Religion in Nepal

The country has an area of 54,363 square miles (140,800 km²) and a population of 28 million. Hindus constitute approximately 81 percent of the population; Buddhists, 11 percent; Muslims, the majority Sunni, 4.2 percent; and practitioners of Kirant (an indigenous animist religion) and others, 4 percent, of which 0.45 percent are Christian. Christian leaders conservatively estimated their number of adherents at more than 800,000. Press reports indicated that there are more than 170 Christian churches operating in Kathmandu alone. According to the chairman of the Madrassah Islamiyah Association, there are almost 2,500 madrassahs. Twenty thousand Tibetan Buddhist refugees reside in the country.
There were no missionaries officially operating in the country.

Nepal was formerly the world's only constitutionally declared Hindu state, but following the movement for democracy in early 2006 and the breaking of King Gyanendra's power, the Nepali Parliament amended the constitution to make Nepal a secular state.
According to the 2001 census, 80.6 percent of Nepalese are Hindu, 10.7 percent are Buddhist, 4.4% are Muslim^[1], 3.6 percent are Kirat (an indigenous religion with Hindu influence), 0.5 percent are Christian, and 0.4 percent are classified as other groups such as Bön religion. Although the population is mostly Hindu, since the 1971 census Hindus have shown the greatest decline as a proportion of the population, and Buddhists and Kirats have increased the most: in 1678 Hindus were 89.4 percent of the population, Buddhists 7.5 percent, and Kirats statistically 0 percent. However, statistics on religious groups are complicated by the ubiquity of dual faith practices, particularly among Hindus and Buddhists. Moreover, shifts in the population's religious composition also reflect political changes.