In the middle of 2023, for the first time in the past 73 years, the title of the most populated country in the world has shifted, with India's population overtaking that of China. These 1.43 billion people, 17.6% of the world's population, call arguably the most diverse region on the planet their home. From the tallest mountains in the world, over dry deserts, the wettest cities, to tropical rain forests and islands, the India has incredible stories to tell, so in this article, we will explore many of these by traveling through the 5 distinct regions of this sub-continent.
Chapter 1: The Himalayas
Before we start, a quick disclaimer: Mapping areas like India's northern border is complicated due to historical and political sensitivities, and it is impossible to please everyone's viewpoints. I will try to use maps showing each country's administered claims, but sometimes third-party maps might differ. Remember, these maps aren't a statement of political opinion but rather tools to explore India's geography. Any perceived political bias is unintentional. With that out of the way, let's dive into the tallest mountain range in the world, which separates India from the rest of the continent.
While the area of elevated land is broad in central Asia, with continuous mountains ranging from the western borders of Uzbekistan to the Chinese province of Henan in the east, the Himalayas are just a thin strip of mountains between the Pakistani Nanga Parbat and the Chinese summit of Namcha Barwa. Between these mountains, India administers the largest region of the Himalayas, with the six Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir under Indian control. Many of these regions are disputed with Pakistan and China claiming them. Still, again, we are considering borders according to who currently lays political control over them and nothing else. The Himalayas and all the neighboring mountain ranges of the Tibetan Plateau, the Hindu Kush to the west, and the Arakan Mountains to the east are created from the Indian tectonic plate ramming into the Eurasian landmass around 10 million years ago.
The powerful collision of the Indian plate has caused these mountains to become the tallest range in the world, with it being the only place where peaks above 8000 meters or 26000 feet can be found. Of the 13 8000-meter-peaks, one of them is located in India in the state of Sikkim. Kangchenjunga rises a total of 8586 meters above sea level, also securing India the title of the third tallest mountain in the world. Up until 1852, it was incorrectly assumed to be the tallest mountain in the world, and technically, it hasn’t been summitted to this day, making it the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world. In 1955, when a British expedition attempted the summit for the first time, a promise to the monarch of the kingdom of Sikkim was kept that the expedition must stop a few meters under the summit to keep it untouched for eternity. The region of these summits is called the “Great Himalayas,” which is a longitudinal belt characterized by most mountains surpassing the 5000-meter mark.
Stretching horizontally just south of that are the lesser and outer Himalayas, with gradually lower and lower peaks. In the lesser Himalayas, deep gorges have been carved by the meltwater from the high glaciers. These gorges extend through the outer Himalayas, where they heavily erode the rolling hills, picking up a lot of sediments, which are then transported to our next region.
Chapter 2: The Indus-Gangetic
Plains The great plains of North India, east Pakistan, and virtually the entirety of Bangladesh are a product of the vast amounts of meltwater that are rushing down from the Himalayan glaciers. The water collects into 2 distinct drainage basins, with the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers in the central and eastern sections and the Indus River in the west. These sediments, which have been deposited around the riverbanks and their tributaries, make the plain one of the most fertile regions in the world, on par with the Nile Delta or the Ukrainian Plain.
The vast amount of alluvium, a term used for sediments that produce very fertile soils, has nourished civilizations for thousands of years now, with the Indus Valley civilization being one of the earliest urbanized centers in the world, over 2500 years before Rome was founded and even around 100 years before the first Pharaoh united the people around the River Nile. Today, this fertility has caused an unbelievable population boom, with over 500 million people living in the watershed of the 3 rivers, with some of India’s most important and most populated cities located on the banks of the Ganges River. If you want to learn more about the Geography of the Ganges and how it impacts the life of millions of Hindus, I made a separate article exploring precisely that. It will be linked in the description below and in an end card after this article. The water for agriculture in the region doesn’t only come from the rivers, though.
Annual summer monsoons regularly pour over the plain, with the eastern parts most affected. Regular floodings are a blessing and a course at the same time to the farmers, as they provide abundant water and destress the need for extra irrigation. However, the intense rainfall can also erode the sediments from the soil and cost billions of dollars in property damage by destroying roads, houses, and farms across the north. In the far east of India, in the state of Meghalaya, the rain gets so extreme that the city of Mawsynram received the title of the rainiest city in the world, receiving an average annual precipitation of 12400 mm per year. To put this into perspective, The UK, which is often said to be a very rainy country, only has an average precipitation ranging between 800 and 1400 mm per year.
As you move westwards and upstream of the Ganges river, however, the rain begins to slow down, and the climate slowly shifts from Subtropical to Semi-Arid and finally to the driest region of India, which brings us to our next destination.
Chapter 3: The Thar Desert
Enclosed by the Indus River plains, Punjab Plains, and the Aravalli hills, the Thar desert forms the only arid landscape of India and is arguably the most interesting desert in the world. A combination of the trade winds and high-pressure zones created by global wind cells divert the annual monsoons to the east of the Thar desert, leaving only 100mm of annual rainfall in the driest places. In many parts, the Thar desert is covered in loose sand, which reaches the desert from the surrounding alluvial plains of the Indus River.
The uncompacted sand is very mobile, and the persistent winds, which caused the diversion of the monsoon, transport these sands across the desert. Everchanging dunes constantly move across the plain, growing and shrinking with the changing weather. Despite these rough and seemingly inhospitable conditions, the Thar desert is far from empty. Since ancient civilizations, people have called the desert their home, and today, an astonishing 27 million people live there. The uncovered bare rock in many places reveals precious resources like phosphor for fertilizers, gypsum for cement, and other building materials. Next to the extraction of natural resources, a very extensive canal network constructed in the mid-20th century also allows for extensive agriculture in the desert.
The Rajasthan Canal, later renamed the Indira Gandhi Canal, redirects water from three rivers in Punjab to the 450 kilometers far away Thar desert, and hundreds of branches and distribution canals totaling 9245 kilometers distribute the water to irrigate a 6700 square kilometers large region of the desert, equivalent to the size of the US state Delaware. While Indians and Pakistanis, who share the desert, have made it more hospitable, they are not fond of the desert expanding into the surrounding fertile lands.
To prevent the dunes from traveling across the boundaries of the desert, windbreaks in the form of shrubs and small trees are installed on dunes, slowing down and eventually stopping their march, and extensive afforestation of previously dead landscapes ensures that the only way the desert will shift is to a greener landscape.
The communities have an unexpected helper for their cause, and nature may by itself transform the desert into a green corridor soon. Global warming has increased the temperature of the equatorial Indian Ocean, which, in the past 120 years of recorded weather data, caused a shift in the monsoon corridor, reducing rainfall in eastern India and concentrating it more and more in Rajasthan, where it continuously moves closer to the Thar desert.
Leaving the plains of the Ganges and Thar desert, the land becomes more elevated again, bringing us to our 4th stop of the journey and the last chapter of the Indian mainland.
Chapter 4: The Peninsular
Extruding into the Indian Ocean lays the oldest and most stable part of the Indian continental shelf, with rock formations dating back to the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, and the undisturbedness makes it the only region of India where Dinosaur fossils can be found. Geographically, this part of the continental shelf can be divided into two main features: the eastern and western Ghats, which are medium-sized mountain ranges, and a far-spanning plateau called the Deccan, which is contained between them.
For the Deccan, no absolute geographical boundaries exist, but it is generally considered the area below the Narmada River, which is the first major river not draining into the Indo-Gangetic Plains. Starting from the Western Ghats, which mark the highest point of the peninsular, a gradual but continuous eastward slope can be made out from the topography, which also leads nearly all rivers of the Plateau draining into the Bay of Bengal instead of the Arabian Sea.
The two largest ones in the Deccan are the Godavari and Krishna Rivers, the 2nd and 3rd longest rivers of India, respectively, which are both considered sacred in Hinduism. Together, they drain nearly 20% of the entire country of India, yet the actual discharge volume is fairly low for such significant and far-reaching rivers. This is caused by the Western Ghats, which act as a rain shield for the vast Deccan Plateau, making it a tropical yet dry and semi-arid region.
The full force of the Monsoons can be experienced at the western foot of the Ghats, where cities like Goa, Mumbai, and Kochi are exposed to annual rainfall exceeding 2 to 3000 millimeters per year. As a comparison, most cities behind the mountains average just 500 mm. Having covered the 4 main areas of the Indian mainland, one last region of the most populated country in the world is left to explore, whose climate is just as rainy as Western Ghat metropoles. Often forgotten when thinking about all the geographical features of India, but the country also has Union Territories, meaning regions directly administered by the federal government, in the Indian Ocean to the west and the east, bringing us to.
Chapter 5: The Islands
India administers two remote archipelagos in front of its shores with the Lakshadweep Archipelago, about 200 kilometers into the Arabian Sea, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, about 1200 kilometers into the Bay of Bengal. These tropical Islands are a strong contrast to the mainland, with the Lakshadweep islands closely resembling the neighboring Maldives and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands appearing more like an exceptionally densely forested extension of Indonesian Sumatra. One of the Andaman Islands regularly makes headlines and is the subject of many documentaries as it is the home of the Sentinelese people, who, in their pursuit of remaining disconnected from the outside world, regularly attack and kill any person who attempts to land on the island. Since the inclusion of the islands into modern India in 1956, it has been illegal to travel to the island, and the Indian Coast Guard guards the tribe's voluntary isolation.
On the other side of the main Andaman Islands lays India’s only active volcano called Barren Island. Opposite to this island group’s volcanic origin story, which has created a relatively large plateau, giving room for hundreds of thousands of people to live on, Lakshadweep is a product of coral reefs emerging out of the ocean and only offer thin lagoons as habitats. This build-up makes Lakshadweep the smallest and least populated of the 36 Indian States and Territories but offers the most picture-perfect beaches.
Tourism in the archipelago still lags strongly behind its Maledive neighbors to the south due to heavy access restrictions, with permits from the mainland being required to access the islands and some islands being entirely off-limits to international tourists. These territories round up our trip through the country of India, which absolutely deserves its title as one of the most diverse countries in the world. From the dramatic summits of the north to the holy river deltas, the buzzing Thar Desert, and the rolling plateau of the Deccan piercing into the Indian Ocean,