Indian Geography Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: Wheat

Wheat is the principal rabi crop of India. Rabi crops are sown in October and November as the monsoon withdraws and harvested in March and April, growing through the cool dry season on residual soil moisture, winter rain from western disturbances, and irrigation. The other rabi crops are barley, gram, peas, mustard, linseed and lentils. Rice, jute and cotton are all kharif crops, sown with the arrival of the monsoon in June and harvested in September and October. Maize, jowar, bajra, ragi, groundnut, soyabean and sugarcane belong with them. Wheat needs cool weather at sowing and warm dry weather at ripening, which confines it largely to the northern plains - Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. Punjab and Haryana have the highest yields, helped by assured irrigation and the high-yielding varieties introduced during the Green Revolution. India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat after China.

Answer: A

Correct answer: The northeastern states

Jhum is shifting cultivation, practised chiefly in the hill areas of the northeastern states - Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. A patch of forest is cleared and burnt, the ash fertilising the soil; it is cropped for two or three years until yields fall, then abandoned and left fallow while the cultivators move on. It is also called slash-and-burn agriculture, and the same practice has local names elsewhere - podu in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, bewar in Madhya Pradesh, kumari in the Western Ghats. It was sustainable while the fallow period ran to fifteen or twenty years and the population was small. Shortening cycles have made it a cause of deforestation, soil erosion and declining fertility, and governments have long tried to replace it with terraced or settled farming - with limited success, since it is bound up with land tenure and community practice as much as with agronomy.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Visakhapatnam

Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh is the deepest natural harbour on the east coast and among the busiest ports in India. It handles iron ore, coal, petroleum and general cargo, and it is the headquarters of the Indian Navy’s Eastern Naval Command as well as the site of a major shipbuilding yard and a steel plant. Its depth matters because the east coast is generally shallow and straight, with few natural inlets - unlike the west coast, which is indented and offers Mumbai, Marmagao and Kochi. Chennai is one of the oldest ports in India but is an artificial harbour, built out into the sea because the coast offered no shelter. Paradip in Odisha is a deep-water port developed for iron ore and coal, and Tuticorin, now Thoothukudi, serves southern Tamil Nadu. India has thirteen major ports, roughly divided between the two coasts, and about 95 per cent of the country’s trade by volume moves through them.

Answer: D

Correct answer: the land lying between two rivers

Doab means the land between two rivers, from the Persian do, two, and ab, water. The best known is the Ganga–Yamuna doab in western Uttar Pradesh, exceptionally fertile alluvial land and among the most intensively farmed and densely populated regions of India. Its agricultural wealth made it strategically important throughout Indian history, and Delhi, Agra and Meerut all lie on or near it. The five rivers of Punjab create four further doabs, each with its own name: Bist, Bari, Rechna, Chaj and Sindh Sagar, formed by the Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum and Indus. Those names combine the first syllables of the two rivers bounding each - Bari from Beas and Ravi, Rechna from Ravi and Chenab. The related terms are khadar, the newer alluvium of the active floodplain, and bhangar, the older terraces above flood level, which carry calcareous nodules called kankar and are less fertile.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Karnataka and Tamil Nadu

The Kaveri dispute is chiefly between Karnataka, the upper riparian state where the river rises at Talakaveri in the Western Ghats, and Tamil Nadu, the lower riparian state whose delta depends on it. Kerala and Puducherry are also parties. It is among the longest-running interstate water disputes in India, with roots in agreements of 1892 and 1924 made under British administration. A tribunal was constituted in 1990 and gave its final award in 2007, apportioning the flow; the Supreme Court modified the shares in 2018 and directed the creation of the Cauvery Water Management Authority. Disputes of this kind are governed by the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act of 1972, under which the centre refers a dispute to a tribunal whose award has the force of a Supreme Court decree. The other major disputes are worth knowing: the Ravi and Beas between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan; the Krishna between Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Telugu states; and the Mahanadi between Chhattisgarh and Odisha.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Rajasthan

The Aravalli range runs about 670 km northeast across Rajasthan, from Gujarat towards the Delhi ridge, and is among the oldest fold mountain systems on Earth - Proterozoic, well over a billion years old. Aeons of erosion have worn it down to low, rounded hills. Its highest point, Guru Shikhar on Mount Abu, reaches only 1,722 metres, a fraction of its original height. It plays an important climatic role, forming a barrier that has checked the eastward advance of the Thar Desert towards the fertile Gangetic plain - which is why its degradation through quarrying and deforestation is a live policy concern. It is rich in minerals: the marble of Makrana used for the Taj Mahal, and the zinc and lead of Zawar, among the oldest worked mines in the world. The Banas, Luni and Sabarmati all rise in it, and it divides Rajasthan into the arid west and the more fertile southeast.

Answer: C

All four statements are true.

The southern block is Archaean granite and gneiss; the Deccan lava plateau is a tableland of horizontal basalt sheets laid down at the end of the Cretaceous; the Malwa plateau with its Vindhyan scarps forms the northern flank; and the Narmada and Tapti troughs are rift valleys between the Vindhyan and Satpura ranges.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Kangchenjunga

Kangchenjunga, at 8,586 metres, is the highest peak in India and the third highest in the world. It stands on the border between Sikkim and Nepal. A distinction is worth drawing. Kangchenjunga is the highest point in India but sits on an international boundary; Nanda Devi, at 7,816 metres in Uttarakhand, is the highest peak lying entirely within Indian territory. Which is the correct answer depends on how the question is worded, and both appear in examinations. Everest, the world’s highest at 8,849 metres, lies on the Nepal–Tibet border and not in India at all. K2, the second highest, is in the Karakoram in territory administered by Pakistan and claimed by India. The name Kangchenjunga means the five treasures of the snows, for its five peaks. Its summit is left untrodden by convention, climbers stopping a few metres short out of respect for local belief.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Anamudi

Anamudi in Kerala, at 2,695 metres, is the highest peak of the Western Ghats and the highest point in India south of the Himalaya. It stands in the Anaimalai or Elephant Hills, within Eravikulam National Park. That park is the principal refuge of the Nilgiri tahr, a mountain goat found nowhere else, and the surrounding slopes carry the shola forest and grassland mosaic characteristic of the higher Western Ghats. Doddabetta, at 2,637 metres, is the highest peak of the Nilgiri Hills and the second highest of the range. Kalsubai, at 1,646 metres, is the highest in Maharashtra. Mahabaleshwar is a hill station rather than a peak, and the source of the Krishna. The Western Ghats run about 1,600 km from Gujarat to Kanyakumari, interrupted only by the Palghat Gap, and are a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Odisha

Odisha produces about half of India’s iron ore, chiefly from the Badampahar, Gurumahisani and Sulaipat mines of Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar districts. Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Jharkhand follow. India’s reserves are of high quality, mostly haematite with an iron content above 60 per cent, and are concentrated in a belt running through Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Magnetite, richer still but harder to work, occurs in Karnataka and Goa. The location explains the geography of the steel industry: Rourkela, Bhilai, Bokaro, Durgapur and Jamshedpur all sit close to both the ore and the Damodar valley coalfields, since it is cheaper to bring the two together than to move either far. Goa’s ore is lower grade and was mined largely for export until the Supreme Court suspended mining there in 2012 over illegal extraction. India is among the world’s largest producers and a significant exporter, chiefly to Japan, China and South Korea.