Nepalgunj is located in the south west of Nepal in Banke District. It is one of the major cities of the Terai with a population of about 50,000. The Terai is a track of land running horizontally across the southern border of Nepal which is essentially an extension of the North Indian plains. If you divide Nepal horizontally into three roughly equal sections, the northern most section would be the Himalayas, the middle section would be the hills and the southern section the Terai. The Terai is home to most of Nepal’s population and is the source of most of Nepal’s food. Despite this, most of the Terai’s population has been excluded from the political process and in fact the area is the poorest in Nepal. These facts made the Terai the heartland of the Maoist campaign and the most politically volatile region of Nepal today.

All of these facts about the Terai region can in fact be seen in a walk through Nepalgunj. The geography is flat, the weather is hot and only on a clear day can you even make out the foothills of the Himalayas rising up from the horizon. Poverty is a reality lived by many in Nepalgunj and anyone walking through the city cannot help but to recognize it. Sometimes it seems that half of the population works as rickshaw drivers, spending most of their time looking for fares and not finding them. Beyond the rickshaw drivers there are armies of peddlers with some having nothing more than a handful of mangoes to sell. Perhaps even worse off than the drivers and the peddlers are the many people who clearly have nothing to do and can be seen lounging about in packs on every corner of the city.

Despite the poverty, Nepalgunj is a very commercial city. If you walk along the main road, every building you see is a shop stuffed with goods, often randomly assembled together with no clear theme. There are only two significant roads in Nepalgunj, Sukhet Road and the bazaar road. Whereas Sukhet Road is straight, broad and packed with bikes, rickshaws, motorcycles and huge freight trucks coming from India, the bazaar road is a narrow, winding street that takes you through lines of small buildings and temples. The shops here are smaller, darker and the shelves are usually only sparsely filled. Shopkeepers seem to spend most of the day sleeping, while their children run the shop and play intermittently.

While these two significant roads are all crowds and movement, if you walk just 5 minutes east, west or north (south is India) from the edges of this activity you will find yourself in the middle of vast farmlands. Peaceful and quiet, this aspect of the Terai is in sharp contrast to what you see walking through the city.

As for political volatility, I have not seen any yet, but you can certainly see the roots of it from walking the streets with the poor and the disenfranchised clearly outnumbering the ranks of the contented. In December there were ethnic based riots in Nepalgunj, during which a dozen or so people were killed. These riots here started a wave of violence across the Terai among Madheshi peoples, who are of Northern Indian descent and among the worst off economically and most underrepresented politically. While this particular conflict has since moved more to the Eastern Terai, it started in Nepalgunj. So overtones of political volatility are certainly present, but I for one am hoping the instabilities and tensions stay dormant during my three months here.