Land, land everywhere, but not a patch for those who till. Indeed, land ownership in most districts of Nepal's southern Tarai districts remains highly skewed in favour of high-caste Hindus, who consider it beneath them to hold a plough or haul manure into the rice paddies. Unlike farmers of the hills, agriculturists in the Tarai habitually hire day labourers to cultivate their lands. There is a history behind this anomaly.
Almost the entire Tarai was annexed into the Shah Empire by the khukuris of the Gorkhali Army more than two centuries ago. Victorious commanders were granted landholdings in the Tarai in lieu of part of their salary by King Prithvi Narayan, the first Shah to reign and rule over the annexed territories. Since Gorkhali nobles were soldiers rather than farmers, during the mid-19th century they brought in tillers from the hills to cultivate their possessions. But unable to survive in the fly- and mosquito-infested swamps of the malarial plains, the immigrants from the hills soon fled eastwards, to the valleys of Sikkim, Assam and beyond.
During this period, Awadh and much of then-Bengal, which included present-day Bihar, were reeling under the oppression of the East India Company. Courtiers of the Gorkhali Empire induced some of the pauperised peasantry of the Ganga plains with promises of lower taxes and guaranteed tenure. Since the land did not technically belong to the agricultural contractors of the plains, they preferred to hire day labourers rather than adopt sharecropping.
The condition of the day labourers in these parts has not improved since the day their forebears left oppressive muglan (the land of Mughals) for the promised land of sarhad (the frontier). Indeed, ownership of land continues to elude the descendants of day labourers. Resettlement schemes in the Tarai have mostly served the displaced population of hills origin, rather than the local landless.