Salyan Districtसल्यान जिल्ला

Salyan is Karnali's southern flank: 1,462 km² of mostly subtropical hill country (68.3% of its area) whose southwestern salient drops out of the Pahari hill zone altogether into the lower Siwaliks. The Babai river rises through its southwest, the Bheri bounds its west and the Sharad Khola drains the eastern hills. The headquarters is Salyan Khalanga in Sharada Municipality, one of ten local levels (three municipalities and seven rural municipalities — among them Bangad Kupinde, named for the Kupinde lake area).

Ginger is the district's signature crop and one of the biggest concentrations of it in Nepal: around 10,000 Salyani families farm ginger worth roughly Rs200 million a year, with Malneta in Sharada-14 a major hub. For want of a single cold store, farmers still bury their harvest in earthen pits to keep seed rhizomes for the next season — an indigenous technique that loses part of every crop to rot, and a standing example of the gap between Karnali's farm output and its infrastructure. The 2021 census counted 238,515 people, a slight decline from 2011 (−0.16% a year; with Dailekh, one of only two Karnali districts to shrink). Chhetris are 59.0% of the population, Magar 14.6% and Kami 11.2%; literacy, at 77.3%, is the province's second-highest after Surkhet.

Historically Salyan was one of the Baise Rajya, the 22 kingdoms of the Karnali basin, ruled by its Shahi line; it aligned with Gorkha by royal marriage around 1760 during unification, and lent its name to the wider Rapti-Karnali borderlands well into the Rana era. Pilgrimage sites dot its ridges — the hilltop Khairabang Devi temple, counted among a famed set of nine goddess shrines, and the Shiva temples of Chhayachhetra and Laxmipur — while the district's southern roads tie it to Dang and the national highway network.