Nepal cannot go on borrowing money to build things the next flood will take away. At the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Balen Shah said Nepalis should be able to "build their future instead of constantly rebuilding their past." That argument now has to travel to Delhi, where borders, water and trade will come up whenever he visits.

His finance minister got there first. At the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi, Swarnim Wagle said the days of treating Nepali nationalism as anti-India sentiment were over, and he thanked India for its help after the floods. The thanks were fair enough. But saying an era is over is a speech, and it asks nothing of Delhi. The hard conversation is about what caused the floods and how to minimize the next one. That one is for the prime minister.

The floods killed more than 1,400 people, and thousands are still missing. On 26 August a surge of water, ice, rock and debris came down the Bhote Koshi, which crosses the border from Tibet, and ripped through the valleys below. The missing includes hundreds of foreign visitors from more than 35 countries: Indians, Americans, Malaysians, Ukrainians and Australians among them. It did not stop in the mountains. People died as far south as Chitwan and Nawal Parasi, and weeks later parts of Rasuwa were still cut off by wrecked roads and bridges. You cannot protect a power station with an agreement against a flood nobody designed it for, hydropower is the exposed asset. Whether a project survives gets decided in the ice and rock far above it.

Six weeks later, on 11 October, another flash flood came down the Budhi Gandaki in Gorkha. It took out bridges and homes in Chumnubri and Dharche, and a hydropower construction camp and its equipment were swept away. Five people were left missing, and helicopters lifted out 95 others, nine of them foreigners. Different river, same lesson: the danger starts far above the project fence.

Human induced global warming loosens those slopes and earthquakes do the rest. Shaking cracks rock, knocks ice loose and weakens the moraines that hold back glacial lakes. The 2015 Gorkha earthquake set off more than 25,000 landslides. If a country plans for earthquakes in one file and glacier hazards in another, it is planning for neither.

That brings me back to Wagle. Delhi will take his remark as the Nepali government's line until someone says otherwise. Balen can confirm it or correct it, and he can argue that friendship with India and firmness on borders, water and sovereignty go together.

Nepali nationalism never needed hostility toward India, and it never needed silence either. Raising floods, warnings and upstream hazards with India is not anti-Indian. It is what a confident country does when it shares rivers with a bigger neighbor, and it should do it as an equal.

And Nepal would not be asking for a favor. The Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali systems supply an estimated 70 percent of the Ganges' dry-season flow, and roughly 40 to 47 percent over the year. A lot of that is glacier melt, snowmelt and springs. What happens to Himalayan ice matters to India as much as to us. Working together doesn't mean giving anything up on borders, sovereignty or water rights.

Balen has already taken a Nepal–India–China Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism to the UN. It covers data sharing, glacial-lake monitoring, early warning and help across borders in a disaster. Few ideas in the region are as practical, and he deserves credit for it. Delhi is where it can start turning into agreements. Wagle says the prime minister could visit by year-end, though no date is official.

Three issues belong to the table, start with black carbon. Soot lands on snow and ice, darkens the surface, and the darker surface soaks up more sun. A 2025 modelling study put South Asian black carbon behind 33.7 percent of glacier mass loss in the Himalayan part of the southern Tibetan Plateau between 2007 and 2016. That counts both faster melting and snow that never fell because soot changed the rainfall. It is one region and one decade, not a verdict on every glacier, and not all of the soot comes from crop burning. Still, it is enough reason to act. India has to deal with residue burning, brick kilns, diesel engines and household fuels. Nepal has to clean up its own, including the burning in the Terai. We should not let that become an excuse for not raising India's emissions with India.

Monitoring needs honesty from Nepal and India alike. We need to know what is coming across the border and how fast, and who has the authority to shut a road or clear a worksite. A warning is useless if it never reaches the person who can act on it.

South Asia has heard big promises before. SAARC adopted the Thimphu Statement on Climate Change in 2010, its leaders have not held a summit since 2014, and its' disaster center in Gujarat, has a mandate for early warning. BIMSTEC now plans yet another disaster center in India. Before anyone sets up a new body or drafts another declaration, governments should say what happened to the last one.

ICIMOD shows how thin our knowledge is. In 2025 it described ground-based monitoring of the region's glaciers, snow and permafrost as "negligible and sparse," with only 18 glaciers in the Himalayan part of the Hindu Kush Himalaya being watched. That is an honest thing to admit, and a painful one after more than forty years of regional work with Nepal as host. But honesty is not a plan. ICIMOD should now tell its member governments and the public which monitoring programs lasted, which stopped and why, and where the money, access or cooperation ran out.

Resource is the other gap. The government puts recovery and reconstruction at $4.7 billion. The UN loss-and-damage fund has set aside $20 million, under half of one percent, and Nepal still has to submit a proposal before it can touch any of it. By the end of September, the government had received about $102 million from all donors, roughly 2 percent of the need. At the World Bank–IMF annual meetings in Bangkok, Wagle pressed for flood recovery money, and the ADB's emergency grant helped. But the reports of his meetings there and with the World Bank do not say how much of any new package is loan and how much is grant. A minister who wants the world to pay for a disaster Nepal did not cause should be the first to publish the terms.

Pakistan has been here. Its 2022 floods caused more than $30 billion in damage and losses, at least $16.3 billion was needed to rebuild, and knowing the need did not bring the cash.

Nepal is heading into the same gap. Calling a loan "support" doesn't make it cheaper to repay. One analysis found that over the past decade Nepal took on more than $6 in loans for every $1 in climate grants. The trap is simple. Nepal borrows to build, a flood destroys what was built, and Nepal borrows again to rebuild. The first asset is gone, the first loan is still owed, and a second one arrives. Both get called "support," and the public is left to work out what it owes.

Balen's party came to power in March promising to clean up public money. The finance ministry signs the loans, so that is where the promise gets tested. A loan should be called a loan and a grant a grant. If a package has both, say how much is which, with the interest rate, repayment period, grace period and conditions. Lenders owe an answer too. Too often an appraisal stops at the project fence when the threat starts far upstream. Nepal needs financing. It also needs to know, before the next loan is signed, which hazards were assessed, which were missed, and who answers for it.

The monitoring gap points to a bigger problem. This gap is not ICIMOD's failure. The institution and the threat do not match. Eight countries set up ICIMOD in 1983 to promote mountain development across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, and it does broad, useful work on knowledge management, livelihoods, ecosystems and regional cooperation. Glacier loss and thawing permafrost are another matter. They move fast, they cross borders and continents, and they threaten the people and economies below. No regional body with a wide mandate and eight members can be the world's lead institution on a problem that also threatens the Andes, Central Asia, the Alps and Alaska.

So, the world needs a new global organization built for this one job. I call it the International Center for Glaciers and Permafrost, or ICGP. The floods show why. Foreign nationals from over thirty-six countries are among the dead or missing. A hazard that high up does not stay inside one border or one region. ICGP would stay laser-focused on glaciers and permafrost: science, adaptation, risk reduction and cooperation among glaciated countries.

It would be small enough to act and strong enough to convene governments, scientists and funders. Its work is simple: watch the dangerous places, share what is known across borders, help governments prepare, and make sure warnings reach the people below It would do long-term monitoring, assess hazards with earthquakes in mind, and give countries practical technical help. The countries would learn where it is safe to build, how to protect water supplies, and when to warn people or move them, before the disaster and not after.

ICGP should work with ICIMOD and with others such as Switzerland's WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, Peru's national glacier research institute and the Central Asian Regional Glaciological Centre in Almaty, not duplicate them. They hold the regional knowledge, and ICGP would connect it. People who profit from mountain infrastructure should help pay, but paying must never buy the right to bury an inconvenient finding. The mandate has to be global. India's support would help get it moving, but India should not set the limits of its membership or purpose. China, Pakistan, the United States and the countries of Central Asia, the Andes and the Alps all belong.

Back in Delhi, Balen cannot settle everything in one visit, but he can ask for three things: a joint monitoring and data-sharing workplan, a funded effort to cut the main black-carbon sources in both countries, and a process to look at ICGP with other interested governments. Each needs a budget, named agencies and delivery dates. Both governments should also agree that appraisals for new infrastructure must cover upstream mountain hazards, including how earthquakes weaken ice, slopes and glacial lakes, with monitoring paid for over a project's life. None of that has to wait for a new center.

Balen does not need to come home claiming he's solved the Himalayan crisis. He needs to move the conversation past sympathy, declarations and another round of loans. He has the platform and the credibility to do it.

The water already crosses the border. So should the responsibility for protecting where it comes from.

Rajouria is a climate and diplomatic strategist working on climate resilience, glacier risk and international cooperation. He holds a Master in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School. He conceived the proposed International Center for Glaciers and Permafrost (ICGP), a focused global platform for science, adaptation, risk reduction and cooperation among glaciated countries, and has been its leading advocate. He also led the Asian Development Bank's funded concept-level study for the center.