Geography of India

Home to the Indus Valley civilization and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four major world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism originated here, while Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zorastrianism arrived in the first millennium CE and shaped the region’s diverse culture. Gradually annexed by the British East India Company from the early eighteenth century and colonised by the United Kingdom from the mid – nineteenth century, India became a modern nation – state in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by widespread use of non – violent resistance as a means of social protest.

Location of Geography

• India lies in the northern and eastern hemisphere of the globe between 84′ N and 37°6′ N latitudes and 68°7′ E and 97°25′ E longitudes.
• The southern extent actually goes upto 6°45′ N latitude to cover the last island of the Nicobar group of islands. The southern extremity is called Pygmalion point or Indira point.

• Its total land frontier of 15,200 km passes through marshy, lands, desert, level plains, rugged mountains, snow covered areas and thick forests.
• Besides there is a maritime boundary of 6,100 km along the main land mass which increases to 7,516 km if the coastline of Andaman Nicobar and Lakshadweep Island are added to it.

• India – Afghanistan and Pakistan – Afghanistan international boundary is called the Durand Line, determined as 1 “militarily strategic border between British, India and Afghanistan.”
• The India – China boundary ( 4,225 km ) is a natural boundary running along the Himalayan ranges and is based on various treaties. Its eastern part ( 1,140 km ) is called the McMahon Line.
• The boundary with Pakistan and Bangladesh ( the East Pakistan ) was finalized at the time of partition in 1947 through the “Roadcliffe Award”.
• India is only country which has given its name to an ocean, i.e., Indian ocean encircled by 46 countries ( 27 littoral including Australia, 7 island and 12 land locked countries ). India’s coast is 7,517 kilometers ( 4,671 mi ) long; of this distance, 5,423 kilometers  ( 3,370 mi ) belong to peninsular India, and 2,094 kilometers ( 1,301 mi ) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep Islands. According to the Indian naval hydrographic charts, the mainland coast consists of : 43% sandy beaches.
• 11 % rocky coast including cliffs, and 46% mud flats or marshy coast.

Physical Features in Geography

• India, the major portion of the Indian subcontinent, sits atop the Indian tectonic plate, the northwestern portion of the Indo – Australian Plate.
• Its defining geological processes commenced seventy – five million years ago, when the Indian subcontinent, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a northeastwards drift, lasting fifty million years, across the then unformed Indian Ocean.
• The subcontinent’s subsequent collision with the Eurasian Plate and subduction under it, gave rise to the Himalayas, the planet’s highest mountains, which now abut India in the north and the north – east.
• Plate movement also created a vast trough in the former seabed immediately south of the Himalayas, which was subsequently filled with river – borne sediment, and now forms the Indo – Gangetic Plain.
• To the west of this plain, and cut off from it by the Aravalli Hills, lies the Thar Desert. The original Indian plate now survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India, and extending as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India; these parallel ranges run, west to east, from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat to the coal – rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand.
• To their south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan plateau, flanked on the left and right by the coastal ranges, Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats respectively, contains the oldest rock formations in India, some over one billion years old.

Size and Shape

• India commands a total geographical area of 32,87,263 sq.km. which is roughly 0.57% of the area of the earth and 8.4% of total area of the land hemisphere.
• After Russia, China, Canada, USA, Brazil and Australia. India is the 7th largest country of the world. Its area is almost equal to the area of Europe ( excluding Russia ), one – third of Canada, one – fifth of Russia, eight times of Japan and 12 times of United Kingdom.
• In population – size, India ( 1027 million in 2001 ) is the 2nd gaint country in the world after China ( 12.65 million in 2000 ).
• Its total population is more than the combined population of USA, Russia, Australia, Canada and Japan.
• India has roughly a quadrangular shape. It measure about 3,214 km from north to south and about 2,933 km from east to west, the difference between the two being just 281 km.
• Indian Rivers

• Major Himalayan – origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal, important tributaries of the Ganges include the Yamuna and the Kosi, nicknamed “Bihar’s Sorrow”, whose extremely low gradient causes disastrous floods every year.
• Major peninsular rivers — whose steeper gradients prevent their waters from flooding – inctude the Godavari, the Mahanadi, the Kaveri, and the Krishna, which also drain into the Bay of Bengal, and the Narmada and the Tapti, which drain into the Arabian Sea.
• Among notable coastal features of India are the marshy Rann of Kutch in western India, and the south – western region of the alluvial Sundarbans delta, which India shares with Bangladesh. India has two archipelagos : the Lakshadweep, coral atolls off India’s south – western coast, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a volcanic chain in the Andaman Sea.
• India’s climate is strongly influenced by the Himalayas and the Thar Desert, both of which drive the dynamics of the monsoons.
• The Himalayas prevent cold Central Asian katabatic winds from blowing in, keeping the bulk of the Indian subcontinent warmer than most locations at similar latitudes.
• Concurrently, the Thar Desert plays a ( role in attracting moisture – laden southwest summer monsoon winds that, between June and October, provide the majority of India’s rainfall ).
• Four major climatic groupings predominate in India : Tropical wet, tropical dry, subtropical humid, and montane.

Geography Physiographic Divisions

• The Himalayan mountains are the youngest and the loftiest of the fold mountain systems in the world.
• The Himalayas stretch in the form of an arcuate curve convex to the south for a distance of once 2400 Km from the Indus gorge in the west to the Brahmputra gorge in the east.
• The Himalayas cover an area of nearly 5 lakh Sq. Km.
• The width of the Himalayas varies from 500 Km in Kashmir to 2Q0 Km in Arunachal Pradesh.
• The Pamir, popularly known as roof of the world is the connecting link between the Himalayas and the high ranges of Central Asia.