On August 26, Samar Bezbaruah was getting ready for a daily day. He had left his dwelling in Assam’s Nalbari district seven months earlier to work in Nepal’s 216-MW Higher Trishuli-1 hydropower venture. That morning, he walked into the venture’s tunnel with a gaggle of 20 others to start the day’s work.
At round 9.15 am, from inside the tunnel, the group noticed a colossal mass of water slam into the powerhouse of the venture, which was located within the river valley beneath them, and during which some colleagues had been working.
Bezbaruah and the others rushed out of the tunnel to get to a safer place. Now they noticed the total extent of the destruction – roads beneath had all been engulfed by the crashing water, silt and particles.
“We then climbed a close-by hill,” Bezbaruah informed Scroll. “We waited for 2 days there earlier than we had been rescued.”
Bezbaruah returned to his village on Monday night. Lots of his colleagues couldn’t. “From Assam, we had been a gaggle of 13, and of those solely eight have returned dwelling,” he mentioned. “We don’t even know the place the remaining are. One in every of them was a relative from my village, we now have not been capable of contact him.”
He added, “The powerhouse additionally had individuals from Himachal, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh. So lots of them are lacking.”
In all, round 350 workers had been rescued from the affected hydropower initiatives within the days after the flood, however rescue operations needed to halt as a result of a threat arose of one other flood. Operations have now resumed; at present, greater than 600 staff are nonetheless lacking.
Amongst these rescued from Higher Trishuli-1 are 73 Indians, together with Bezbaruah. In response to the Indian Express, round 150 Indian and Nepali staff on the venture are nonetheless lacking. “A lot of the staff right here had been Indians,” mentioned Bezbaruah.
The venture is the most important of the 13 hydropower projects broken or destroyed by the flood. It’s the second in a collection of initiatives on the river, round 35 km downstream from the Tibet-Nepal border, the place the flood first hit.
It’s funded by means of loans by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, and the Asian Infrastructure Funding Financial institution, or AIIB, which put a mixed $150 million in loans into the dam, making it one of many largest international direct investments in Nepal’s historical past.
At the same time as rescue operations proceed, public experiences of the venture present that venture authorities and the funding banks did not adequately assess the dangers it confronted of climate-related disasters.
A 2018 environmental and social evaluation report of the Asian Infrastructure Funding Financial institution noted that there’s “minimal GLOF risk within the venture space”, referring to glacial lake outburst floods. Of the three recognized glaciers within the area, it famous, “none are thought-about below the excessive threat GLOF class”.
In the meantime, in December 2024, an impartial panel of specialists visited the positioning as part of routine monitoring for the Asian Improvement Financial institution. Of their report they wrote that “no local weather resilience evaluation was undertaken for the Undertaking – this can be a vital hole”. It then advisable that such an evaluation be performed.
Nevertheless, a 12 months later in Might 2025, the panel for the ADB found that the evaluation “has but to be achieved”.
These lapses had been famous by researchers Parineeta Dandekar and Himanshu Thakkar, who’re related to the South Asia Community on Dams, Rivers and Individuals. In one post, they wrote that whereas the worldwide banks’ personal experiences repeatedly highlighted local weather dangers, “they didn’t take any preventive steps, didn’t demand stringent checks and balances, nor had been they ready for a calamity they knew might happen”.
The banks funded the initiatives within the identify of “local weather and catastrophe resilience, one thing that sounds particularly jarring in the present day”, they wrote in one other publish.
Prabindra Shakya, founding father of Kathmandu-based Group Empowerment and Social Justice Community, mentioned that within the Trishuli river valley, “local weather affect evaluation ought to have been a serious consideration, as a result of this isn’t the primary time we now have seen floods right here”. He added, “We had a glacial lake outburst final 12 months too.”
The banks’ failures had been notably severe as a result of their “insurance policies define that they should look into these dangers”, mentioned Sunil Acharya, who relies in Kathmandu, and who’s the Lead of Simply Transition for the worldwide non-profit advocacy group Recourse. “There’s a clear lapse of their very own accountability duties,” Acharya mentioned. “These initiatives are merely being pushed by means of.”
Scroll emailed the venture’s funding banks, and the venture authorities, in search of responses to criticism that they’d not adequately assessed the protection dangers to the venture. This story can be up to date in the event that they reply.
Funding hydropower
Hydropower accounts for nearly all of Nepal’s put in electrical energy technology capability of 4,120 MW. “Nepal’s dream of changing into a developed nation is by exploiting hydropower,” Acharya mentioned. “Over 98% of the nation’s electrical energy comes from hydropower.”
He defined that the entire nation’s fossil gas is imported and that it noticed these initiatives as a path out of dependence on imports. “This dream was then pushed by worldwide finance establishments,” he mentioned.
A number of of those initiatives depend upon worldwide financing – as data collated by the Worldwide Accountability Undertaking exhibits, between 2016 and 2026, the Asian Improvement Financial institution, america’ Improvement Finance Company, and the World Financial institution’s Worldwide Finance Company have permitted loans, grants and “advisory providers” for not less than six initiatives associated to hydropower. Ten extra are within the “proposed” stage.
As Dandekar and Thakkar, noted, a “cumulative affect evaluation” of the Trishuli basin, printed by the Worldwide Finance Company in 2020, analysed potential environmental and social impacts of hydropower throughout the whole the basin, however didn’t talk about the threats of glacial lake outburst floods and flood disasters. Whereas it regarded on the fragmentation of aquatic habitat, lowered water availability and impacts on river-based livelihoods within the basin, which has greater than 36 hydropower initiatives, “It didn’t even try to look upstream and assess Tibetan impacts,” they wrote. “It made no cumulative catastrophe plan for a basin affected by hydropower initiatives.”
Actually, a number of months earlier than December 2024, when the impartial panel urged a local weather evaluation, the basin noticed clear indications of dangers to the venture. Particularly, on September 28, the Nepal authorities issued a warning a couple of threat of excessive rainfall – by midday that day, elements of the venture had collapsed as a consequence of rising river water.
In its Might evaluation, the place it discovered that the evaluation it had recommended had not but been achieved, the panel additionally famous that the September flood confirmed that “mixtures of climatic and geological occasions can have extreme penalties”. It advisable “increasing the scope of such local weather resilience evaluation to catastrophe dangers”.
“The venture mustn’t have gone forward with out a local weather evaluation within the first place,” mentioned Vaishnavi Vardarajan, Asia Pacific Program Coordinator on the Worldwide Accountability Undertaking.
As soon as the venture did go ahead, she famous, the irony was that “the financial institution themselves requested this knowledgeable physique to come back collectively”. Regardless of this, “its suggestions haven’t change into part of the financial institution’s due diligence and haven’t modified the trajectory of the venture.”
She added, “It’s a clear signal that the banks usually are not following their very own techniques of accountability.”
Different lapses
The failure to hold out the advisable evaluation of the Higher Trishuli-1 venture was not the authorities’ solely lapse. The panel had recommended that the venture’s “early warning system” needs to be redesigned “as quickly as potential”. However, by Might 2025, not a lot had modified. “The sluggish implementation of a dependable early flood warning system… stays a serious threat to these venture communities in proximity to the river,” the panel’s report famous.
Bezbaruah informed Scroll that the venture was geared up with a siren that may go off if water out of the blue rose close to the tunnel, or even when there was every other emergency. “However we have no idea what occurred that day, it didn’t go off,” he mentioned. “We had no time to assume or to talk when the waters got here in.
The panel additionally discovered that muck from the venture was being disposed of immediately within the river, a follow that’s identified to worsen the impacts of floods, because the particles causes further injury. Muck appears to be “disposed the place handy to the contractor”, it famous. In lots of situations, the muck had been dumped alongside “gabions”, which refers to retaining partitions – these “had really collapsed throughout the monsoon and supplies had been washed away by the river”, the panel discovered.
The Higher Trishuli-1 venture was not the one one which the December 2024 report raised considerations about. It additionally discovered that an early warning system put in 10 km upstream within the Chilime hydropower venture “proved to be ineffective” for the flood that September. The Chilime venture has been severely impacted by the flood final week and not less than eight workers on it are lacking.
Rising Nepal’s debt burden
Consultants famous that the latest catastrophe shouldn’t be an remoted occasion, and that Nepal has seen quite a few situations prior to now of hydropower initiatives struggling injury from climate-related occasions. Between 2015 and 2020, as an illustration, floods and landslides damaged 34 hydropower initiatives. Just a few years later, in simply the month of June 2023, torrential rain in Jap Nepal brought on floods that broken 30 hydropower initiatives. “Regardless of these challenges, Nepal nonetheless lacks a Basin-specific, climate-responsive framework to information long-term hydropower and water useful resource planning,” researchers Sanju Adhikary and Mahendra Aryal wrote in a June 2026 paper.
Whereas the ensuing risk to security is essentially the most severe concern, specialists have additionally famous that when monetary establishments overlook local weather dangers of hydropower initiatives, the borrowing nation may be left with heavy debt burdens.
Acharya gave the instance of the Melamchi Water Provide Undertaking, funded by the Asian Improvement, OPEC fund for Worldwide Improvement, Nordic Improvement Fund and Japan Financial institution for Worldwide Cooperation. In 2021, the venture’s infrastructure suffered injury due to a flood, simply earlier than it was supposed to start functioning. “ADB had not achieved an evaluation of the local weather dangers. Now, the venture solely works partially, and Nepal is constant to pay the mortgage again,” mentioned Acharya.
In gentle of those crises, Nepal wanted to reevaluate its vitality future, specialists mentioned. “Nepal ought to make investments extra in diversifying its vitality means,” mentioned Acharya. “It ought to spend money on distributed photo voltaic and wind, and in making the facility grid extra local weather resilient.” He added that this accountability additionally fell on monetary establishments, and that they wanted to fund renewable vitality initiatives apart from hydropower.
Vardarajan echoed this argument, including that banks wanted to guage initiatives extra rigorously. “Local weather evaluation has to seem urgently in worldwide banks’ threat score of a venture,” mentioned Vardarajan. “A number of disasters have occurred within the Himalayan area.” If banks didn’t conduct such assessments, “they’re simply bankrolling local weather disasters”, she mentioned.
Shakya urged that smaller and medium-scale hydroprojects might be much less dangerous. “In our work we now have been piloting and supporting by means of monetary and technical help for community-led micro hydroprojects lower than 20KW,” he mentioned. Such decentralised small and medium degree initiatives, he argued, generally is a extra environmentally and socially viable choice “relatively than a cascade of huge scale dams”.
