Nepal Census Atlas

Chapter 1

Where the war was fought

Nepal’s civil war (1996–2006) did not burn evenly across the map. The Maoist insurgency took root in the Mid-Western hills — Rolpa, Rukum, Jajarkot — then spread through Karnali and the Far West, places long distant from Kathmandu’s roads, schools, and power lines.

The census cannot explain why the rebellion began. It can show what those districts still looked like five years after the peace: electric lighting in about 4% of Jajarkot households, 15% in Rukum, 21% in Rolpa. Wood cooked nearly every meal.

The war’s heartland was also the country’s darkest belt of households.

Chapter 2

One country, three Nepals

Pull back from the conflict hills and the 2011 census shows a wider fracture. Literacy and household services did not form one national gradient — they split across Nepal’s three belts: the high Mountains, the Mid Hills, and the Tarai plains.

National median literacy sat at 65%. The map shows how uneven that average was.

Chapter 3

Dense, and left behind

The central Tarai is Nepal’s crowded lowland belt — flat, fertile, and threaded by the East–West Highway. After mid-century malaria control, settlement surged. People and commerce piled onto the plains long before schools and state services caught up.

That is why density here does not look like Kathmandu’s advantage. Madhesi districts were long peripheral to a hill-centered state: Nepali as the language of schooling, thinner public investment, agrarian child labor, and especially low schooling for girls. The 2011 census records the result — Rautahat at 42% literacy and 44% school attendance (ages 5–25), with female literacy only 32%.

Roads move goods. They do not automatically move literacy.

Chapter 4

The men who left

Sex ratios plunge across the western hills: Gulmi at 75 men per 100 women, Syangja 77, Rolpa 83. The census counts who remained — women, children, elders — while labor migration pulled working-age men abroad and to the cities.

Absence is a demographic signature of remittance Nepal.

Chapter 5

The Valley before the quake

This choropleth is still 2011. Overlaid are USGS ShakeMap intensity contours from 25 April 2015 — the Mw 7.8 Gorkha earthquake — with the epicenter marked near Barpak, Gorkha. The census cannot show collapsed buildings; it can show how densely people already clustered in the Valley the quake would reach: Kathmandu ~4,100 / km², Bhaktapur 2,400, Lalitpur 1,200.

Services clustered here too. When the ground shook four years later, it shook a capital that already held the country’s densest risk — inside bands of strong shaking (MMI 5–8).

Vulnerability was visible before the disaster had a date.