Malaria kept the Terai wild until DDT opened it to settlers
At the foot of the Himalayas lies a belt of marshy lowland, tall grass and sal forest called the Terai. For centuries its fevers and predators kept most outsiders away, leaving it to peoples such as the Tharu, reputed to resist malaria. A 1960s spraying campaign changed who lives there.
The Terai runs along southern Nepal and northern India between the Sivalik Hills and the Indo-Gangetic Plain, stretching in India from the Yamuna eastward to West Bengal. In Nepal it covers nearly 34,000 square kilometres, about 23.1 percent of the country, at elevations of just 67 to 300 metres, with more than 50 wetlands. The name, in Nepali, Hindi and Urdu alike, means low-lying land at the foot of the hills, and it has been summed up as low, marshy ground. Just above it runs the Bhabar, a forest strip roughly 8 to 12 kilometres wide.
Great Himalayan rivers such as the Ganges, Karnali, Narayani and Kosi spill out of the hills here and spread alluvial fans over thousands of square kilometres, renewing the soil with fresh silt each year. That richness has a cost. Where clearing and farming leave permeable gravel and sand, the water table sinks; where clay dominates, groundwater rises and monsoon floods can be massive, as in Bihar in 2008. Rainfall runs from around 1,600 millimetres a year in the west to as much as 3,000 in the east.
The Tharu and Dhimal are its indigenous peoples. The Tharu were once semi-nomadic, practising shifting cultivation and gathering wild foods and herbs, while the Dhimal kept to forest edges to dodge outbreaks of disease. Nepal's Shah rulers encouraged settlement from the late 18th century, and their officers hunted elephants and rhinos, snaring 200 to 300 elephants a year by the century's end. The British, who saw the region as lawless and prized its timber, began heavy logging in the 1920s.
The decisive change came after DDT spraying against malaria in the 1960s, when large numbers of hill people and others moved down in search of farmland. By June 2011 the Nepal Terai held more than 13.3 million people from over 120 ethnic groups and castes, and land ownership largely sets rural status.
Source: Terai
