Siraha Districtसिराहा जिल्ला

Siraha covers 1,188 km² of the eastern Tarai between the Kamala river — its western boundary with Dhanusha — and Saptari to the east, with Bihar along the southern border. The headquarters, Siraha municipality, sits near that border in the south, but the district's largest and most dynamic town is Lahan on the East–West Highway, one of the major urban centres of Madhesh Province. The 2021 census recorded 739,953 people at 623 per km², with the population growing 1.43 percent a year over the decade — second in the province only to Rautahat.

Siraha is among the most linguistically homogeneous districts in the Tarai: Maithili is the mother tongue of 84.6 percent of residents, the highest Maithili share of any Nepali district, with Nepali, Urdu and Tharu each under 4 percent. The district is steeped in Mithila folk religion: at Salhesh Fulbari, the garden site near Lahan associated with the folk hero-king Salhesh, a hooded orchid (Dendrobium aphyllum) blooms around Nepali New Year each April, and the belief that it flowers only for that one day draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Nepal and India. Salhesh himself, venerated from a Dalit hero into a cross-caste demigod, embodies the shared culture of the Nepal–Bihar borderland.

Lahan is also home to one of Nepal's most consequential medical institutions: the Sagarmatha Choudhary Eye Hospital, founded in 1983 as a 12-bed eye unit, has grown into the anchor of the country's largest eye-care network, performing high-volume, low-cost cataract surgery for millions of patients from across eastern Nepal and the bordering Indian states. Beyond the highway towns, the district economy rests on paddy and wheat farming on the Kamala-fed plain, supplemented by remittances; literacy stands at 65.1 percent of those aged five and older.