leave the country to survive.

The alternative is development planned from the start to prevent crisis and to cope when it comes. A road built with proper drainage and slope protection costs more on day one and saves lives for decades. A school built to shelter a village during a flood is worth two schools. Social protection that can be scaled up within days of a disaster keeps a bad month from becoming a lost decade. Money spent this way is not taken from development. It is development that lasts.

Six foundations that prevent crisis

What would crisis preventing development look like in practice? I would start with six foundations for rebuilding Nepali society. They are usually discussed as the way to give the republic deeper roots. They are also the most practical crisis prevention programme this country could adopt.

Equal education for every child and young person, which means ending the commercialization that sorts children by their parents’ income. Young people who feel locked out of opportunity do not stay quiet for ever, as September 2025 showed.
A deep overhaul of public health institutions, so that good basic care does not depend on money or location. Every epidemic, earthquake and flood is first a test of our hospitals, and in August morgues ran out of space.
A decent labour system, with fair wages, respect for work and real social security. Jobs worth staying for at home mean fewer coffins arriving at Tribhuvan airport, and social security gives families something to fall back on when disaster strikes.
An end to caste and gender discrimination, with better access to basic public services for women, Dalits and minorities. Disasters hit the excluded hardest, and old resentments are the easiest to inflame when tension flares.
Development and infrastructure that are safe for people and suited to a changing climate. That means asking, before any road, dam or settlement is approved, what will happen to it in the worst flood or quake we can foresee.
Good governance, with far less corruption in policy, administration, and everyday dealings with the state. Corruption is how a hazard becomes a catastrophe, through weak buildings, ignored safety rules and relief that never reaches the people it was meant for.

Fixing the machinery

Building a solid foundation for a functional crisis management plan take years. In the meantime, the way the state handles crisis needs urgent repair. Here I suggest five changes to be made in a short run.

First, put local governments at the front line and back them properly. Crises happen in wards and villages, where federal and provincial offices are thin or absent. In Nuwakot, a headteacher who acted on warnings got 900 children out of school ten minutes before the water arrived. Yet the same flood washed away two rural municipality offices, and the first emergency grant to 15 affected local units from the central disaster fund was just Rs 67.5 million.

Second, write the division of work into law. Each tier of government should know in advance what it must do, with what money, and who answers when it fails. Today too much depends on phone calls to Singha Durbar.

Third, give crisis management a home with real power. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority sits inside the Home Ministry and was built mainly for natural hazards. It cannot deal with fuel shortages, communal violence or the fallout of mass evictions. Nepal needs one well funded body with the legal authority and adequate resources to plan for every kind of crisis and to make ministries and provinces work together, without turning into yet another office that competes with them.

Fourth, treat crisis as a threat to people’s lives and livelihoods, not mainly as a law and order problem. Curfews and security deployments may calm a street, but they do not rebuild trust between neighbours or find a family a new home. The measure of success should be whether people are safer, fed, housed and earning again.

Fifth, open up the data. People should be able to see which slopes and riverbanks are dangerous, what relief was promised and what was delivered. Open information builds trust, crowds out rumours and makes it harder to steal from the victims. Behind all of this Nepal needs an honest national stock take, covering the safety of existing infrastructure, the state of livelihoods and youth opportunities, the social fault lines that crises expose, and the hazards a warming climate is adding.

How governments should be judged

For too long we have judged governments by the projects they announce and the ribbons they cut. This government and every one after it should face a harder test. How many people died in the last flood, and how many will die in the next? How quickly did the gas come back, how fast did a town calm down after a fight, and did the evicted family find a home?

Nepal will not stop facing crises. Its geography, its climate and its politics make sure of that. What it can choose is whether each crisis sets it back another decade or leaves it a little stronger. A government that prevents a disaster gets no inauguration ceremony and no photograph. That is exactly why preventing crisis must become the standard by which we measure every government from now on.