Jajarkot Districtजाजरकोट जिल्ला

Jajarkot covers 2,230 km² of steep hill country in the Bheri river basin, climbing from subtropical valley floors (37.3% of its area) through temperate mid-slopes (34.6%) to subalpine ridges (16.9%) toward the Dolpa border. The headquarters, Khalanga in Bheri Municipality, is a ridge-top bazaar town above the Bheri, home to the historic Jajarkot Palace. Seven local levels — three municipalities (Bheri, Chhedagad and Nalgad, the last earlier called Tribeni Nalgad) and four rural municipalities — administer the district.

The 2021 census counted 189,360 people, up 0.96% a year from 2011. The population is overwhelmingly Khas: Chhetri 39.3%, Kami 22.6% and Thakuri 16.2%, with 98.4% speaking Nepali as their first language and 98.7% Hindu. Literacy stands at 75.5%. The economy rests on terrace farming and remittances, and the district has long ranked among Nepal's least served for roads, electricity and health care — a vulnerability the 2023 disaster exposed brutally.

Just before midnight on 3 November 2023, a magnitude 5.7 (Mw; 6.4 on the local scale) earthquake struck with its epicentre at Ramidanda in Barekot Rural Municipality. It killed 153 people — 101 of them in Jajarkot, including the deputy mayor of Nalgad — and injured around 375, making it Nepal's deadliest earthquake since 2015; nearly half of the dead were children. Roughly 62,000 houses across thirteen districts were damaged and 26,550 collapsed outright, most of them traditional stone-and-mud builds that failed while families slept. In Khalanga hardly a house was left intact, over 50 public buildings including the old palace collapsed, and the 50-bed district hospital was forced to treat the injured on floors and verandas.