Sindhuli Districtसिन्धुली जिल्ला

Sindhuli is the largest Bagmati district by area (2,491 km²), an inner-Tarai and hill district southeast of the Kathmandu Valley. The Mahabharat range walls its north along the Sunkoshi river, the Churia (Chure) hills run along its south, and between them lie the Sindhuli and Kamala valleys, opening onto the Kamala plain toward the Madhesh border. The Japanese-assisted BP Highway, two-thirds of whose length crosses Sindhuli on a famously serpentine alignment, dramatically shortened the road journey between Kathmandu and the eastern Tarai when it opened and turned the once-isolated district into a national transit corridor.

The 2021 census counted 300,026 people — virtually static (+0.12% per year) since 2011, an unusual balance between inner-Tarai growth and hill out-migration. The district headquarters has been at Sindhulimadhi, in today's Kamalamai Municipality, since 1967. Farming dominates the economy — rice and maize in the valleys, and the district's signature crop, junar (sweet orange), grown on Mahabharat slopes between roughly 800 m and 1,300 m, which has made Sindhuli one of Nepal's leading citrus producers.

Sindhuli's name is fixed in Nepali national memory by Sindhuli Gadhi, the hill fort about 20 km east of the headquarters. Here in October 1767 Gorkhali troops ambushed and routed a roughly 2,400-strong British East India Company expedition under Captain George Kinloch that had been sent to relieve the besieged Kathmandu Valley kings — the first armed clash between Nepal's emerging state and the Company, and a victory that cleared the way for Prithvi Narayan Shah's conquest of the valley two years later. The restored fort area, with its old stone ramparts and commanding views, is now the district's main historical attraction.