Staff Reporter:
Nepal’s former Forest and Environment Minister Madhav Prasad Chaulagain has claimed that China didn’t warn them before the devastating floods tore through the country, leaving hundreds dead and thousands missing.
In an interview with NDTV, he said that Nepal did not receive any timely warning from the Chinese side before a wall of ice, rock and mud tore through the Nepal-Tibet border at around 8:40 am on Wednesday.
Chaulagain said the human cost was worsened by a failure of information-sharing between the two neighbours.
A smaller glacier incident in 2025 had already produced an agreed protocol, but that mechanism was not used. “We missed that opportunity,” he said.
He also rejected Beijing’s assertion that the collapse began on Nepali territory. The event, he insisted, originated in Tibet.
“Things are not so clear,” he said, calling for greater transparency.
Chaulagain argued the disaster exposed a deeper planning failure.
Nepal’s early-warning systems and environmental impact assessments for hydropower projects concentrated on glacial lakes. This event involved ice-rock falls and the collapse of a glacier-fed river system that “was never envisioned”, he said.
He described the absence of a working Nepal-China-India warning system as a “call for action”.
Withholding data, he said, is “against humanity”.
Death count rises to 626 in Nepal flash floods
The death count from the flash floods in Nepal surged to 626 on Saturday, as rescue teams continued search and relief operations for the fourth straight day.
While nearly 2,500 people have been evacuated, more than 2,400 people are still missing.
More than 11,000 security personnel, including over 5,000 Nepal Army personnel, have been mobilised for search and rescue operations.
