On 9 September 2025, amid nationwide unrest, the Supreme Court of Nepal was set on fire. The court's own preliminary assessment, published five weeks later, set out what was lost.1
What the Supreme Court lost
The Supreme Court was not the largest single loss. The Kathmandu District Court lost more than 400,000 archived files and about 4,000 active ones.1 Outside the valley, district and high courts reported losses in the thousands.3
How the losses were counted
- 9 Sep 2025Supreme Court set on fire1
Arson at the court during the unrest.
- 12 Sep 2025Singha Durbar offices still burning5
Firefighters were still fighting fires at the Department of Roads and Department of Transport buildings, both gutted.
- 17 Sep 2025Pokhara counts its ward offices4
27 of the city's 33 ward offices damaged, 20 of them completely gutted, with documents burned.
- 16 Oct 2025Preliminary loss report1
About 933,000 case files lost across all courts: 30,752 active and 903,071 archived.
- 3 Nov 2025Courts resume limited services3
District and high courts reopen with severe losses still being assessed.
- 18 Mar 2026Recovery, six months on2
The Supreme Court reports 19,102 files recovered or reconstructed.
The building was not the failure
Fire-rated construction, detection and suppression reduce the chance of a loss. They cannot undo one. What decided the outcome here was that each file existed once, in one building, with no indexed copy anywhere else.
Recovery has been slow because it means rebuilding a file from whatever the parties, lawyers and lower courts still hold. Every rebuilt file is a case that stood still while it was rebuilt.
What any institution can do this year
- Inventory what you hold
Room by room: what record classes, from which years, in what condition.
- Rank by consequence
Which records would stop the organisation, or lose a case, if they were gone tomorrow.
- Move originals that must survive
Into rated, monitored storage with a chain of custody.
- Keep a second, indexed copy
Scanned and stored at a separate site, for the records you cannot afford to rebuild.
Sources
5 sources verified, last checked 4 October 2026- 1
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