The head teacher of a school in Nepal almost certainly saved the lives of more than 1,600 pupils with his quick actions as this week’s devastating flash floods approached.

Rajendra Dawadi, the principal of Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary School in Nuwakot, was working on Wednesday morning when he started to receive warnings from people upstream.

At the time, there were around 900 students on the early shift at the school – with 700 making their way towards the building on foot or by bus.

Speaking to the Times, Rajendra said one of the calls came from a parent who said the water ‘was rising fast’.

Unsure if the floodwater would come in the school’s direction, he nevertheless made the call to ring the school bell and get the children out of their classrooms and to higher ground.

He told the BBC: ‘I decided I shouldn’t delay any more. Even if the flood was not coming, it was just a matter of a single day’s classes.’

Rajendra, 47, added: ‘If we had made the decision ten minutes later, all of us, including the students and me, would not be able to speak to you today.’

The students were motivated up the hill by the sheer terror of seeing the school janitor being swept away after he returned to lock some doors, he said.

A hostel building 100 metres from the river’s banks was also swallowed up as they made their way to safety.

But while the children who were in the school were safe, he also knew the ones who were on their way in also needed to be warned.

Rajendra was able to get through to the drivers of all the school buses – which each carried 80 passengers – except one, which he later saw making its way across the bridge towards the school.

He told the Times: ‘By now, the water was in the school grounds — it was so fast — so I told him to turn around. It got to the other side just as the bridge collapsed.’

Yunisha, a 16-year-old student at the secondary school, said in a BBC interview: ‘I, along with my friends, survived by just 10 seconds.’

Meanwhile, a 97-year-old woman has been rescued from the rubble of her care home after it was destroyed in the flood.

Guna Maya Bohara’s great-nephew, Dipak Bohara, said she ‘smiled as if she was a warrior that had returned after being victorious in a war’ as she was carried away from the scene in the bucket of an excavator.

More than 30 British nationals are still missing after extensive flash flooding hit the Himalayan country.

In its latest update, the Nepalese police said 794 people had been killed in the disaster while a total of 2,502 remain missing.

The flood is thought to have been caused when a huge chunk of ice and rock collapsed from a glacier, an event that registered a magnitude of 5.2 on its own according to the US Geological Survey.

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