Nepali Migrants' Unresolved Repatriation Crisis
For many families in Nepal, the death of a relative abroad does not end their struggle but initiates a prolonged bureaucratic and financial ordeal that often leaves bodies behind due to prohibitive costs.
Tulsi Ramrai, a 72-year-old resident of Rautahat, has spent four months navigating the corridors of Singha Durbar in Kathmandu, moving between the Foreign Affairs, Labour, and Finance ministries. His goal is singular: to bring home the body of his son-in-law, Santosh Rai, who died in a hospital in Phnom Penh in May. The barrier is not legal or bureaucratic, but financial. The Nepali embassy in Thailand calculated that repatriating the body would cost $7,335, a sum that exceeds the means of the family. Because Santosh entered Cambodia on a visit visa, he fell outside the state mechanisms typically designed to support workers, leaving his family without a clear path to closure.
Ramrai’s experience highlights a systemic gap in Nepal’s approach to its massive migration economy. While the country sends hundreds of thousands of citizens abroad annually for work, there is no unified institutional framework guaranteeing that those who die overseas can be returned home. According to the Department of Immigration, over 6.16 million Nepalis traveled abroad in the past five years. In the last year alone, nearly 792,000 received labor approvals, with a significant portion heading to Gulf countries and Europe. However, when death occurs, responsibility for repatriation often dissolves into a complex web of visa categories, employer obligations, and insurance limits, leaving families to navigate a fragmented system with little state support.
Remittances as Economic Backbone
The scale of this migration is central to Nepal’s economic identity. Annual remittances have grown from under 100 billion Nepali Rupees in the early 2000s to a record 1.4 trillion in 2024. In the most recent fiscal year, these funds rose by 37.1 percent to 2.32 trillion rupees, surpassing the government’s entire national budget of 2.12 trillion. The World Bank describes these inflows as a critical stabilizer, accounting for 26 percent of the country’s GDP in 2024. For more than a third of households, these funds are a primary income source, averaging nearly 186,000 rupees per family in 2023. This economic reliance creates a paradox: while the state benefits immensely from the labor force abroad, it has not developed corresponding safety nets for their most vulnerable moments.
Fragmented Accountability for the Dead
Santosh Rai’s case illustrates how specific administrative details can determine outcomes. He had retired from the Nepali Army and traveled to Cambodia on a visit visa to work as a security guard. When he quit his job and fell ill, his status shifted him away from standard worker protections. His wife filed for repatriation immediately, and local non-resident associations attempted to help, but the process stalled due to costs. Motibahadur Shrish, deputy chief of the consular department, noted that the embassy has no specific budget line for rescuing stranded citizens who are not classified as workers. This distinction means that families often must rely on crowdfunding or navigate a labyrinth of ministries, as Ramrai did, where no single entity assumes responsibility for the final journey home.
According to GN geopolitics/migration (en-US), the outcome for many migrant families depends heavily on chance factors such as the type of visa held, the country of death, and the willingness of employers or insurance schemes to contribute. For those who fall outside these categories, the choice is often between a foreign grave and years of waiting. The absence of a centralized repatriation fund or protocol leaves the most vulnerable families to bear the full weight of a crisis that is, in many ways, a predictable consequence of the state’s reliance on external labor. As Nepal continues to export its workforce, the question of how to care for those who can no longer return remains unresolved, leaving families like Ramrai’s to seek answers in a system that offers none.
