About the Mahananda
The Mahananda rises in the mist-covered Darjeeling hills — the world's most celebrated tea-growing landscape — and flows south through the West Bengal Terai before entering Bihar and eventually joining the Ganga in Bangladesh. The river drains the southern slopes of the Singalila Ridge, home of red pandas and the extraordinary Sandakphu viewpoint where four of the world's five highest mountains are visible simultaneously. The Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary in the Terai protects the river's lower forested corridor.
The Mahananda valley's eastern sub-Himalayan landscape is one of the world's most biodiverse transition zones — where the subtropical forests of the Terai give way to the temperate forests of the Darjeeling hills, creating an extraordinary compression of habitats across just 50 kilometres of altitude. Asian elephants, Gangetic dolphins, and river otters inhabit the lower river while red pandas and clouded leopards live in the hills above. The Siliguri Corridor — the narrow strip of Indian territory that connects northeast India to the rest of the country — is threaded by the Mahananda and its tributaries.
Mechi · Kankai · Balasan