Geography Quiz: Agro-Climatic Zones and Land Use of India

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, and zone three B is the flood prone eastern plain, which covers Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur, Karauli and Sawai Madhopur, the districts drained by the Banganga, Gambhir and Chambal where heavy monsoon flows cause waterlogging.

In 1988 the Planning Commission adopted a division of the country into fifteen agro-climatic zones so that crops, irrigation, credit and research could be planned for areas that are uniform in rainfall, temperature, soil and cropping pattern.

The Trans-Gangetic Plain zone lies beyond the Yamuna, that is on the Punjab side of the Ganga system, and takes in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar belt of Rajasthan; its canal and tubewell irrigation supports the wheat and rice rotation of the green revolution.

The Western Dry zone is western Rajasthan, the Thar region west of the Aravalli, with low and uncertain rainfall, sandy soil and a short growing season, so its crops are bajra, moth, guar and other hardy millets and pulses, with animal husbandry as the main support.

This head covers land that could be cultivated but has lain unused for more than five years, usually because it has become saline, waterlogged, eroded or short of water, and bringing it back into use is a standing aim of land reclamation programmes.

Gross cropped area is a derived measure, not a land use head: it counts a field as many times as it is cropped in an agricultural year, so the same hectare can appear twice or thrice, and it is used with net sown area to calculate cropping intensity.

The ratio tells how many crops the sown land carries in an agricultural year, so a value of a hundred would mean a single crop everywhere and the Indian figure of about 140 per cent means that a large part of the land bears a second crop, mainly where irrigation…

The National Forest Policy of 1952 laid down that one third of the total geographical area of the country should be under forest, and it fixed separate norms inside that target: about 60 per cent in the hills, where tree cover protects the slopes and the catchments, and about 20…

Kharif crops are sown in June and July as the south west monsoon arrives and harvested in September and October, and they are the rain dependent crops: rice, jowar, bajra, maize, cotton, groundnut, soyabean and tur.

The fifteenth of the Planning Commission zones is a separate Islands region made up of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea, with equatorial rainfall, thin coral or lateritic soils and coconut, areca nut, spices and fisheries as the mainstay.

The Lower Gangetic Plain, essentially West Bengal, has heavy rainfall, humid air and the alluvium of the delta, the conditions jute needs for growing and for retting, and it grows rice and potato along with it.

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, which run from the arid western plain and the hyper arid partially irrigated zone in the west, through the irrigated north western plain and the two transitional plains of inland drainage and the Luni basin, to the semi arid and flood prone eastern…