Kamala

The Kamala rises at about 1,200 m near the historic Sindhuligadhi fort, on the low ridgeline where the Mahabharat and Churia ranges meet in Sindhuli. It cuts through the Churia onto the Madhesh plains and runs south across the heart of old Mithila into Bihar, where — after roughly 328 km in total — it joins the Kareh (the lower Bagmati) at Badlaghat in Khagaria district, its waters ultimately reaching the Koshi and the Ganga.

Draining a 7,232 km² catchment with no snow in it, the Kamala is the archetypal Churia-fed river: silt-heavy and dangerous in the monsoon, meagre in the dry season. Its floods regularly inundate the densely farmed Tarai — the 2003–04 flood seasons affected on the order of a million people across the Kamala and neighbouring rivers — while dry-season irrigation systems at the tail ends run short of water.

That mismatch is exactly why the Kamala matters to planners. Its plains are some of Nepal's most productive rice land, served by barrages and canals on both sides of the border (India operates the Kamala barrage at Jainagar), and the basin was chosen for Nepal's first basin-scale water strategy: the Kamala Basin Water Resources Development Strategy (2021), prepared by WECS with Australia's CSIRO, now being implemented with ICIMOD support — pairing Chure watershed conservation with better dry-season allocation. Older proposals to top the river up with Sun Koshi water remain on the books.