Himachal Pradesh Has Its Own Raja Ghepan Lake, and the Nepal GLOF Crisis Just Showed Us What Happens Next

On 26 August, a slab of glacier the size of a small town broke away high above the Nepal-China border and slammed into a river valley. It happened in minutes. There was no rain that morning, no siren that mattered. By the time anyone understood what was happening, entire settlements were gone. The toll as I write this: over 270 confirmed dead, more than 1,500 still missing, including over 800 foreign trekkers. The number keeps climbing.

Photo Source: Internet

Now look eight hundred kilometres west, into our own mountains.

Raja Ghepan Lake (also known as Ghepang Ghat), in Himachal's Lahaul-Spiti, sits on the exact same conditions that produced Nepal's disaster: a shrinking glacier, a fast-growing lake, and a natural dam of loose mud and rock that was never built to hold what it's holding now. It has grown by 176% in just 33 years. A government (NRSC) report has already flagged it as a threat not just to Lahaul, but to everything downstream into Jammu & Kashmir, and on into Pakistan.

Same physics. Same warming climate. Same kind of silence before it happens.

And Raja Ghepan isn't alone.

Samudra Tapu Lake, also in Lahaul-Spiti, has grown over 900% since the 1960s and now holds an estimated 57 million cubic metres of water, sitting behind a dam no stronger than the one that just failed in Nepal. Vasuki Lake, in the Parbati valley near Kullu, is up 30% in just seven years.

Sangla Lake, in Kinnaur, sits right above hydropower projects, the same kind of infrastructure Nepal watched get swept away in Rasuwa this week. A national study has flagged 189 glacial lakes across the Indian Himalayas as high-risk. Four of the most dangerous are right here, in our own backyard. This isn't a someday risk. Nepal just showed us what "anytime" looks like.

Photo Source: ISRO

Here's what actually happened there, and why it matters for us. The impact of the glacier collapse was so strong it first registered on seismographs as a 4.4-magnitude earthquake. Scientists later corrected that it wasn't an earthquake, it was the collapse itself, revised to 5.2 on the scale. There are also reports going around, still unverified, that construction activity near the border by China may have played a role. What's confirmed is simpler and just as serious: a glacier gave way, and everything downstream paid the price. No warning system caught it in time. There simply wasn't time.

That's the part that should worry us most. Even where warning systems exist, and Himachal is only just getting its first pilot one at Sangla Kinnaur lake, they buy minutes, not enough time to move an entire valley.

And here's the part that should make us angry: the places carrying this risk, Nepal, Himachal, infact entire Global South, have contributed almost nothing to the warming causing it. The average person in Nepal emits about 0.5 tonnes of carbon a year. The average person in the Global North emits around 14 tonnes, nearly 25 times more. If the whole world lived the way the Global North does, we'd need five to seven planet Earths to keep up.

The Global North is burning the fuel. The Global South is losing its mountains.

Early warning alone will not save us. We need real engineering, carefully lowering these lakes, without digging or construction that could trigger the very collapse we're trying to prevent. That takes specialised teams: national and international experts who've done this before. Not our local PWD or irrigation department with limited resources, stretched thin, doing this for the first time with lives on the line.

And at the political level: stop approving reckless dam and road construction on fragile glacial slopes. Every blast, every cut into a mountain in this terrain is a gamble with the lives downstream. The Global South needs to stand together and demand real accountability from the Global North whose emissions are melting our glaciers — not just sympathy, responsibility.

There's something deeply unfair about how this works. The people living comfortably, far from these mountains, are driving the changes that are breaking them apart. The people living closest to nature, asking for almost nothing, are the first to lose everything.

Raja Ghepan Lake has been called a "ticking time bomb" in study after study for years now. We've read the reports. We've nodded along. We're still waiting for action to match the warnings.

Nepal just showed us what waiting costs. Let's not find out the same way.

~ Madhusudan