5,285 Missing in Nepal: A Family’s Wait for Answers

Floods have a way of ending twice. First, the water recedes. Then the search ends, and families are left with a number that has no names attached.

That number is 5,285. It is how many people Nepal still counts as missing after the August 26 flood that began at its border with Tibet. Officials have said the flood killed at least 1,455 people, and about 13,795 others were rescued. In early October, Nepal formally ended search and rescue and moved to a rehabilitation phase. The missing were not declared dead. They were declared, in effect, unfound.

One name among thousands

One of those names is Priyanka Choudhary. She is an Indian-born Finnish citizen who was returning from a Hindu pilgrimage in Tibet and was at the border crossing with Nepal when the mudslide hit. Her family lives in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh.

She went to school and studied dentistry in Chhattisgarh, then went to the UK for higher studies, completed a PhD in Finland, married a local man, and settled there as a university teacher. She had been on the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra. The night before the disaster, she spoke to her family for nearly an hour, excitedly describing the pilgrimage. The plan was Kathmandu, then Delhi, then home to Bilaspur for Raksha Bandhan, to tie a rakhi to her younger brother.

She never arrived. Her father, businessman Ramesh Choudhary, said the family was waiting for a miracle.

The silence on the Tibet side

Her brother Tarun soon found that the search ran through two countries and two very different systems. He said there was no information from the Chinese side. Priyanka was one of 261 foreign nationals still missing in Tibet ten days after the disaster, and families complained of an information blackout.

Nepal’s police and officials, by contrast, regularly posted updates on the missing and dead, and the search came with DNA testing. Beijing said its disclosures were transparent and timely. Diplomats who attended its briefing said no details were shared on how DNA identification would proceed.

A number that keeps changing

Even 5,285 is not a settled figure. Nepal Police’s last published bulletin, dated September 30, listed 1,454 recovered and 4,718 missing, while the figure that went with the cabinet’s October 7 decision was 5,285. The missing include hundreds of foreigners. One count puts them at 650 from 38 countries, while another says 607 from 34 countries. On the Tibet side, 43 deaths and 519 missing have been reported.

Closure by paperwork

Calling off the search was practical as well as painful. Nepal’s emergency operations chief said authorities are looking at how to legally declare the missing dead, so families can complete insurance, banking and other formalities. Families are divided. Some want the search to continue, others want closure, and some have held symbolic funerals. The state needs the numbers to close, and a family needs a person to mourn. A death certificate without a body satisfies the first need and not the second.

Why this matters

The 5,285 are a public tragedy and thousands of private ones. In Bilaspur, one family is still holding a plane ticket, a Raksha Bandhan date and a phone call from the night before. The reconstruction bill, which authorities put at nearly $5 billion, will eventually be paid. What the families are asking for is much smaller and harder to supply: a name, a confirmation, an answer.