When Prediction Fails, What Should Governance Still Deliver?

A Tragedy Without a Villain Still Demands an Answer When a

disaster of this scale happens, the instinct is to look for someone who should have known and didn't act. In Nepal's case, that instinct runs into an uncomfortable fact: predicting a specific glacier collapse, in a specific valley, on a specific day, may simply be beyond what current monitoring can deliver - not because no one is trying, but because the terrain itself resists it.

The Indian Himalayas hold nearly 7,500 glacial lakes and roughly 15,000 glaciers. Satellite monitoring tracks many of them, but confirming a lake or glacier's actual physical condition - whether a moraine dam is weakening, whether a hanging mass of ice is close to failure - usually requires an actual site visit.

Those visits are only feasible for a few months a year, in some of the most inaccessible terrain on Earth. Even where warnings are technically possible, there is a further complication: residents living below these slopes, often for generations, tend not to relocate even when warned, because habit and the absence of any real alternative outweigh an abstract risk.

None of this means nothing could have been done. It means the honest question is not "why didn't anyone predict this," but "what should a government do when it knows a category of disaster is likely somewhere, sometime, without being able to say exactly where or when." That is a genuinely different governance problem and it has a genuinely different answer: not forecasting, but zoning.

Construction codes that keep large settlements, dams and hydropower projects out of the most vulnerable valley corridors. Enforced restrictions on where new infrastructure can be built, informed by the broad risk maps satellite monitoring already provides, even without precise event-level prediction.

Continued investment in tracking glacier health, not because it will ever produce certainty, but because it feeds exactly the kind of long-term development planning that keeps people and infrastructure further from the areas most likely to fail eventually.

This reframing matters because the alternative - treating every such disaster as evidence of a specific, nameable failure - leads nowhere useful. It either produces false reassurance ("we'll build a better early warning system and this won't happen again") or paralysis ("nothing can be done about something we can't predict").

Both let the actual, achievable policy response - keeping people and critical infrastructure out of known danger corridors - go unaddressed while the debate chases an unattainable standard of predictive certainty. The most honest description of what happened is not conspiracy or cover-up, but passive neglect: the slow, unglamorous failure to translate known regional risk into enforced zoning and construction discipline, repeated after Chamoli in 2021, after Sikkim in 2023 and now again.

That failure is addressable in a way that predicting the next glacier collapse is not - which is exactly why it deserves the governance attention and the accountability, that chasing certainty has been absorbing instead.