Analysis: How many times will Nepal resettle its disaster-affected?

Weeks after devastating floods hit Nepal on 26 August, a team of government and NGO officials arrived in Khalte, in the Rasuwa district, to conduct a survey. They asked residents of the completely inundated village how many members of their family were missing and how badly their homes and land had been damaged.

What they failed to ask, however, was where people wanted to live next and how they planned to rebuild their lives, say Khalte residents who spoke to Dialogue Earth. They requested anonymity, saying that criticising officials could jeopardise their chances of receiving government relief they are awaiting.

There are no houses left standing in Khalte after the floods. 

“We want answers on what our future is,” says a 37-year-old resident who lost his home and several family members in the flood. He may now have to find work abroad to earn enough to build a new house, he adds.

A 26-year-old woman from the same settlement tells Dialogue Earth she worries about how she will raise her children without a home of their own.

“Sometimes I feel that this village is cursed,” says a 41-year-old resident who has moved twice since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal in 2015. His home was destroyed in the August flood, and he is now staying in a holding centre in Rasuwa, where families are sheltering in tents that he says leak in the rain.

“We leave one place because of a disaster, move somewhere else and then face another disaster. Now we may have to leave again. It feels as though we cannot find a place where we are allowed to live in peace.”

Khalte was itself an informal resettlement village. Of its roughly 300 households, at least 250 were families who moved there from elsewhere in Rasuwa after the 2015 earthquake. The district suffered severe damage in that earthquake as well as the recent floods.

A geo-hazard assessment carried out in 2018 by the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) found that Khalte was “at risk, and therefore could not be recommended for the development of a new integrated settlement”, according to a 2021 research article.

After Khalte was deemed unsafe, government officials and the NRA proposed that an integrated – meaning planned – settlement be established in the village of Tiru instead, in the same district. Months after the geo-hazard assessment, the NRA asked residents how many wanted to move to Tiru. Over 82% of the 193 Khalte households surveyed wished to stay put.

But with Khalte and its surrounding infrastructure completely swept away in the August floods, survivors must now find yet another place to resettle. Some residents told Dialogue Earth they are planning to protest the government for what they consider negligence.

Nepal has now run this resettlement experiment multiple times in the last three decades. Each time, its technical capacity to identify risk has outpaced its institutional capacity to act on it.

Resettlement for the resettled

After the 2015 earthquake, people displaced from several villages in Rasuwa first moved to rented land in Naubishe, a village about three hours’ walk away. When many of the families fell behind on rent, the landowner evicted them, according to the Kathmandu Post.

The NRA was established shortly after the earthquake to coordinate reconstruction. The authority had bought land for a permanent site for those displaced in Rasuwa. Little work has been done to build a permanent settlement since then, reported the outlet. The authority was dissolved in 2021.

In the meantime, families moved to public land in Khalte. The geo-hazard assessment that defined it as at risk was part of a series of such assessments undertaken for hundreds of settlements by Nepali authorities across several years after the earthquake.

Buildings covered with mud in Devighat following the August floods. Research in 2018 found that geo-hazard assessments of the area, conducted by the government after the 2015 earthquake, failed to capture new risks (Image: OPA Images / Alamy)

Additionally, 2018 research covering Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Kathmandu districts found gaps in Nepal’s geo-hazard assessment methodology and a lack of precision. For instance, it did not capture new or changing risk in the area, with the assessment confined to a single date. The research also noted that following the NRA’s assessments in those districts, there were no clear relocation plans, nor any policy attention on livelihood opportunities at new sites.

In fact, just last year, a government report was written after a smaller flood on Trishuli River, which Khalte sat along the banks of, reported Nepali outlet OnlineKhabar. It found that construction along the river was at risk, and identified Khalte as one of the settlements at high risk of flooding, the outlet noted. Earlier this month, local officials told the Kathmandu Post they had been preparing to move Khalte’s residents to a new site when the 26 August floods struck.

A recurring issue

The flood-affected districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading are at constant risk, and comprehensive studies are needed before developing settlements in those areas, Khum Narayan Paudayal, a geology professor at Tribhuvan University, told news outlet Lokaantar. He added that resettlement should not be allowed in flood-affected areas just because there is land left.

But this pattern of impermanent resettlement extends far beyond these districts.

Earlier this year, research into two villages deemed unsafe by geo-hazard assessments undertaken after the earthquake was published in the journal World Development. Landslide debris could fall onto Lampat in Sindhupalchok district, the researchers found. While Bosimpa, in Dolakha district, was “located on a large unstable slope”. Despite these warnings, in 2023 the researchers found residents living in houses just several kilometres away, some built with government subsidies.

They also found that, in the settlements intended to replace both villages, over half of the houses stood empty. The new sites lacked farmland, adequate infrastructure, or the water and electricity residents had been promised. Construction costs routinely exceeded government subsidies, driving many households into debt. In Rasuwa, the 2021 research article found residents expected their new settlement to serve only as a home during the monsoon season, since their economic and social ties remained in their original villages.

They did not move far away from disaster either. Floods along Melamchi River inundated Sindhupalchok district in June 2021, killing at least 25 people and impacting hundreds of families. Half a year later, survivors who did not proactively move were still awaiting a resettlement decision as officials lacked the risk data needed to determine where rebuilding was safe, Dialogue Earth reported. It noted that local authorities requested a comprehensive study of the whole watershed, but never received one.

Resettlements in Nepal are challenging because landslide and flood risks in the country’s mountainous terrain are not rooted in one location, the World Development researchers note. They continue evolving years after the event that first exposed them.

What makes 2026 different

Though some improvements have been made to disaster response since 2015, several aspects have remained slow to develop.

In the aftermath of the August floods, it remains unclear which authority will be overseeing resettlement.

In 2015, Nepal built the entirely new NRA from scratch. It had a fixed-term mandate focused strictly on earthquake recovery, and its own workforce to do it.

This time, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) led the Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, having taken over the NRA’s work when it closed in 2021. No dedicated post-floods reconstruction body has been announced, meaning resettlement could compete with the NDRRMA’s other work.

The government’s needs assessment capabilities have improved since 2015. In September, the NDRRMA’s rapid assessment was published just over two weeks after the flood, largely produced from satellite and drone data. It identified priority recovery requirements, giving NGOs, international partners and the government lead time in designing aid packages. In 2015, the government only released a Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, albeit more in-depth, roughly two months after the earthquake.

But in the aftermath of the August floods, the plight of landless and undocumented households appears similar to a decade prior, when many were not counted and supported in recovery efforts.

In September, two ministries wrote a bill to amend two land laws. This would require the state to arrange alternative settlements for landless people living in high-risk locations including riverbanks, forests, road rights-of-way and other disaster-prone land. Khalte’s residents have fit that description for years, but there was no such legal obligation to help them. The bill remains in draft form.

This year, with the legislative amendment pending, those are the households that appear most likely to be left out again.

After 2015, ownership of homestead land became a prerequisite for households to receive the main housing reconstruction grant given by the NRA. By late 2016, about 13% of eligible households in districts worst hit by the earthquakes were still unable to sign the grant agreement as they lacked ownership papers.

This year, authors of the August floods’ rapid assessment acknowledge that no household survey, key informant interviews or structured community consultations were carried out for it. The assessment also states the housing, land and property concerns of tenants, landless households and people without documentation were not comprehensively examined.

There are a few things a resettlement site in 2026 must get right to be considered safe, permanent and viable in the long term. An independent geological safety assessment must be completed before anyone is moved there, not years later, as in the case of Khalte. Land tenure issues and financial arrangements must be settled before construction begins, so families are not left occupying informal ground indefinitely, like many of Khalte’s residents have been for the past decade. Long-term livelihood opportunities have to be designed into the site from the outset.

The 41-year-old resident’s account is proof of this failure. He has now been moved, or left to move himself, three times. Each time, a formal plan for where he should go next either arrived years too late or not at all.