Our Country, India
The rivers of India
Tell India's Himalayan rivers from its peninsular rivers, follow the Ganga from its glacier to the sea, and say which sea each of the great rivers reaches.
India's rivers come in two families, and once you can tell them apart the map makes much more sense. The Himalayan rivers begin in the mountains of the north. The peninsular rivers begin in the hills of the plateau in the south. They behave differently, they end in different seas, and the difference starts with where their water comes from.
The two families
A Himalayan river — the Indus, the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and their tributaries — is fed by melting snow as well as by rain, so it carries water all year round. A peninsular river — the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna, the Kaveri, the Narmada and the Tapi — is fed by rain alone, so it runs full in the rainy season and shrinks in the dry one.
The Ganga is the greatest of them. It begins where the Gangotri glacier melts, high in the Himalayas, and flows south and then east right across the Northern Plains. Its longest tributary, the Yamuna, joins it at Prayagraj. Near the sea it meets the Brahmaputra, which has come down through Assam, and together the two build the Sundarbans — the largest delta in the world, whose seaward edge carries the mangrove forest the same name is famous for — before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The third of the great Himalayan rivers, the Indus, rises in the mountains and flows the other way, westwards; most of its course today is in Pakistan, and it ends in the Arabian Sea.
The peninsular rivers cross old, hard rock rather than soft plains. Most of them — the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna, the Kaveri — flow eastwards and empty into the Bay of Bengal, building deltas as they arrive. They flow east because the plateau is higher along its western edge and slopes down towards the east, and water can only run downhill. The Godavari is the longest of them, so long that it is sometimes called the Ganga of the south.
Two peninsular rivers are exceptions and are worth remembering as a pair: the Narmada and the Tapi flow westwards, into the Arabian Sea. They do not build deltas. Each ends instead in an estuary — the wide, funnel-shaped kind of mouth, with the tide running in and out of it.
Worked example
You are told about a river that rises in the mountains of the north, is full even in the middle of a dry summer, and reaches the Bay of Bengal. Which family is it in, and how do you know?
It rises in the mountains of the north, so it is a Himalayan river.
Where a river begins is the first thing that puts it in one family or the other.
Try it together
Follow the Ganga from the mountains to the sea.
Answer each step with a name.
1.The river begins where a glacier melts high in the Himalayas. Which glacier is that?
Have a go
Have a go on your own. Which of India's two families of rivers keeps its water all year because melting snow feeds it?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.