Nepal flash floods: When disaster becomes content

August 26, 2026, will be remembered by the people of Nepal for a long time, a day when a wall of water, rocks, ice, and cement cascaded down from the mountains and swept away bridges, hydropower stations, settlements and thousands of people living alongside the Trisuli River. The death toll continues to rise even as hope flickers when we read dramatic stories of people found alive after many days.

For Indian journalists assigned to report on a disaster like the one that occurred on the Nepal-Tibet border on August 26, there are specific challenges. 

First, if you’re parachuting into another country, take a little time to understand the history, geography and culture of the area you’re sent to cover. Nepal is an independent, sovereign state with its own language, culture, and history.

What we share with Nepal is geography: the Himalayas that stretch across the subcontinent. At this time of environmental challenges, including global warming, and the push for development that ignores past warnings about the Himalayas, a disaster hitting one part of this mountain chain offers lessons for all others who share its geography.

The August 26 torrent of what seemed like liquid cement that coursed down the mountains of a part of Nepal, destroying everything in its path, left all who watched it stunned. The footage was all over social media within hours, even before the media could respond and send their reporters to the spot.

We watched reels by ordinary Nepalis who managed to find a perch out of reach of that deadly wall of destruction. Yet, even as we struggled to understand what had happened, how and why, the Nepali media, often without sufficient resources, was at work. 

Today, when that story has predictably disappeared from our front pages – and in India the story was principally about Indian tourists and pilgrims who were affected – it is worth pausing to reflect on what the media needs when covering such disasters in other countries, especially our neighbouring countries.

Much of Indian mainstream TV stayed true to form, over-dramatising and emphasising their own presence there rather than the story.

Print did better, although some still could not resist boasting that the reports were by “such and such in Nepal”.  Surely that is the job of a media house, to have feet on the ground and report. 

An exception to the routine reporting we read is this long-form piece in The Indian Express by Tashi Tobgyal and Devansh Mittal, tracing people in a photograph they found while reporting on the Nepal disaster.

Even as Nepal picks up the pieces and continues to search for survivors, it is worth looking at the reporting in Nepali newspapers. I looked at Nepali Times, edited by veteran journalist Kunda Dixit and found articles that were informative and graphic in telling the story.

On August 27, a day after the flood, the headline of the editorial in Nepali Times read: “Not if, but when next?” That sums up the reality many parts of Nepal face, and it would also apply to the Himalayan region in India.

The editorial goes on to state: “This was not a ‘natural’ disaster. Nothing about it was natural – not the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas buildup due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.” A conclusion that could apply to similar events that have occurred in India’s Himalayan region.

An interview with Alton C. Byers, a Himalayan glacier expert, reiterates this comment in the editorial. Calling this “the most horrific flood I have ever seen”, Byers points out that “the critical point, and that I’m starting to hear more and more on this in the Nepal press, is that there are settlements along floodplains. A tremendous surge in unregulated, unplanned urbanisation, with much of the building along the rivers where it really shouldn’t be. If you look at aerial photos from 50 years ago, you’ll see that the villages in the area were up high. Only farms may have been down by the river because that’s where a lot of fertile soil is. So this is unfortunately a consequence of building in the wrong places.” 

Much has been reported about the settlement of Trisuli on the banks of the river that was crushed in the avalanche. This piece in Nepali Times gives a sense of what the place looked and felt like before it was wiped out. The writer quotes a survivor: “We couldn’t find my wife. She and the house are both gone. There’s nothing to say. We are without an address.”

Bringing home the ugly reality of how social media today has replaced reflective or careful reporting in times of tragedy, Milan Shreshtha writes a searing critique in the same paper that is worth reading for journalists and social media consumers. “The most disturbing feature of social media engagement”, he writes, “is the transformation of tragedy into entertainment even more than earlier legacy tabloid press.”

As a result, writes Shreshtha, “A catastrophe is turned into ‘content’. An ice-rock avalanche becomes content. Human suffering becomes content. Comment sections fill with mockery, outrage, conspiracy theories, and political point-scoring – all the while families mourn their losses…Videos of destruction are consumed with the same casual detachment as any other viral post. The algorithm favours emotional reaction, not ethical reflection. The result is a public sphere that is often disconnected from empathy.”

This last paragraph, I think, captures much of what has gone wrong with the way news, any news, is disseminated today. It is reduced to content. It must be eye-catching and entertaining rather than factual. And it is “disconnected from empathy”. In the process, we forget that whether it is a so-called “natural” disaster or man-made, like the five-storey Satya Niketan building that collapsed like a house of cards in India’s capital city last week, there are people at the heart of the story – grieving, searching, in pain.

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