Jhapa Districtझापा जिल्ला

Jhapa is Nepal's easternmost district, a 1,606 km² slab of Tarai plain wedged between the Mechi river border with India and the first rise of the hills. It contains the lowest land in the country — about 58–60 m above sea level in its southern rice fields — and its flat, fertile geography has made it one of Nepal's great agricultural and migration frontiers. The headquarters is Bhadrapur (the airport locality of Chandragadhi within it lends the HQ its other common name), but the district's commercial pulse runs through the highway towns of Birtamod, Damak and the border municipality of Mechinagar.

With 998,054 people at the 2021 census — up from 812,650 in 2011, a growth rate of 1.97% a year that is the fastest in the province — Jhapa is on the verge of becoming Nepal's third million-person district after Kathmandu and Morang. The plain grows rice and the bulk of Nepal's CTC tea, the lowland counterpart to Ilam's hill-grown orthodox leaf, and the population is famously mixed: hill-origin Bahun and Chhetri settlers alongside the indigenous Rajbanshi, Limbu, Rai and Santal communities, around 110 caste and ethnic groups in all.

Jhapa also carries one of South Asia's defining refugee stories. In the early 1990s more than 100,000 Lhotshampa refugees expelled from Bhutan settled in camps in Jhapa and Morang, the largest being the Beldangi complex near Damak. From 2007 one of the world's biggest third-country resettlement programmes moved over 113,000 of them to the United States and seven other countries; a few thousand still remain in the camps.