NUWAKOT, Oct 3 — Clutching a photograph of his missing son, Rajesh Ram is pinning his hopes on DNA testing — like thousands of others desperately seeking relatives swept away by Nepal’s catastrophic Himalayan floods.

“I searched for him everywhere, but I could not find his body,” 53-year-old Ram told AFP, still waiting for answers about his son Suroj Kumar, a garage mechanic in Betrawati, which was swamped by the floods.

Nepal was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction from the tsunami-like wall of freezing water and debris triggered by a glacial and rock collapse on the Nepal-China border on August 26.

The scale of the identification task is immense.

With thousands of DNA profiles to process, fragmented remains and limited technical capacity and manpower, experts warn matching bodies to families could take weeks.