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Hearing on the writ petition filed in the Supreme Court against the government appointment of Additional Inspector of General of Police Dhiraj Pratap Singh as the chief of Nepal Police has begun.

A single bench of Justice Sushmalata Mathema has heard the petition, according to Debendra Dhakal, joint spokesperson for the apex court.

Additional Inspector of General of Police Bishworaj Pokharel on May 2 filed the petition against the promotion of AIG Singh to the 29th IGP of Nepal Police. A Cabinet meeting on May 1 promoted Singh to the IGP.

The writ petition demanded annulment of the promotion of Singh as he is one-and-a-half year junior to him.

Five persons including a child died when a bus carrying pilgrims and a Tata Sumo collided with each other at Roshi Rural Municipality-11 in Kavre on Wednesday.

The bus bearing Indian registration number plate (UP 583 B 8181) heading towards India from Kathmandu collided head-on with the Tata Sumo (Ba 1 Cha 4210) en route to Kathmandu from Sindhuli this afternoon, DSP Hari Khatiwada, spokesperson at the District Police Office, Kavre said.

He said that 18 persons were injured in the incident and are receiving treatment in Dhulikhel.

India registered about 475,000 more total deaths in 2020 than the previous year, government data released months ahead of schedule on Tuesday showed, as the World Health Organization readies its estimates of excess COVID-19 deaths whose methodology New Delhi has opposed, Reuters reported.

Some experts estimate India's actual COVID death toll is as high as 4 million, about eight times the official figure, especially as a record wave driven by the Delta variant killed many people in April and May of last year. The WHO's estimate will be published on Thursday.

Vinod Kumar Paul, a top health official who has overseen India's fight against the pandemic, said there was nothing "dramatic" in the total death data for 2020 and that those were "absolute, correct and counted numbers".

He said the data showing 8.1 million total deaths in India in 2020 was released by the Office of the Registrar General two to three months in advance because of the attention on the country's COVID toll, according to Reuters.

"There is a public narrative in the media, based on various modelling estimates, that India's COVID-19 deaths are many times the reported figure - that's not the case in reality," he told state TV.

"We now have actual data for 2020, there is no need to do any modelling now. We will have actual, robust data for 2021 too. Modelling can lead to overestimation, absurd estimation."

The death count grew slower in the country of 1.35 billion people in 2020 than in the previous two years, the data showed.

India officially reported 148,738 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, with the tally jumping to 523,889 on Tuesday out of more than 43 million cumulative infections. Only the United States and Brazil have recorded more deaths as of Tuesday.

Countries around the world reported only 1.83 million COVID-19 deaths in 2020 but the WHO estimates excess mortality of at least 3 million globally for that year.

India has said it does not agree with the WHO's methodology, though the scientists working on the latest estimates have defended it, Reuters reported.

A hoax bomb call created panic at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu on Wednesday morning, promoting the airport officials to halt the flights for an hour.

Passengers were evacuated from the airport soon after the officials received a call from an unidentified person claiming that there was a bomb at the airport's domestic terminal.

Though a joint team from the Nepal Police and Nepal Army carried out a search operation following the information, they did not find any suspicious object.

Now, the situation is under control and the flights have also resumed, an airport official said.