UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Bir Shikargah Wildlife Sanctuary lies in the Shivalik tract of Panchkula district. The name itself explains its origin: a bir is an enclosed woodlot and shikargah means a hunting ground, so the area was a hunting preserve of the princely period that was later turned into a protected area.

It lies in Kaithal district and is the largest wildlife sanctuary in Haryana by area, a plantation and scrub tract along the old course associated with the Saraswati, created to restore tree cover and wildlife on land that had little of either.

The Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre at Pinjore in Panchkula district was India's first centre for breeding vultures in captivity, run by the Haryana forest department with the Bombay Natural History Society.

Bhindawas Wildlife Sanctuary is a man-made wetland in Jhajjar district, filled by overflow water from the Jawaharlal Nehru canal. It is the largest wetland in Haryana, was recognised as a Ramsar site in 2021, and hosts a long list of migratory waterbirds each winter.

These were Haryana's first two wetlands recognised under the Ramsar Convention as wetlands of international importance, both in 2021. Sultanpur is in Gurugram district and Bhindawas, the largest wetland in the state, is in Jhajjar district and is filled by overflow from the Jawaharlal Nehru canal.

Kalesar National Park lies in the Shivalik foothills of Yamunanagar district at the north-eastern corner of Haryana, where the state meets Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand along the Yamuna.

Sultanpur National Park stands near Farrukhnagar in Gurugram district, on the road from Gurugram to Jhajjar. It is a shallow freshwater lake ringed by grassland and scrub, the best known protected area of Haryana, and it draws thousands of migratory waterbirds every winter.

These are low pressure systems that form over the Mediterranean and West Asia and travel east with the westerly jet stream, reaching north-west India in winter.

Where canal water has been applied for decades without matching drainage, the water table creeps up towards the surface. Capillary action then draws water upward, it evaporates in the dry heat, and the dissolved salts it carried are left behind as the white crust of kallar or reh.

The Shivalik belt of Panchkula and Yamunanagar carries dry deciduous forest with sal, khair, shisham and sain, while the Aravalli spurs of the south and the dry south-west carry thorn forest of kikar or babool, khejri, ber and dhak.

Karoh Peak stands in the Morni hills of Panchkula district, in the Shivalik belt at the northern edge of the state, and rises to about 1,467 metres.

The peepal, Ficus religiosa, is the state tree of Haryana. It is a long-lived tree of the plain, planted at village meeting places and shrines, and the state's scheme that pays a pension for the care of very old trees protects many peepals among them.

In the national division of the country into agro-climatic regions, the Trans-Gangetic Plains region covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar tract of Rajasthan.

The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, a research institute under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, is at Karnal. It works on reclaiming salt-affected and alkaline land, on gypsum treatment and subsurface drainage, and on salt-tolerant crop varieties, all problems that Haryana's canal-irrigated districts face directly.

Bhur is the light, loose, sandy soil found in Sirsa, Hisar, Bhiwani and Mahendragarh, where Haryana shades into the sandy tract of Rajasthan.

Rausli is the loam of the central Haryana plain, a balanced mixture of sand, silt and clay.

Panchkula lies in the Shivalik foothills at the north-eastern corner of the state.

The Shivalik districts of Panchkula, Ambala and Yamunanagar in the north-east catch the first of the monsoon against the foothills and receive the heaviest rain of the state, while the south-western districts of Sirsa, Bhiwani and Mahendragarh lie towards the dry Thar margin and receive the least.

The loo is the hot, dry wind that blows from the west and north-west over the plains of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh in May and June.

Uttar Pradesh grows most of the Indian mint crop, concentrated in Barabanki, Rampur, Badaun, Sambhal and the neighbouring districts, and the menthol and mint oil distilled from it go largely to export, which has made mint a cash crop of the zaid and early kharif season there.