Landslides in Nepal: Prone Districts Ranking and Major Disasters

Nepal sits on one of the most landslide-prone landscapes on Earth. The Himalaya is the world's youngest mountain range, still rising as the Indian plate pushes under the Eurasian plate, and its rocks are fractured, weathered and weak. Hills and mountains cover roughly 77 percent of the country, and millions of people live, farm and travel on slopes close to the natural limit of stability. In Nepali a landslide is called 'pahiro' (पहिरो) — a familiar word in every hill community once the monsoon arrives.

The trigger for most landslides is water. The summer monsoon, from roughly June to September (Asar–Asoj in the Bikram Sambat calendar), delivers about 80 percent of Nepal's annual rainfall, often in short, intense bursts that saturate soil and set slopes moving. Analyses of the government's disaster database show landslide numbers climbing from May, peaking in July, and tapering off after September. Earthquakes add a second trigger and a long shadow: the magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake of 25 April 2015 (12 Baisakh 2072 BS) set off an estimated 25,000 landslides, and the slopes it cracked have kept failing in the rains for years afterwards, especially in Sindhupalchok, Dolakha and Gorkha.

Human activity makes the natural hazard worse. Thousands of kilometres of rural roads have been cut into hillsides by bulldozers with little engineering, drainage or slope protection — so-called 'dozer roads' that researchers repeatedly link to new slope failures. Settlements have expanded onto marginal slopes, and climate change is intensifying extreme rainfall. Landslide disasters are consequently becoming more frequent: the years with the most fatal landslides on record in Nepal have all occurred since 2020.

Among Nepal's recurring hazards — floods, fires, lightning, epidemics — landslides kill the most people. Analyses of the government's BIPAD disaster database found landslides to be the single deadliest hazard category between January 2016 and April 2025, accounting for roughly 31 percent of recorded disaster fatalities and nearly half of all missing persons. Only rare catastrophic earthquakes, such as the 2015 Gorkha earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people, have produced higher one-off death tolls.

The long-term record is sobering. A dataset compiled from newspaper archives, the global fatal-landslide database and Nepal's BIPAD portal counts about 1,437 fatal landslides since 1968, killing 6,195 people — excluding landslides triggered by earthquakes. Datasets based on Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) records put the 1971–2019 average at around 111 landslide deaths per year. The worst years are far deadlier: fatal-landslide datasets place 2002 above 400 deaths and 2020 at around 300.

For the most recent well-analysed decade, the BIPAD portal recorded 2,458 landslide events between 2011 and 2021 (roughly BS 2068–2078), killing 1,384 people, with recorded direct losses above NPR 1.75 billion. Because many small events in remote areas go unreported, researchers caution that all of these figures likely undercount the true toll.

District-level counts from the BIPAD portal give the clearest picture of where landslides strike most often. Between 2011 and 2021, seventeen districts each recorded 50 or more landslides, almost all in the hill and mountain belts. Baglung in Gandaki Province topped the list with 100 recorded landslides, followed by Sankhuwasabha in eastern Nepal (95) and Nuwakot, northwest of Kathmandu (92). By province, Bagmati recorded the most landslides in that decade (568), followed by Koshi — then Province 1 — with 554 and Gandaki with 506.

Counting events is not the only way to rank risk. A 2024 national-scale study of rainfall-triggered landslide susceptibility and exposure, published in the journal Earth's Future, found that the districts where high susceptibility overlaps with large exposed populations include Sindhupalchok, Gorkha and Bajhang — the only three districts that rank in the national top twenty for both slope susceptibility and population exposure. The study also highlighted a dense cluster of exposed communities southwest of Pokhara, across Syangja, Gulmi, Baglung and Parbat districts, and on the peripheries of the Kathmandu and Pokhara valleys.

Measured by lives lost rather than event counts, no district features more prominently than Sindhupalchok, northeast of Kathmandu on the road to the Chinese border. It suffered Nepal's deadliest single landslide at Jure in 2014, repeated failures on earthquake-weakened slopes in 2020, and the Melamchi flood-debris disaster of June 2021. Districts that appear repeatedly in monsoon casualty reports and preparedness plans include those below.

The Jure landslide is Nepal's deadliest recorded single landslide. In the early hours of 2 August 2014 (17 Saun 2071 BS), after days of heavy rain, a massive slope collapse of roughly 5.5 million cubic metres tore down the hillside above Jure village in Mankha, Sindhupalchok district, about 80 kilometres northeast of Kathmandu. The slide buried much of the settlement while residents slept, killing 156 people, destroying or burying around 120 houses and displacing more than 400 survivors.

The debris did not stop at the valley floor. It dammed the Sunkoshi River behind an earthen barrier about 55 metres high, impounding a lake that backed up the valley, submerged houses and drowned the substation of the Sunkoshi small hydropower plant — knocking out roughly 10 percent of Nepal's electricity generating capacity and triggering load-shedding. Fearing a catastrophic outburst flood downstream, a danger felt as far as India, authorities evacuated riverside communities while the Nepal Army used controlled blasting over several weeks to cut a spillway and gradually drain the lake.

Jure also severed the Araniko Highway, then Nepal's main overland trade artery to China through the Tatopani/Kodari border point, destroying about two kilometres of road and halting cross-border commerce for weeks. The disaster became a landmark in Nepali disaster policy, cited in debates that led to the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2017 (2074 BS) and the creation of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) in 2019. For many Nepalis, 'Jure pahiro' remains the benchmark for how destructive a single landslide can be.

Six years after Jure, Sindhupalchok again became the centre of Nepal's landslide tragedy. On the morning of 14 August 2020 (30 Saun 2077 BS), a huge landslide buried Lidi village in Jugal Rural Municipality, destroying at least 17 houses and damaging dozens more. At least 37 people were confirmed dead and two more were never found. The disaster was widely described as preventable: an earlier slide on 10 July had already put Lidi at high risk, and about 170 families had formally petitioned the district disaster committee for relocation just one week before the slope collapsed.

Lidi was not an isolated event. Throughout the 2020 monsoon, Sindhupalchok's slopes — weakened by the 2015 earthquake, which killed 3,440 people in this one district — failed again and again. Landslides in Melamchi Municipality killed ten people in early August, and on 13 September a slide at Ghumthang in Bahrabise Municipality killed at least 11 with around 20 missing. By season's end, Nepali media tallied about 75 killed and 40 missing in Sindhupalchok's floods and landslides in 2020, making it the country's worst-hit district that year.

Nationally, the 2020 monsoon was among Nepal's deadliest landslide seasons on record, with roughly 300 landslide deaths. It hardened the lesson that the Gorkha earthquake's legacy is measured not only in collapsed buildings but in destabilised hillsides that keep failing years later — and that relocating communities from known danger zones remains one of Nepal's hardest disaster-management tasks.

On 26–28 September 2024 (10–12 Asoj 2081 BS), an exceptionally late, intense burst of monsoon rain struck central and eastern Nepal. Kathmandu Valley stations measured between about 240 and 322 millimetres of rain in 24 hours — the capital's heaviest rainfall since systematic records began in 1970. Rivers burst their banks and hundreds of landslides tore through hillsides across Bagmati, Koshi and neighbouring provinces. Per the United Nations situation report of 16 October 2024, based on NDRRMA data, 249 people died, 178 were injured and 18 remained missing, with the highest fatalities in Dhading, Kavre and Lalitpur; 56 of the dead were in the Kathmandu Valley.

The event's signature horror was on the roads. At Jhyaple Khola in Dhading district, on the main highway corridor into Kathmandu, landslide debris buried vehicles including two night buses bound for the capital; at least 35 bodies were recovered along that stretch. Landslides cut every major highway into the Kathmandu Valley for days, stranding thousands of travellers ahead of the Dashain festival — a stark demonstration that landslides threaten not just hillside villages but the arteries of the national economy.

The NDRRMA's preliminary loss-and-damage assessment recorded thousands of damaged houses, destroyed bridges, hydropower plants knocked offline and billions of rupees in losses. Coming at the very end of the official monsoon, the 2024 disaster underlined a trend climate scientists have warned about: Nepal's rainfall is becoming more erratic and intense, extending the landslide danger window beyond the traditional season.

Nepal's official disaster record-keeper is the BIPAD portal (Building Information Platform Against Disaster, bipadportal.gov.np), operated by the NDRRMA under the Ministry of Home Affairs. It logs landslide incidents, deaths and losses in near real time and is the primary public source for district-wise landslide data. Rainfall warnings come from the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), which issues special weather bulletins ahead of high-risk monsoon spells. Landslide-specific early warning remains limited, though community rainfall-threshold systems and mobile tools such as the Pahiro Alert app have been piloted in high-risk districts.

Each year before the monsoon, the government prepares a national monsoon preparedness and response plan, prepositioning rescue teams from the Nepal Army, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force in vulnerable districts. Under the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act 2074 (2017), municipalities are responsible for identifying at-risk settlements and managing relocation — the step whose failure proved fatal at Lidi. For residents and travellers in the hills during Asar–Asoj, a few practical precautions save lives.