Nepal; village pump in the Terai, 1986

Nepal; woman at the village pump in the Rapti Valley, the Terai region, 1986. Two elephants roam in the background. The Terai is a lowland (altitude 300-1000 metres) tropical and sub-tropical belt of flat, alluvial land bordering India and the Ganges plain. In the mid-1980s, it served as Nepal's granary and land resettlement area. Nepal's public health programme had largely controlled malaria although it had not been eradicated. The area had the country's largest commercially exploitable forests although by the early 1990s these were being increasingly destroyed in the demand for timber and agricultural land. The people of the Terai are mostly Hindu.