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 A senior interior ministry official said authorities had not been
able to establish contact with some of the worst affected areas in
the mountainous nation, and that the death toll could reach 5,000.
Roads leading out of Kathmandu were jammed with people, some with
babies in their arms, trying to climb onto buses or hitch a ride
aboard cars and trucks to the plains.
Huge queues had formed at the city's Tribhuvan International
Airport, with tourists and residents desperate to get a flight out.
"I'm willing even to sell the gold I'm wearing to buy a ticket, but
there is nothing available," said Rama Bahadur, an Indian woman who
works in Nepal's capital.
Many of Kathmandu's one million residents have slept in the open
since Saturday's quake, either because their homes were flattened or
they were terrified that aftershocks would bring them crashing down.
"We are escaping," said Krishna Muktari, who runs a small grocery
store in Kathmandu city, standing at a major road intersection. "How
can you live here? I have got children, they can't be rushing out of
the house all night."
Overwhelmed authorities were trying to cope with a shortage of
drinking water, food and electricity, as well as the threat of
disease, and the government appealed for international help.
"The big challenge is relief," said Chief Secretary Leela Mani
Paudel, the country's top bureaucrat. "We urge foreign countries to
give us special relief materials and medical teams. We are really
desperate for more foreign expertise to pull through this crisis."
High in the Himalayas, hundreds of climbers were staying put at
Mount Everest base camp, where a huge avalanche after the earthquake
killed 17 people in the single worst disaster to hit the world's
highest mountain.
Rescue teams, helped by clear weather, used helicopters to airlift
scores of people stranded at higher altitudes, two at a time.
Sick and wounded people were lying out in the open in Kathmandu,
unable to find beds in the devastated city's hospitals. Surgeons set
up an operating theater inside a tent in the grounds of Kathmandu
Medical College.
Across the capital and beyond, exhausted families laid mattresses
out on streets and erected tents to shelter from rain. People queued
for water dispensed from trucks, while the few stores still open had
next to nothing on their shelves.
INSTANT NOODLES AND FRUIT
The United Nations Childrens Fund said nearly one million children
in Nepal were severely affected by the quake, and warned of
waterborne and infectious diseases.
 In the ancient temple town of Bhaktapur, east of Kathmandu, many
residents were living in tents in a school compound after centuries
old buildings collapsed or developed huge cracks.
"We have become refugees," said Sarga Dhaoubadel, a management
student whose ancestors had built her Bhaktapur family home over 400
years ago.
They were subsisting on instant noodles and fruit, she said.
"No one from the government has come to offer us even a glass of
water," she said. "Nobody has come to even check our health. We are
totally on our own here. All we can hope is that the aftershocks
stop and we can try and get back home."
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A total of 3,726 people were confirmed killed in the 7.9 magnitude
quake, the government said on Monday, the worst in Nepal since 1934
when 8,500 died. More than 6,500 were injured.
Another 66 were killed across the border in India and at least
another 20 in Tibet, China's state news agency said.
The toll is likely to rise as rescuers struggle to reach remote
regions in the country of 28 million people and as bodies buried
under rubble are recovered.
Several countries rushed to send aid and personnel.
India sent helicopters, medical supplies and members of its National
Disaster Response Force. China sent a 60-strong emergency team.
Pakistan's army said it was sending four C-130 aircraft with a
30-bed hospital, search and rescue teams and relief supplies.
A Pentagon spokesman said a U.S. military aircraft with 70 personnel
left the United States on Sunday and was due in Kathmandu on Monday.
Australia, Britain and New Zealand said they were sending specialist
urban search-and-rescue teams to Kathmandu at Nepal's request.
Britain, which believes several hundred of its nationals are in
Nepal, was also delivering supplies and medics.
However, there has been little sign of international assistance on
the ground so far, with some aid flights prevented from landing by
aftershocks that closed Kathmandu's airport several times on Sunday.
On Monday, an Indian air force relief plane returned to New Delhi
because of congestion at the airport, Indian television reported.
The disaster has underlined the woeful state of Nepal's medical
facilities.
Nepal has only 2.1 physicians and 50 hospital beds for every 10,000
people, according to a 2011 World Health Organization report.
Doctors at one Kathmandu hospital said they needed over 1,000 more
beds to treat the patients that were being brought in ambulances and
taxis.
(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani and Gopal Sharma in
Kathmandu, Frank Jack Daniel, Mayank Bhardwaj, Krista Mahr, Amit
Ganguly and Nidhi Verma in New Delhi; Neha Dasgupta and Clara
Ferreira-Marques in Mumbai and Norihiko Shirouzo in Beijing; Writing
by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Mike Collett-White)
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