Work to rebuild trade routes destroyed by catastrophic flooding in Nepal has begun, with a new bridge across the Tadi River that the Nepali Army is calling the “bridge of hope.”
Nepal will need a lot of it, as the country starts digging itself out of a disaster-related economic crisis that government officials estimate will cost a least $5 billion in reconstruction receipts alone.
What the headline number doesn’t account for, experts said, is the knock-on impacts from losing critical infrastructure the country depends on for travel and transporting goods.
“This flash flood, it is not a single-sector disaster,” Nischal Dhungel, a non-resident fellow at the Nepal Institute for Policy Research who writes about Nepal’s economy.
“Its effects run through farms, power plants, trade corridors, tourism, business, insurance, linking household losses to national economy recovery.”
