Important Valleys of India: Rivers, States and PYQs

A valley is the low ground between two higher land forms, cut by a river or scooped out by a glacier. India has valleys of every kind: the broad structural basin of Kashmir, the glacial troughs of Ladakh, the longitudinal duns of the Shivalik foothills, the rift valleys of the Narmada and the Tapi, and the rainforest bowl of the Silent Valley in the Western Ghats. Examiners ask this topic as a matching exercise, so the valley must be fixed in the mind with its state, its river and the one thing it is famous for.

How valleys are formed

A river in its youthful stage cuts a narrow V-shaped valley, deepening it by vertical erosion, and where the walls are almost vertical the result is a gorge or a canyon; the Indus and the Brahmaputra have cut some of the deepest gorges in the world where they turn through the Himalaya. A glacier, being a solid mass, scrapes the floor and the sides alike and leaves a U-shaped valley, which is why the valleys of Ladakh and upper Himachal are flat-floored with steep walls; a smaller tributary glacier leaves a hanging valley above the main trough. A rift valley is different in origin: it is a block of land that has subsided between two parallel faults, and the Narmada between the Vindhya and the Satpura, and the Tapi between the Satpura and the Ajanta hills, are India's textbook examples. Between the Lesser Himalaya and the Shivalik lie flat-floored longitudinal valleys called duns in the west and duars in the east, the Dehradun being the best known. In Kashmir the old lake floor has left thick deposits of fine silt and clay called karewas, on which the saffron of Pampore is grown.

Valleys of the Himalaya and the North-East

Valleys of peninsular India

South of the Himalaya the valleys are older and shallower. The Narmada and the Tapi run westward through rift valleys and reach the sea by estuaries rather than deltas, because a down-faulted trough carries no space for a delta. The Damodar flows through a rift valley in the Chotanagpur plateau, and the coalfields of Jharia, Bokaro and Raniganj lie along it; the Damodar Valley Corporation, set up in 1948 on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, was independent India's first multipurpose river valley project. In Kerala the Silent Valley National Park in Palakkad district protects a block of tropical evergreen forest drained by the Kunthipuzha, home to the lion-tailed macaque; the campaign of the 1970s and 1980s against a hydel project there is a landmark in Indian environmental history. The Araku Valley in the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh is known for its coffee and its tribal communities, and the Tirthan Valley in Himachal Pradesh gives access to the Great Himalayan National Park.

Valley names worth remembering

• Valley of the Gods: Kullu, in Himachal Pradesh.
• Valley of Flowers: Bhyundar Valley in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, brought to notice by the mountaineer Frank Smythe in 1931.
• Valley of Flowers of Sikkim: Yumthang, beyond Lachung.
• Valley of Saffron: the Pampore karewas in the Kashmir Valley.
• Silent Valley: Palakkad, Kerala, on the Kunthipuzha.
• Cold desert valleys: Spiti, Lahaul and Nubra.

Why valleys matter in geography answers

Valleys are where India's people live. The Kashmir Valley holds most of the population of its region, the Imphal Valley holds the greater part of Manipur's, and the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys together carry nearly all of Assam's farmland. A valley also decides the route of a road or a railway, which is why the Beas valley carries the way to Manali and the Teesta valley the way to Gangtok. And because a valley concentrates settlement and traffic on a narrow floor, it concentrates risk too: cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides in Himalayan valleys, and waterlogging in the floodplains of the Barak and the Brahmaputra.