They left UP to work on Nepal’s biggest hydropower projects. Then the floods struck

A missed call that went unanswered. A phone that went silent. Four days after devastating flash floods swept through Nepal, families of two men in Uttar Pradesh have had no news of them. Ravish Singh, 48, a welder from Gorakhpur, and Karan Sharma, 32, an electrician from Kushinagar, were working on the 216 MW Upper Trishuli-1 Hydropower Project in Nepal’s Rasuwa district.

Ravish called his wife, Kalawati Singh, on August 26, around 8.50 am. “She could not answer the call as she was busy with household chores and planned to call him back later. The couple usually spoke two or three times a day,” said his younger brother, Ajay Singh, a sub-inspector posted in Ballia district.

“When she called Ravish in the afternoon after finishing her work, his phone was unreachable. She tried several times but could not get through,” he said. Two to three hours later, the family learned about the floods in Nepal.

“My sister-in-law has been upset that she could not answer Ravish’s call that morning. Since August 26, she has made hundreds of calls, hoping that he would pick up,” Ajay said. They had last seen Ravish two months ago when he came home to see his wife and two children.

Ravish’s younger brother, Raj Kumar Singh, left for Nepal on Friday to search for him. “We are in contact with the company he worked for, but they haven’t been able to provide any information about him,” Ajay said. Even calls to designated helpline numbers have yielded nothing.

In Kushinagar, Karan’s wife and children are facing a similar wait. He had come home in June for 15 days after his father developed a heart problem. “Karan would call us regularly… On the day the floods hit, we could not contact him.

Then his phone was switched off,” said his brother, Shiv Karan Sharma. He, too, has travelled to Nepal to look for his brother. On Wednesday, Ashok Kumar Chaurasia called his daughter Shivani in a panic. The floodwaters around their home in Nuwakot were rising, he told her, and he feared the situation could worsen.

For the next 24 hours, there was no word from Ashok. He and his brother, Panna Lal, had run a clothing shop in the district for nearly four decades. Ashok’s two daughters, living in Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia and Varanasi, watched news of the floods in mounting alarm.

The sisters called relatives, tried their family’s phones again and again, and waited for any sign that their father and six other members of their family — their mother, two brothers, and uncle’s family — in Nepal were safe.