Cities on River Banks and Industrial Towns of India

Settlements grow where water is. Almost every old city of India stands on a river or at a confluence, because the river gave drinking water, irrigation, a transport route, a defensive line and a place of pilgrimage. Industry followed the same logic later, adding two more conditions, a mineral or a raw material near at hand and a railway to carry the product away. Examiners turn both patterns into one-mark matching questions, so this topic has to be learnt as lists: the city with its river, and the town with the thing it makes.

Why cities grew on river banks

A river bank gives a city five things at once: water for drinking and for crops on the flood plain, silt that keeps the surrounding land fertile, a cheap waterway before the age of railways, a natural defence on one flank, and in India a ghat where people bathe and perform rites. Varanasi on the Ganga, Prayagraj at the meeting of the Ganga and the Yamuna, Haridwar where the Ganga leaves the mountains and Nashik on the Godavari all combine trade with pilgrimage. Capital cities repeated the pattern: Delhi on the Yamuna, Srinagar on the Jhelum, Lucknow on the Gomti, Patna on the Ganga and Guwahati on the Brahmaputra.

Indian cities and their rivers

World cities and their rivers

London stands on the Thames, Paris on the Seine, Rome on the Tiber, Berlin on the Spree, Moscow on the Moskva and Cairo on the Nile. Baghdad is on the Tigris. The Danube is the river of three capitals, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, which is a favourite matching question. In Asia, Dhaka stands on the Buriganga, Bangkok on the Chao Phraya, Lahore on the Ravi and Kabul on the Kabul river. In the United States, Washington is on the Potomac and New York at the mouth of the Hudson, while in China Shanghai stands on the Huangpu, a tributary near the mouth of the Yangtze.

Industrial towns of India

Indian industry grew in clusters. Cotton textiles went to Mumbai and Ahmedabad, where the black soil tract, the port and the humid climate came together, and to Coimbatore in the south. Iron and steel went to the Chhotanagpur plateau and its edges, where coal, iron ore, manganese and water lie close to one another. The public sector steel plants of the second and third plans were built with foreign collaboration: Bhilai in Chhattisgarh and Bokaro in Jharkhand with Soviet help, Rourkela in Odisha with German help and Durgapur in West Bengal with British help, while the first large private plant was Tata Iron and Steel at Jamshedpur, founded in 1907. The railway workshops are a cluster of their own: the Integral Coach Factory at Perambur near Chennai, the Rail Coach Factory at Kapurthala, the electric locomotive works at Chittaranjan and the locomotive works at Varanasi.

Nicknames examiners ask

Ahmedabad is called the Manchester of India for its cotton mills and Coimbatore the Manchester of South India. Kanpur is the Leather City, Jamshedpur the Steel City and Dhanbad the coal capital of India because of the Jharia field. Bengaluru is both the Garden City and the Silicon Valley of India, Surat the Diamond City and Nashik the wine capital for its grape belt. Jaipur is the Pink City, Jodhpur the Blue City, Jaisalmer the Golden City and Kochi the Queen of the Arabian Sea.

How the two lists connect

Many industrial towns are on rivers for a reason: water is needed in tonnes to make steel, paper, fertiliser and cloth, and effluent has to go somewhere. Jamshedpur on the Subarnarekha, Kanpur on the Ganga, Ahmedabad on the Sabarmati and Surat on the Tapi all grew at a site where water, a railway and a raw material met. That is also why river pollution in India is worst where industry is thickest, and why the Ganga action plans concentrate on the stretch from Kanpur to Varanasi.