Rautahat Districtरौतहट जिल्ला

Rautahat spans 1,126 km² of the central Tarai between Bara to the west and the Bagmati river, which divides it from Sarlahi, to the east; 94.4 percent of the district lies below 300 metres. The headquarters Gaur sits on the Indian border in the far south, while Chandrapur anchors the district's north on the East–West Highway. Administratively Rautahat is a Nepali outlier: its 18 local levels include 16 municipalities and only 2 rural municipalities (Durga Bhagwati and Yamunamai) — no other district has as many municipalities.

The 2021 census counted 813,573 people, up from 686,722 in 2011 — an annual growth rate of 1.63 percent, the fastest in Madhesh Province — at a density of 723 per km². Bajjika is the mother tongue of 72.4 percent of residents, making Rautahat the core of Nepal's Bajjika-speaking belt, with Urdu (10.0 percent) a distant second. Muslims make up 22.6 percent of the population, the largest share of any Nepali district, alongside a 75.7 percent Hindu majority. The district also records Nepal's lowest literacy rate: 57.8 percent of those aged five and older — the hard floor of the national education statistics and a key fact for understanding the Tarai's development gap.

Rautahat's economy is dominated by paddy, sugarcane and vegetable farming on the Bagmati-fed plain; the district is one of five Madhesh districts whose farmland the Sunkoshi–Marin diversion and the Bagmati irrigation system are being engineered to water year-round, against monsoons that swing between drought and the floods the Bagmati regularly delivers. Gaur's border bazaar trades directly with Bihar, and the Nunthar hills at the district's northern fringe mark the first rise of the Churia range.