Like thousands of others, he is searching for relatives swept away when Nepal's catastrophic Himalayan floods struck on August 26, triggered by a glacial and rock collapse on the Nepal-China border. The identification task is enormous. Nepali authorities have recovered 1,454 bodies, but roughly a third are only partial remains, and just 112 have been identified and returned to families. A further 5,285 people remain missing in Nepal, including hundreds of foreigners. In China, state media reports 43 dead and 519 missing - bringing the combined toll to nearly 1,500 dead and 5,800 missing.

Nepal's two forensic laboratories, both in Kathmandu, are handling a workload far beyond anything before. Mukul Pradhan, chief scientific officer at the National Forensic Science Laboratory, says the lab normally analyses 1,000 to 1,500 samples a year for paternity or crime cases, but is now processing thousands. Some 3,685 forensic samples are undergoing testing, including over 1,300 from recovered bodies. Blood profiles quickly; teeth or bone samples take days. Because DNA alone cannot identify a body, authorities must also process samples from thousands of relatives before matches can be made. Floodwaters carried some bodies far downstream, complicating the effort further. Nepal has buried more than 1,200 bodies, numbered and tagged for possible retrieval. India, China, South Korea, the United States, and Singapore have sent support teams, and officials say matching could begin within weeks. Until then, families remain in painful limbo - some holding symbolic funerals, Ram still hoping to find any remains of his son. (Bssnews)