Nepal's Gen Z PM faces first major crisis as floods kill 900+

Prime Minister Balendra Shah, known to most of Nepal as Balen, had been in office for just over a year when the floods came. A former rapper who rode a wave of Gen Z anti-corruption anger into power in September 2025, he was 36 years old and leading a cabinet with little experience managing national emergencies. Last week, that inexperience collided with catastrophe.

Flash floods tore through the Himalayan nation near the Chinese border, carrying rock, ice, mud and debris that obliterated entire towns and damaged hydropower plants under construction. By Monday, authorities confirmed more than 900 people dead. Nearly 4,800 remained missing. Rescue teams, including specialists from China and India, were searching for hundreds of workers believed trapped in tunnels at hydropower sites, buried under mud and rubble. It was Nepal's worst disaster in a decade—worse than anything the young government had been built to handle.

In hospitals and temporary aid centers across the affected districts, families waited for word. Sushila Giri came looking for her son, Sishir, a Kathmandu University student who had been interning at one of the hydropower projects when the disaster struck. "I came to know that my son, along with others, was at the quarter of the hydro project when the disaster happened," she told reporters. "Please help me find his whereabouts." Indra Adhikari had lost her home and paddy fields. Four of her relatives were missing. She noticed that rescue efforts seemed concentrated in areas accessible by road, where media gathered—particularly along one side of the Trishuli River. Remote settlements upstream and across the water remained largely unreached. "Most of those who have come to Trishuli Bazaar are not rescuers but onlookers," she said.

The government itself admitted it was not ready. Bikram Timilsina, the minister for information and communication, acknowledged the stumbling start after visiting the flood zone. "On the very first day, we got a bit confused as to how to deal with the crisis," he told reporters. "From the second day onward, we have been putting all our efforts into swift search, rescue and relief works." Security agencies drew praise for their helicopter operations, reaching people in places ground teams could not. But the crisis exposed deeper fractures in how the government was organized to respond. Shah's ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party held no seats in local or provincial governments, and the federal administration appeared to be managing the emergency largely alone, without adequately involving those lower levels of government.

Govinda Pokharel, who had overseen Nepal's reconstruction after the 2015 earthquake, saw a critical mistake in the timeline. China and India had offered specialized help for tunnel rescues from the start, he said, but the government took three days to decide whether to accept it—three days lost when workers were still alive in the tunnels. "Our neighboring countries like China and India were willing to lend help for rescue, especially for tunnel rescue from the very outset," Pokharel told reporters. The government had initially insisted its own teams could handle the operation. By Friday, Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal announced the shift: international expertise would be accepted for tunnel rescues, DNA testing, and forensic work.

There were signs of competence alongside the missteps. By Saturday, the government's Disaster Relief Fund had collected more than 5 billion Nepali rupees—roughly $34.7 million—from domestic sources. Pokharel noted this as evidence of public trust. "It shows the public trust in the government that doesn't misuse its funds collected in the name of relief," he said. Security agencies coordinated effectively on search operations. But Prabha Bogati, deputy mayor of Bidur Municipality, described a centralized command structure that left local authorities sidelined. "In previous crises, local communities and volunteers used to be mobilized in search, rescue and relief efforts," she said. Under the current approach, local stakeholders were not brought into the response and were not permitted to recover bodies or perform final rites—a significant constraint in a country where these rituals carry deep cultural weight.

Education Minister Sasmit Pokharel defended the administration's choices, saying all available resources were being mobilized and that a process had been initiated to better organize volunteer efforts. The question now is whether a government that came to power on the promise of reform can learn fast enough to manage the scale of what lies ahead. The floods struck just days before the anniversary of the protests that brought Shah to office. His first year in power had been defined by the mandate for change. His second year would be defined by whether he could deliver when the nation needed him most.