This is not new writing. K. Sahadevan published it in Countercurrents on 30 June 2020, and we are putting it up again because six years on it reads like a report filed last week.
On 26 August a glacier came away at about 5,200 metres on the Tibet side of the range. Its debris dammed the Lhende, then let go, and the wave went down the Bhote Koshi into Rasuwa. As on 27 August Nepal had recovered 157 bodies and listed 826 missing, another 558 were missing in Gyirong across the border, and 19 bridges, some 40 km of road and the hydropower schemes on the river were gone. The count was still rising.
The essay had already laid out the arithmetic. China, 20 per cent of the world’s people and 7 per cent of its water. India, 17 per cent and 4 per cent. 28,000 of China’s 50,000 rivers gone in twenty years. A third of Himalayan glaciers gone by 2050, above a billion people in eight countries. Both governments answered that with dams, mines and garrisons.
