Who went to Kailash? Nepal floods expose a gap in tracking private pilgrims from India

Two days after the August 26 Nepal floods, Delhi officials had another task: Tracking travellers outside India’s official Kailash Mansarovar Yatra system. They were seeking information from private tour operators who had taken travellers on the route.

On August 28, Delhi Chief Secretary Rajeev Verma directed district magistrates to check missing-person complaints with the police and approach private tour operators to establish how many Delhi residents had travelled to Nepal and verify their status.

Maharashtra was conducting a similar exercise. By August 29, the state had identified 404 people from Maharashtra in the Nepal-Tibet region and established contact with 338 of them. The Ministry of External Affairs separately provided a list of 149 people from the state who were safe in China or Tibet. Sixty tourists who had travelled through one private operator were still untraceable at that stage.

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Authorities faced two tasks after communications had collapsed: Locating people and establishing who had travelled privately in the first place.

That exposes a basic difference between two ways Indians undertake the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage.

The list that exists before departure

The Ministry of External Affairs organises the official Kailash Mansarovar Yatra through Lipulekh Pass in Uttarakhand and Nathu La in Sikkim.

For 2026, the MEA selected 1,000 pilgrims through a computerised draw. The programme has 10 batches on the Lipulekh route and 10 on the Nathu La route, with 50 pilgrims in each batch.

Those 1,000 pilgrims enter an organised government system before they leave. Each applicant supplies passport and personal details through the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra (KMY) portal. Selected pilgrims are assigned a route and batch, and are informed through their registered email address and mobile number.

If an emergency affects a particular official batch, the MEA already has the underlying participant list and the planned itinerary of that batch.

That list covers pilgrims participating in the MEA-organised yatra. Indians who book Kailash trips with private operators and travel through Nepal are recorded through separate channels.

The Kailash travellers outside the KMY list

Nepali tour operators said China fixed a ceiling of 24,000 Indian pilgrims travelling to Kailash through Nepal during the 2026 season, compared with 20,000 in 2025.

The 24,000 figure is a quota ceiling; actual traveller totals may be lower. The 1,000 and 24,000 figures therefore measure different things: selected official-yatra pilgrims and permitted private-route capacity.

The numbers show that the potential private traffic is a separate stream organised by numerous commercial operators, with traveller information held outside the MEA’s KMY participant list.

Rasuwagadhi data show the scale of movement along one Nepal route. In fiscal year 2025-26, 13,523 Kailash Mansarovar pilgrims used the crossing, an 18.75 per cent increase from the previous year. The border recorded 53,742 entries and exits during the seven months it operated, including 24,278 by Indian nationals. A traveller can be counted once while crossing towards Tibet and again while returning through the same border, so the totals measure traffic through the checkpoint, with repeat counts possible for the same traveller.

What information exists for private travellers?

There are several sources of information. Tour companies know their clients. Immigration authorities hold border records. Families know itineraries. The Indian Embassy in Kathmandu also operates a registration facility for Indian nationals.

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The Embassy registration facility operates separately from the official Kailash Yatra database.

The Embassy says all Indian nationals are advised to register because registration can help it provide faster consular services. Its form seeks details including passport number, phone and WhatsApp numbers, date of arrival, location in Nepal and an Indian emergency contact.

Two details matter: Registration is voluntary. The Embassy also states that the information submitted remains for Embassy use within that system.

Private Kailash pilgrims travelling through Nepal are recorded separately from the MEA’s KMY list. The official yatra list and the Embassy’s voluntary registration facility are separate systems.

Why the difference mattered after the flood

On the morning of August 26, 390 Kailash-bound travellers were scheduled to cross from Nepal into Tibet at Rasuwagadhi. They were clients of at least 10 private travel companies. Ninety-three were Nepalis; most of the rest were foreign nationals, largely Indians.

Hours later, roads and communications across the affected corridor were disrupted. The structure of the private pilgrimage suddenly mattered because the traveller information was distributed across operators and other sources rather than sitting in the MEA’s official KMY list.

Delhi’s post-flood instructions make the administrative consequence unusually clear. District magistrates were told to check police complaints and approach private tour operators to find out how many Delhi residents had travelled to Nepal and verify their status.

Maharashtra's State Emergency Operations Centre was likewise coordinating with the MEA control room, district administrations, travel agencies and families while verifying its 404-person list.

The evidence supports a narrower conclusion: the official yatra has a single MEA KMY list, while authorities accounting for Indians who had travelled privately through Nepal had to draw on several sources.

Should private tour operators file passenger lists?

Private Kailash travel serves demand beyond the official programme's capacity. Safety comparisons between private and official travel require separate evidence. A centralised passenger list could have made post-disaster accounting easier.

A narrower administrative response would place the responsibility on the companies organising these journeys. Private operators taking organised groups of Indians to remote, high-risk pilgrimage destinations abroad could be required to submit a basic passenger list before departure.

The question exposed by the response is administrative: should organised private groups of Indians travelling to remote, high-risk international pilgrimage destinations have a simple pre-departure passenger list available to consular authorities for emergencies?

This could be limited to organised Kailash groups: a seasonal journey into remote high-altitude terrain, generally undertaken through identifiable commercial operators.

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A basic passenger list could contain the traveller's identity, passport number, operator, emergency contact, planned route and expected travel dates. Its purpose would be to make one task easier when communications fail: knowing who needs to be accounted for.

The government-organised Kailash Mansarovar Yatra begins with a participant list. Private Kailash travel through Nepal is recorded through separate channels.

After the floods, Delhi asked tour operators for details of travellers who had booked Kailash trips through them. Maharashtra reconciled names supplied by the MEA, travel companies, districts and families.

The Nepal floods have shown why that distinction matters: when traveller information is already available in one place, authorities can focus immediately on locating people; when it is scattered across several records, assembling a reliable list becomes part of the emergency response itself.