UPSC GK Questions 2026

At Bhedaghat, a short distance from Jabalpur, the Narmada falls over a ledge as the Dhuandhar, so called because the spray rises like smoke, and then runs for a few kilometres between white and pink marble cliffs, the Marble Rocks.

The Sardar Sarovar is the terminal dam of the Narmada valley scheme, in Gujarat, and its reservoir submerges villages upstream in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

The tribunal was constituted in 1969 under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act to settle the sharing of the Narmada, and it delivered its award in 1979, dividing the river's water among Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan and fixing the height and the rehabilitation terms of the Sardar Sarovar.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Nimar plain is the lower part of the Narmada valley, around Khandwa, Khargone and Barwani, shut in by the Vindhyan scarp on the north and the Satpura on the south.

The Tapti, or Tapi, begins at Multai in Betul district on the southern side of the Satpura and flows west through Maharashtra and Gujarat to the Gulf of Khambhat.

The Chachai falls lie in Rewa district, where the Bihad river plunges over the edge of the Vindhyan sandstone plateau.

Khajuraho is in Chhatarpur district, which lies on the Bundelkhand Plateau, the tract of old granite and gneiss north of the Vindhya that takes in Chhatarpur, Tikamgarh, Datia, Sagar and Damoh.

The trough between the Vindhya and the Satpura sank along two roughly parallel faults, leaving the land on either side standing up as block mountains.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.