Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal announced on Saturday that the reconstruction bill following the recent devastating floods could amount to billions of dollars. Authorities are currently assessing the extensive damage caused by the floods, which have left communities grappling with significant destruction.
“The reconstruction and rehabilitation would entail perhaps billions of dollars,” he told reporters in Kathmandu. “We will do loss and damage research and then we plan, but I am reaching out to our international community for support”.
Khanal appealed for specialised help to identify and preserve the bodies recovered. “So we’ve been asking to provide fridges until… we can locate the loved ones of these people who passed away in this disaster. Identifying the bodies was another huge challenge.
Rescue teams have retrieved 675 bodies, and more than 2,426 people are still missing in Nepal.
Three days after the disaster, Khanal said “the urgency is on rescue and saving lives as much as we can”, but the scale of the disaster was already stretching the government’s capacity. “We have reached out to our friends who can provide specific requirements, not only in the rescue,” he said. “Hundreds of bodies have been found downstream, and there is a risk of fast decomposition because these bodies have been in water for a long time,” he added. “Our own healthcare capacity is very limited, to put these bodies in a frozen state for a long time,” Khanal said. The government was also considering bringing in “freezer trucks, like those where you can put perishable goods”, he added. “We need forensic capability,” he said. “DNA sampling, DNA testing and reporting — we have very limited forensic capability in Nepal.” (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
