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NepalGEOGRAPHY, NEPAL
The Land
![[PDF]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/pdf.gif)
Figure 4. Nepal: Geographic Regions
Source: Based on information from Leo E. Rose and John T. Scholtz,
Nepal: Profile of a Himalayan Kingdom, Boulder, 1980, 4; Nanda R.
Shreshtha, Landlessness and Migration in Nepal, Boulder, 1990,
6; and Pitamber Sharma, Urbanization in Nepal, Honolulu, May 1989,
132.
Sandwiched between two Asian giants--China and
India--Nepal
traditionally has been characterized as "a yam caught
between two
rocks." Noted for its majestic Himalayas, which in
Sanskrit means
the abode of snow, Nepal is very mountainous and hilly.
Its shape
is roughly rectangular, about 650 kilometers long and
about 200
kilometers wide, and comprises a total of 147,181 square
kilometers
of land. It is slightly larger than Bangladesh or the
state of
Arkansas. Nepal is a landlocked country, surrounded by
India on
three sides and by China's Xizang Autonomous Region
(Tibet) to the
north. It is separated from Bangladesh by an approximately
fifteenkilometer -wide strip of India's state of West Bengal, and
from
Bhutan by the eighty-eight-kilometer-wide Sikkim, also an
Indian
state. Such a confined geographical position is hardly
enviable.
Nepal is almost totally dependent on India for transit
facilities
and access to the sea--that is, the Bay of Bengal--even
for most of
the goods coming from China.
For a small country, Nepal has great physical
diversity,
ranging from the Tarai Plain--the northern rim of the
Gangetic
Plain situated at about 300 meters above sea level in the
south--to
the almost 8,800-meter-high Mount Everest, locally known
as
Sagarmatha (its Nepali name), in the north. From the
lowland Tarai
belt, landforms rise in successive hill and mountain
ranges,
including the stupendous rampart of the towering
Himalayas,
ultimately reaching the Tibetan Plateau beyond the Inner
Himalayas.
This rise in elevation is punctuated by valleys situated
between
mountain ranges. Within this maze of mountains, hills,
ridges, and
low valleys, elevational (altitudinal) changes rersulted
in
ecological variations.
Nepal commonly is divided into three broad
physiographic areas:
the Mountain Region, the Hill Region, and the Tarai Region
(see
fig. 4). All three parallel each other, from east to west,
as
continuous ecological belts, occasionally bisected by the
country's
river systems. These ecological regions were divided by
the
government into development sectors within the framework
of
regional development planning.
The rhythm of life in Nepal, as in most other parts of
monsoonal Asia, is intricately yet intrinsically
intertwined with
its physical environment. As scholar Barry Bishop learned
from his
field research in the Karnali region in the northwest, the
livelihood patterns of Nepal are inseparable from the
environment.
Data as of September 1991
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