Etymology
The name Dooars is said to have been derived from the word Door in English or ‘Dwar’ in local languages. There are 18 entry points or Doors to Bhutan from Dooars area. The most famous is the main connecting road of Bhutan with India through Phuentsholing – Jaigaon boarder.
Geography
The Dooars area of North Bengal is bound in the East by Assam, on its West is the Plains of Darjeeling district of North Bengal. To its North is Bhutan and to the South is Bangladesh. The Dooars region is mostly in the plains but includes some hilly areas of lower altitude. The area is crisscrossed by a large number of rivers that flow mostly from Bhutan in the North to Bangladesh in the South. Most of the rivers orginate at lower altitude and are fed by monsoon rain. This gives a unique characteristic to the rivers with very low level of water in dry season and sudden high water and even flash floods during monsoon or sudden rain. There are however a few glacier fade large rivers in Dooars. The river Teesta that roughly forms the western boundary of Dooars is the largest river in the region, Torsha and Sankosh are also quite large.
Forests of Dooars
The region used to be part of a continuous stretch of dense forest. The forests were used by the elephants traditionally to migrate from Assam upto the Nepal border. Human habitation has decreased the overall forest cover but even then, Dooars remains home of some of the best forests of the region including several National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries and Forest Reserves.
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