Nepal’s roads kill. One fine evening in February 2026, a bus left from Pokhara at 1:15 AM from Dhading; it fell off the road into the Trishuli River. Nineteen individuals died. In three weeks, it was the third such crash following Baitadi and Ramechhap. Altogether forty individuals died in twenty-one days. Preliminary investigation cited vehicle condition and the driver’s negligence as the major cause. Come the month of February, it is common to find news reports of road accidents. But can we truly call it an accident?
Accidents are unforeseeable; by contrast, the Nepali case is anything but. For instance, in July 2024, when a landslide near Simaltal, Chitwan swept two buses into the Trishuli River, one of them wasn’t found for eighteen months. A government task force that investigated did not blame it on rain, fate, bus, or the driver. Instead it found that debris from rural road construction above the highway triggered the landslide. It further concluded that Bharatpur Metropolitan City and Bharatpur Division Road Office failed to clear the blocked culverts that might have caused it. Failure in coordination cannot be classified as an accident. The more important question is, who is ultimately responsible for coordinating in the first place?
Nepal’s road safety apparatus is split across the Department of Roads, the Department of Transport Management, the Department of Local Infrastructure, and Road Board Nepal. Federalism then handed all 753 local governments their own constitutional authority to build and maintain roads. Above this sits the National Road Safety Council, born of a Cabinet decision rather than an Act, with no legal enforcement power over any of the agencies it is meant to coordinate. Each institution controls one piece of the system, yet none can compel the others to act.
As recently as May 2026, the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport informed the Infrastructure Committee of the House of Representatives that Nepal still has no dedicated road safety institution and will not have one until the Road Safety Bill, drafted in 2016, clears its long legislative limbo. When one thread of responsibility is split across five institutions in two tiers of government, a single institution can be held accountable. It is not a forgotten flaw. The arrangement has persisted because it rarely forces any single institution to bear the political cost of failure.
The coordination failure carries real human costs. According to the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2022, road traffic mortality stood at 14 per 100,000 people, or approximately 4,000 deaths per year due to road traffic accidents. Nepal Police records put the toll at over 15,000 deaths between 2018 and 2024—about seven people every day. What makes those numbers even harder to accept is that the state already knows how to reduce them.
The Transport Improvement Suggestion Task Force submitted a 201-page report on transport reform with concrete recommendations. By the authors estimates road accidents can be reduced by 80 percent. The report also highlighted that deficiencies caused by negligence on the part of road-related agencies or other state bodies currently carry no legal consequences for those agencies. It recommended enacting legal provisions making the responsible agency or party liable whenever an accident results from such negligence. However, no concrete actions have been taken based on the report.
Legislative attention, however, has not been entirely absent. The problem is that it continues to focus on the wrong part of the system. There is a new transport bill moving through Kathmandu, one that would, among other things, treat reckless driving causing death as a serious criminal offense rather than an administrative matter. It is a step worth taking. However, it will penalise the driver without questioning the road even once. It merely extends the old agreement in a new form, where at least someone is made to answer, but it is rarely, if ever, the office that signed the design of the road, or was responsible for coordinating across agencies.
If all this sounds frustrating, outrage is an understandable response. But the next time a bus goes into a river, resist allowing the word accident to close the discussion before asking who designed the road, who maintained it, and who was responsible for coordinating across agencies. The Trishuli River has taken more than one busload of people who were told afterward that no one was to blame. Somewhere upstream of that water, someone always was.
