Madhya Pradesh Mixed Quiz: Set 1

The Tropic of Cancer, 23 degrees 30 minutes north, crosses Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tripura and Mizoram, moving from west to east.

Dhupgarh rises to 1,350 metres at Pachmarhi, in Narmadapuram district, and is the highest point both of the Satpura range and of Madhya Pradesh.

The Narmada is about 1,312 kilometres long in all, and roughly 1,077 kilometres of that course lies inside Madhya Pradesh, which makes it by a wide margin the longest river of the state.

Madhya Pradesh covers 308,245 square kilometres, about 9.4 per cent of India, which makes it the second largest state after Rajasthan and the largest landlocked state of the country.

Amarkantak lies at the eastern end of the Satpura, where that range, the Maikal hills and the Vindhya come together, and three rivers begin there: the Narmada, which turns west along the rift valley, the Son, which runs east towards the Ganga, and the Johila, a tributary of the Son.

The Tawa rises in the Satpura, drains the Pachmarhi and Betul country and joins the Narmada at Bandrabhan in Narmadapuram district; it is the largest of the Narmada's tributaries.

Madhya Pradesh lies between these parallels and between 74 degrees 9 minutes east and 82 degrees 48 minutes east longitude.

Malwa was covered by the great lava flows that spread over western and central India, and the basalt they left weathers into the deep black cotton soil, locally called regur, which makes Malwa a wheat, gram, cotton and soyabean region.

Bargi stands on the Narmada in Jabalpur district, in the upper part of the valley, and it was the first of the big dams of the Narmada valley scheme to be finished.

Dhupgarh, 1,350 metres, stands in the Pachmarhi group of the Mahadeo hills within the Satpura range and is the highest point of Madhya Pradesh.

The Chambal begins on the Malwa Plateau at Janapav, flows north through Madhya Pradesh into Rajasthan and finally joins the Yamuna, which is why it belongs to the Ganga drainage although it starts in central India.

The Indira Sagar dam stands on the Narmada at Narmadanagar, near Punasa in Khandwa district, and its reservoir holds the largest volume of water of any reservoir in the country.

The Narmada rises on the Amarkantak plateau, at about 1,057 metres, where the Satpura and Maikal ranges meet, and flows westward for about 1,312 kilometres in all, of which roughly 1,077 kilometres lie inside Madhya Pradesh, before reaching the Gulf of Khambhat.

The Vindhya Range runs west to east along the northern edge of the Narmada valley, and the rivers that rise on its northern slope, the Chambal, the Betwa, the Ken and the Tons, go to the Yamuna and the Ganga, while those on its southern slope go to the Narmada.

The Bansagar dam is on the Son near Deolond in Shahdol district, in the Baghelkhand country of north-eastern Madhya Pradesh, and the project is a joint venture of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which is why the same dam turns up in the question papers of all three states.

The Narmada does not flow in a valley cut by its own water but along a long structural trough, a rift, with the Vindhya forming its northern wall and the Satpura its southern wall.

Beyond the Son valley the Vindhyan rocks continue east as the Kaimur range, which passes through the Rewa and Satna country of Madhya Pradesh into Uttar Pradesh and then into the Kaimur and Rohtas districts of Bihar, where it forms the southern plateau fringe of that state.

The Gandhi Sagar dam is the uppermost of the four works of the Chambal valley project and stands on the Chambal in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh.

The Chambal rises at Janapav hill near Mhow in Indore district, on the southern edge of the Malwa plateau, and flows north and then north-east into the Yamuna, cutting the deep ravines that form the boundary between Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Pachmarhi lies in the Mahadeo hills of the Satpura in Narmadapuram district, at a height of about a thousand metres, and is the only hill station in Madhya Pradesh.