Geography Quiz: Important Valleys of India

The Kashmir Valley is a broad structural basin about 135 kilometres long lying between the Pir Panjal in the south-west and the Great Himalaya, with its Zanskar branch, in the north-east; the Jhelum meanders across its flat floor and leaves it through a gorge at Baramulla into the Wular lake.

The Nubra Valley lies north of Leh, reached across the Khardung La, where the Nubra river joins the Shyok, itself a tributary of the Indus; the sand dunes at Hunder carry the double-humped Bactrian camels left behind by the old Central Asian caravan trade, and the Diskit monastery stands above…

The Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh, along the Beas between Manali and Bhuntar, is called the Valley of the Gods because of the many village deities carried in procession at the Kullu Dussehra, which begins on the day the festival ends elsewhere in India.

The Valley of Flowers National Park lies in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, in the Bhyundar valley drained by the Pushpawati, and it is inscribed on the World Heritage list together with the Nanda Devi National Park.

The Silent Valley National Park in the Palakkad district of Kerala, part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, is drained by the Kunthipuzha, a tributary of the Bharathappuzha, and the park protects one of the last undisturbed blocks of tropical evergreen forest in the Western Ghats, with the lion-tailed macaque as…

Duns, called duars in the eastern Himalaya, are flat-floored longitudinal valleys formed where coarse sediment carried down by Himalayan rivers was trapped between the Lesser Himalaya and the rising Shivalik range.

A rift valley is a strip of land that has subsided between two roughly parallel faults, and both the Narmada, between the Vindhya and the Satpura, and the Tapi, between the Satpura and the Ajanta hills, occupy such troughs.

Yumthang lies beyond the village of Lachung in north Sikkim, at roughly 3,500 metres, and the Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary around it gives the valley the popular name of the Valley of Flowers of Sikkim; hot springs rise on the bank of the Lachung river and the Zero Point lies further…

The Ziro Valley in the Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh is the home of the Apatani, who grow rice and rear fish in the same flooded field without using draught animals, a system studied as a model of sustainable wet-land farming; the valley is on India's tentative list for…

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1948, the first multipurpose river valley project of independent India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had combined flood control, irrigation, navigation and power generation in one basin…

Karewas are thick beds of fine clay, silt and sand laid down on the floor of a Pleistocene lake that once filled the Kashmir Valley; they form flat terraces above the Jhelum's floodplain, and the karewas around Pampore in Pulwama district produce the saffron for which the valley is famous…