India's topography is stunningly diverse, with everything from steamy tropical jungles to expansive arid deserts to icy mountain peaks. At 3,287,263 sq km, it is the second-largest Asian country after China, and forms the vast bulk of the South Asian subcontinent – an ancient block of earth crust that carried a wealth of unique plants and animals like a lifeboat across a prehistoric ocean before slamming into Asia about 40 million years ago.
Look for the three major geographic features that define modern-day India: Himalayan peaks and hills along the northern borders, the alluvial floodplains of the Indus and Ganges Rivers in the north, and the elevated Deccan Plateau that forms the core of India's triangular southern peninsula.
As the world’s highest mountains – with the highest peak in India (Khangchendzonga) reaching 8598m – the Himalaya create an almost impregnable boundary separating India from its neighbours to the north. These mountains formed when the Indian subcontinent broke away from Gondwanaland, a supercontinent in the southern hemisphere that included Africa, Antarctica, Australia and South America. All by itself, India drifted north and finally slammed slowly, but with immense force, into the Eurasian continent about 40 million years ago, buckling the ancient seafloor upward to form the Himalaya and many lesser ranges that stretch 2500km from Afghanistan to Myanmar (Burma).
When the Himalaya reached its great heights during the Pleistocene (less than 150,000 years ago), it blocked and altered weather systems, creating the monsoon climate that dominates India today, as well as forming a dry rainshadow to the north.
Although it looks like a continuous range on a map, the Himalaya is actually a series of interlocking ridges, separated by countless valleys. Until technology enabled roadbuilding into the Himalaya, many of these valleys were virtually isolated, creating a diverse array of mountain cultures.
Covering most of northern India, the vast alluvial plains of the sacred Ganges River are so flat that they drop a mere 200m between Delhi and the waterlogged wetlands of West Bengal, where the river joins forces with the Brahmaputra River from India’s northeast, before dumping into the sea in Bangladesh. Vast quantities of eroded sediments from the neighbouring highlands accumulate on the plains to a depth of nearly 2km, creating fertile, well-watered agricultural land. This densely populated region was once extensively forested and rich in wildlife.
Gujarat in the far west of India is separated from Sindh (Pakistan) by the Rann of Kutch, a brackish marshland that becomes a huge inland sea during the wet season; the waters recede in the dry season, leaving isolated islands perched on an expansive plain.
South of the Indo-Gangetic (northern) plain, the land rises to the Deccan Plateau, marking the divide between the erstwhile Mughal heartlands of North India and the Dravidian civilisations of the south. The Deccan is bound on either side by the Western and Eastern Ghats, which come together in their southern reaches to form the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu.
On the Deccan’s western border, the Western Ghats drop sharply down to a narrow coastal lowland, forming a luxuriant slope of rainforest.
Offshore from India are a series of island groups, politically part of India but geographically linked to the landmasses of Southeast Asia and islands of the Indian Ocean. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands lie far out in the Bay of Bengal, while the coral atolls of Lakshadweep (300km west of Kerala) are a northerly extension of the Maldives islands, with a land area of just 32 sq km.
India is grappling with a growing dilemma: how to develop, modernise and expand economically, without destroying what's left of its environment, or adding to the global climate problem. The government has come under criticism for some conflicting stances. On one hand, Prime Minister Modi has made it his personal mission to clean up the Ganges River by 2019, has launched the much-publicised Swachh Bharat campaign to reduce trash pollution nationwide, and supports large-scale solar power generation. His government is reportedly planning a US$3 billion package for the country's solar panel manufacturing industry and is aiming to increase renewable capacity to 175 gigawatts by around 2022. But his government faces challenges when it comes to domestic coal mining (a major source of greenhouse gas emissions). India is the world's third-largest producer of coal, but for electricity, despite domestic production having risen in recent decades, the rate of growth is not meeting demand, making India increasingly reliant on imported coal.
With well over a billion people, ever-expanding industrial and urban centres, and growth in chemical-intensive farming, India’s environment is under considerable pressure. An estimated 65% of the land is degraded in some way, most of it seriously, and successive governments have been consistently falling short of the majority of their environmental protection goals. Many ongoing problems have been linked to the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when chemical fertilisers and pesticides enabled huge growth in agricultural output but at enormous cost to the environment.
Despite numerous environmental laws, corruption has continued to exacerbate environmental degradation – exemplified by the flagrant flouting of laws by some companies involved in hydroelectricity and mining. Usually, the people most affected are low-caste rural farmers and Adivasis (tribal people) who have limited political representation and few resources to fight big businesses.
Agricultural production has been reduced by soil degradation from over-farming, rising soil salinity, loss of tree cover and poor irrigation. The human cost is heart-rending, and lurking behind all these problems is a basic Malthusian truth: there are far too many people for India to support.
As anywhere, tourists tread a fine line between providing an incentive for change and making the problem worse. For example, many of the environmental problems in Goa are a direct result of irresponsible development for tourism. Always consider your environmental impact while travelling in India.
Changing climate patterns – linked to global carbon emissions – have been creating worrying extremes of weather in parts of India. While India's per-capita carbon emissions still rank far behind those of the USA, Australia and Europe, the sheer size of its population makes it a major polluter.
It has been estimated that by 2030, India will see a 30% increase in the severity of its floods and droughts. In the mountain deserts of Ladakh, increased rainfall is changing time-honoured farming patterns, while glaciers on nearby peaks are melting at alarming rates. In 2013, devastating flooding hit Uttarakhand – with unconfirmed estimates of between 6000 and 50,000 people killed over the course of a couple of days. In 2014, massive floods struck the Kashmir Valley, inundating Srinagar, wreaking widespread damage and loss of life. Conversely, other areas are experiencing reduced rainfall, causing drought and riots over access to water. Islands in the Lakshadweep group as well as the low-lying plains of the Ganges delta are being inundated by rising sea levels.
Since Independence, over 50,000 sq km of India’s forests have been cleared for logging and farming, or destroyed by urban expansion, mining, industrialisation and river dams. Even in the well-funded, highly protected Project Tiger parks, the amount of forest cover classified as ‘degraded’ has tripled due to illegal logging. The number of mangrove forests has halved since the early 1990s, reducing the nursery grounds for the fish that stock the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal.
India’s first Five Year Plan in 1951 recognised the importance of forests for soil conservation, and various policies have been introduced to increase forest cover. This has yielded some success; however, many regulations have been ignored by officials or criminals and by ordinary people clearing forests for firewood and grazing. What can you do? Try to minimise the use of wood-burning stoves while you travel. Furthermore, you can support the numerous charities working with rural communities to encourage tree planting.
Arguably the biggest threat to public health in India is inadequate access to clean drinking water and proper sanitation. With the population marching upwards, agricultural, industrial and domestic water usage levels are all expected to soar, despite government policies designed to control water use. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, out of more than 3000 cities and towns in India, less than a dozen have adequate waste-water treatment facilities. Many cities dump untreated sewage and partially cremated bodies directly into rivers, while open defecation is a simple fact of life in most rural (and many urban) areas.
Rivers are also affected by run-off, industrial pollution and sewage contamination – the Sabarmati, Yamuna and Ganges are among the most polluted rivers on earth. At least 70% of the freshwater sources in India are now polluted in some way. Over recent years, drought has devastated parts of the subcontinent (particularly Rajasthan and Gujarat) and has been a driving force for rural-to-urban migration.
Water distribution is another volatile issue. Since 1947 an estimated 35 million people in India have been displaced by major dams, mostly built to provide hydroelectricity for this increasingly power-hungry nation. While hydroelectricity is one of the greener power sources, valleys across India are being sacrificed to create new power plants, and displaced people rarely receive adequate compensation.