Every year, Nepal welcomes the monsoon with two predictable events: farmers celebrating Asar 15 in hopes of a prosperous harvest, and security forces addressing media outlets to announce preparedness efforts. Yet harvests crumble, and preventable deaths mount year after year. One ritual celebrates life; the other mourns death, exposing Nepal’s perennial vulnerability. As dark monsoon clouds gather over the Himalayas and rivers swell, hillsides loosen and communities fear displacement. The tragedy is not the inevitability of recurrent disasters but Nepal’s prolonged romanticism with post-disaster rescue effort policies.
Disaster management is year-long preparedness and should never be periodic, beginning only after rivers swell and trigger landslides on hillsides or terai inundation. It should begin months earlier with hazard mapping, intelligence-driven planning, strategic resource positioning, and coordinated preparedness with unified command at the central level and span of control at provincial and local levels.
Unfortunately, Nepal’s disaster response remains overwhelmingly reactive rather than preventive, making it cost-ineffective.
The devastating floods and landslides of September 2024 illustrated this reality. More than 240 people lost their lives, thousands were displaced, and economic losses exceeded NPR 46.6 billion. Roads, bridges, schools, hydropower facilities, telecommunications and public infrastructure suffered widespread destruction, demonstrating how a few days of extreme rainfall can paralyze the nation’s economy and isolate entire communities, crippling land movements.
Lately, climate change is overwhelmingly transforming Nepal’s security landscape. Floods and landslides are no longer isolated humanitarian emergencies or confined to local dynamics; they are increasingly threatening national sovereignty with shifting borders in the south, east, and west of Nepal. The “Susta” border complexity reflects it all.
Nepal’s Preparedness
Nepal possesses capable institutions. Nepal Army, Armed Police Force, Nepal Police, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), local governments, and volunteer organizations have repeatedly demonstrated courage and professionalism under extraordinarily difficult conditions. During major disasters, security personnel often risk their own lives to rescue stranded families, recover victims, and restore critical infrastructure. However, courage alone cannot compensate for inadequate preparation. It requires policy interventions.
Nepal’s principal weakness is not a lack of skills or shortage of resources but the monopolistic acquisition of resources with centralized deployment policies. Helicopters, rescue boats, engineering units, communications equipment, and medical teams across the service providers lack a central repository and inventories stationed far from the districts most likely to be affected- tightly controlled by possessive authorities.
During flash floods, the first six to twelve hours often determine whether victims survive. By the time specialized resources arrive from Kathmandu or provincial headquarters and resources are mobilized, roads have collapsed, bridges have washed away, and communities have become inaccessible. These preventable administrative delays transform humanitarian assistance and disaster response into death body recovery efforts. The rescue operation, therefore, must be measured in saving lives and not in response time, extracting dead bodies.
Modern emergency management with AI tools can attain such objectives at low cost and sustain efforts. Based on comprehensive risk analysis, mapping, and predictive analysis, these tools facilitate preparing hazard maps, forecasting rainfall, monitoring river levels, acquiring satellite imagery, and obtaining historical disaster data, identifying districts facing elevated risks weeks before peak monsoon conditions. These data should be accessible, facilitating operational deployments to pre-position resources rather than waiting until disasters strike and isolate affected communities.
Nepal has invested considerably in weather forecasting and flood early-warning systems. Yet an early warning system saves lives only if authorities possess access and capacity to act upon it. Information without rapid intervention merely informs communities that disaster is imminent.
Communities located along floodplains, unstable slopes, and river corridors should not be left to make last-minute decisions as water levels rise. Local governments, supported by security agencies, should establish temporary evacuation centers before the monsoon begins, identify transportation routes, maintain registries of vulnerable populations including elderly citizens, persons with disabilities, pregnant women and children and conduct regular evacuation exercises.
Temporary relocation is often politically unpopular because it disrupts livelihoods. Nevertheless, temporary displacement before disaster is vastly preferable to permanent displacement after tragedy. Nepal’s response system must also recognize that rescue operations become exponentially more difficult once transportation networks fail. When highways collapse, bridges wash away, or landslides block mountain roads, valuable hours are lost reaching affected populations. Those hours often determine survival. Consequently, forward deployment of rescue teams dramatically reduces response times while improving survival rates.
Investment in specialized capabilities and synchronization
Swift rescue remains one of the most technically demanding emergency disciplines with augmented air rescue capabilities. Flash floods carry immense hydraulic force capable of sweeping away vehicles, buildings, and trained responders themselves. Rescue personnel therefore require continuous training, specialized protective equipment, rescue boats, underwater search capabilities, drones, thermal imaging systems, and interoperable communications.
Nepal should expand the use of unmanned aerial systems for hazard mapping, rapid damage assessment, victim location, and rescue efforts. Drones can quickly identify isolated settlements, damaged bridges, blocked roads, and stranded families long before ground teams arrive. Technology cannot replace rescuers but it dramatically enhances their effectiveness.
Although Nepal has established disaster management mechanisms at federal, provincial, and local levels, overlapping responsibilities sometimes delay operational decision-making, increase logistical redundancies, and hinder force multiplier effects. During rapidly evolving disasters, command structures must remain simple, unified, and clearly understood. During disaster response, security forces must operate in a “span of control” modality and act in a “mosaic” deployment principle. Internationally, Incident Command System (ICS) principles emphasize unified command, common communication protocols, standardized resource management, and clearly defined operational objectives. Nepal has adopted many of these principles, but implementation must be localized.
Localization for disaster efforts needs public participation for response and resilience
Communities themselves constitute the true first responders. Neighbors rescue neighbors long before professional responders arrive. Therefore, disaster education should become part of school curricula, community organizations, and municipal preparedness programs. Basic training in first aid, emergency communications, flood evacuation, and family preparedness can substantially reduce casualties.
Success in disaster management should not be measured solely by the number of heroic rescues after a catastrophe. Rather, success should be measured by the number of rescues that never become necessary because vulnerable populations were evacuated early, critical infrastructure remained operational, and communities were adequately prepared. Prevention rarely receives headlines. Preparedness seldom attracts political recognition. Yet these invisible successes save far more lives than dramatic rescue operations ever can.
Japan pre-positions emergency assets before typhoon season. Bangladesh has reduced cyclone fatalities dramatically through community evacuation systems and cyclone shelters. India pre-positions National Disaster Rescue Force preemptively. Nepal need not reinvent disaster management; it must re-invent and institutionalize what successful countries already practice.
Treat preparedness as a budget priority, not a charity drive
Preparedness must become a permanent line item within Nepal’s national security budget rather than an emergency expenditure approved only after disaster strikes. Annual monsoon disasters are neither unpredictable nor extraordinary. They are recurring national security events that deserve recurring budgetary commitments.
Nepal must shun considering preparedness as a humanitarian expense. It must be preventive national security spending. Every rupee invested before a disaster saves many more in reconstruction, economic disruption, and human suffering afterward. “Broken Window Fallacy” is a traditional approach.
Nepal routinely mobilizes tens of thousands of security personnel during elections and appropriately provides additional stipends to security personnel because safeguarding democracy is considered a constitutional obligation via budgetary allocation. But state responsibility to protect citizens from predictable natural disasters deserves less institutional commitment. Search-and-rescue operations should receive budgetary funding on par with election operational priority.
Nepal’s security institutions have repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary professionalism under some of the most adverse conditions imaginable, risking their lives to save others. Their dedication deserves more than public praise, medals, or media attention. Retaining qualified rescuers requires sustained investment in planning, equipment, training, personnel welfare, and a family safety net.
Disaster response cannot continue to rely on ad hoc donation campaigns or emergency fundraising whenever a major calamity strikes. While such initiatives reflect generosity and solidarity, they increasingly risk masking the state’s fundamental responsibility to adequately finance disaster preparedness. A nation that confronts annual monsoon floods and landslides should not depend on post-disaster appeals to sustain its rescue capabilities. Instead, disaster readiness must be supported through predictable annual budget allocations that enable security agencies to pre-position critical resources, maintain modern equipment, and provide hazard allowances, insurance, and welfare support for the personnel who routinely risk their lives in search-and-rescue operations. Preparedness must not be a charity, it is a core national security investment that must be funded before disaster strikes, not after tragedy unfolds.
Equally important is the welfare and motivation of the rescuers themselves. Search-and-rescue personnel routinely operate in floodwaters, unstable terrain, and hazardous weather, often for prolonged periods with significant personal risk. Policies that reduce their financial security or require them to shoulder the burden of disaster response without adequate compensation can undermine morale and retention. Instead, Nepal should introduce dedicated hazard allowances, comprehensive insurance coverage, mental health support and long-term recognition programs. Nepal has long provided additional stipends and logistical support for security personnel deployed during elections because safeguarding democracy is recognized as a national priority. The same principle should apply to disaster response, where the lives of security personnel are more at stake than routine election security. If the state can allocate additional resources to secure the ballot box, it should be equally willing to support those who risk their lives to rescue citizens trapped by floods and landslides.
Resilient disaster management depends not only on modern equipment and predictive analytics but also on a motivated, well-trained, and adequately supported workforce. The courage of Nepal’s rescuers has never been in question. The question is whether the nation will provide them with the institutional support, financial incentives, operational resources, and due recognition.
Every monsoon should begin not with regulatory emergency meetings after disaster strikes, but with utmost confidence that rescue teams, equipment, evacuation plans, and essential supplies are already positioned where science predicts they will be needed most.
Being a pioneer commandant of APF Disaster Management Training Center and a rescuer in Nepal’s mega earthquake in 2015, I would recommend that Nepal establish a permanent intra-agency regional monsoon response team coming under a singular operational command, equipped with air capabilities, high-clearance vehicles, rescue boats, engineering detachments, field hospitals, drone surveillance units and interoperable communications for the monsoon period. These task forces should be synchronized and activated before the onset of the monsoon and deployed according to seasonal threat assessments rather than waiting for disasters to occur, where critical time is lost making administrative and operational deployment efforts. A standing force can truly alleviate risks of loss of lives with an immediate response mechanism.
Nepal has spent decades proving that its rescuers are brave. It is now time to prove that its institutions are equally prepared. The measure of Nepal’s disaster management system is not authorities presenting how many helicopters fly after villages disappear beneath floodwaters but how many lives were pulled from the brink of sure death.
Durga Kunwar is a former senior law enforcement official from Nepal with more than twenty years of experience in security, governance and public policy. He writes on democracy, security-sector reform, international relations and South Asian politics. His work focuses on governance, political transformation, emerging security challenges and the intersection of technology and society. Opinions and views are personal.
