Mechi

The Mechi rises in the Mahabharat hills near Ilam, in the tea country of Nepal's far east, gathering the Deumai and Jogmai kholas before descending to the Jhapa plain. From there to the Indian border it is the boundary itself, separating Nepal from West Bengal, before it crosses into India and joins the Mahananda in Bihar's Kishanganj district — whose waters carry on through the Mahananda to the Ganga.

At Kakarbhitta (Kakarvitta) in Mechinagar municipality, the bridge over the Mechi is Nepal's main eastern gateway: the principal land crossing for trade and travellers between eastern Nepal and India's Siliguri corridor, with the customs post on the river's west bank.

Though a modest, rain-fed river with a wide seasonal gravel bed, the Mechi looms large in Nepali geography: it named the former Mechi zone, and the phrase 'Mechi to Mahakali' — this river in the east to the border river in the far west — remains the standard Nepali idiom for the whole country, end to end.