The Shah rulers of a nascent Nepal initially saw the terai wilderness of their new kingdom as a potential source of agricultural expansion, and they actively encouraged the Tharu to increase their taxable farming output through land grants and incentive packages for local communities. But it did not take long for the Shahs to realize there were even more pressing reasons to keep the forests and grasslands of the terai uncultivated and intact, and that the Tharu people were far more useful as guardians of the forest than as destroyers of it.
