Samdrup Jongkhar ( Dzongkha:བསམ་གྲུབ་ལྗོངས་མཁར་) is a

town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an ori ...

and seat of

Samdrup Jongkhar District Samdrup Jongkhar District ( Dzongkha: བསམ་གྲུབ་ལྗོངས་མཁར་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie: ''Bsam-grub Ljongs-mkhar rdzong-khag'') is one of the 20 dzongkhags (districts) comprising Bhutan. The dominant langua ...

Bhutan Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...

. The town is located at the south-eastern part of Bhutan and borders the Indian state of

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

. Though there is no clear historical record of the development of the town, it is said to have developed as a result of the construction of the Samdrup Jongkhar-Tashigang national highway in the 1960s. In the past the Sharchops of Tashigang, Dundsan, Orong and Yangtse used to trade in a small Indian border town in Assam called Gudama (current day Daranga or Darranga Mela, better known as Mela Bazar"Darranga Mela - a place of tourism and business" http://www.assamspider.com/resources/3993-Daranga-Mela-place-tourism-business.aspx). Today it is one of the most important trading towns for the eastern districts of Bhutan. Near the border is Hanumaan Mandir in NK Darranga, a temple run by Hanumaan Mandir Charity in which there are both Bhutan and Indian people member. After 2003, due to insurgency problems, much of the business was halted, causing a ripple effect on the developmental and socio-economic life of the people of most of eastern Bhutan. Samdrup Jonkhar Dzongkhag has a mix of population largely dominated by the Sharchops and by

Lhotshampa The Lhotshampa or Lhotsampa ( ne, ल्होत्साम्पा; ) people are a heterogeneous Bhutanese people of Nepalese descent. "Lhotshampa", which means "southern borderlanders" in Dzongkha, began to be used by the Bhutanese state i ...

s in Bangtar. It is also an important economic center of the country where coal mining is an important contribution to the country's economy.

References

External links

Satellite map at Maplandia.com
Populated places in Bhutan {{Bhutan-geo-stub