Geography Quiz: Peninsular Plateau and Coastal Plains

Gujarat has the longest coastline of any Indian state. Its shore runs from the Rann of Kachchh round the Gulf of Kachchh, along the whole Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula and down the Gulf of Khambhat, and this deeply indented outline gives it far more shore than any other state.

Doddabetta, about 2,637 metres high, is the highest point of the Nilgiri hills, the block where the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats meet, and it overlooks the hill station of Udhagamandalam or Ooty in Tamil Nadu.

Anaimudi rises to about 2,695 metres in the Anaimalai hills of Kerala, south of the Palakkad Gap, and it is the highest summit anywhere in the Peninsular Plateau and indeed in India south of the Himalayas.

The Palakkad Gap, also spelt Palghat, is the widest break in the Western Ghats, lying between the Nilgiri hills to the north and the Anaimalai hills to the south.

The Narmada flows west between the Vindhyan range and the Satpuras along a trough formed by faulting, that is, a rift valley, and it empties into the Gulf of Khambhat through a broad estuary rather than a delta.

Chilika lies on the Utkal coast of Odisha, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sandbar, and it is the largest brackish-water lagoon in India, famous for its migratory birds and for its population of Irrawaddy dolphins.

Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, fissure eruptions poured out sheet after sheet of lava over western and central India; the hardened lava is basalt and the stepped landscape it makes is called the Deccan Trap.

The southern section of the western coastal plain, lying in Kerala, is called the Malabar coast, and it is distinguished by its kayals, the shallow lagoons and backwaters such as Vembanad and Ashtamudi that are linked into an inland waterway.

Lying mainly in Jharkhand with parts in Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, and drained by the Damodar, it holds India's richest concentration of coal along with iron ore, mica, bauxite and copper; the cluster of collieries, steel plants and power stations along the Damodar has earned it the nickname Ruhr…

The eastern coastal plain is divided into three named stretches, and the southern one, running along Tamil Nadu, is the Coromandel coast; it receives much of its rain from the retreating north-east monsoon in October and November, unlike the rest of India.