Indian & World Geography — Glossary

Ahmedabad–Vadodara is a key urban-industrial corridor in central Gujarat connecting the state's largest city with Vadodara along National Expressway 1 and the broader Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

Alfred Weber's least-cost theory is a 1909 model of industrial location holding that firms locate where the combined cost of transport, labour and agglomeration is minimised.

Alluvial soil is a fertile, transported soil deposited by rivers, floods, and coastal action, dominating India's northern plains and deltas and supporting its most intensive agriculture.

Alluvial soils are fertile, transported soils deposited by rivers, streams, and wave action, covering about 40 percent of India's land area and dominating the northern plains.

The Alpine–Himalayan belt is a continuous zone of young fold mountains and seismic activity stretching from the Atlas in northwest Africa across southern Europe and Asia to the Indonesian arc.

Angul is a district and administrative town in central Odisha, India, known as a major coal, thermal-power, and aluminium industrial hub.

An antecedent river is one that predates the uplift of the mountains it crosses, maintaining its original course by cutting deep gorges as the land rose.

The Arabian Sea branch is the western current of the south-west summer monsoon that strikes peninsular India's west coast, splitting further into three sub-streams.

Arid and desert soils are sandy, saline, low-humus soils formed under dry climates with high evaporation, found in India mainly across western Rajasthan and adjoining regions.

Arid or desert soil is a sandy, saline, alkaline soil with low organic content and high phosphate, found in low-rainfall regions and classified by the ICAR under aridisols.

The Atacama Desert is a hyper-arid coastal desert in northern Chile, widely regarded as the driest non-polar region on Earth.

August Lösch's market-area theory holds that hexagonal market areas of varying sizes nest together to form an integrated economic landscape that maximizes profit and consumer access.

The Bay of Bengal is the northeastern arm of the Indian Ocean, the world's largest bay, bordered by India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The Bay of Bengal branch is the easterly arm of the Indian summer monsoon that sweeps from the Bay of Bengal across northeast and northern India, bringing the bulk of rainfall to the Gangetic plains.

The Bengaluru–Chennai corridor is a planned high-density industrial and transport belt linking Karnataka's capital with the Tamil Nadu port-city of Chennai across roughly 260 km of southern peninsular India.

The Bhilai Steel Plant is a Soviet-aided integrated steel plant in Chhattisgarh, commissioned in 1959 and operated by the public-sector Steel Authority of India Limited.

Black soil is a dark, clay-rich, lime- and iron-bearing soil formed from weathered basaltic Deccan lava, noted for high moisture retention and natural cotton-growing fertility.

The Brahmaputra is a major transboundary river that rises in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows through Arunachal Pradesh and Assam in India, and joins the Ganga in Bangladesh.

Census 2011 was the 15th national census of India and the seventh after Independence, enumerating a population of 1.21 billion under the Census Act, 1948.

A Census Town is a settlement that satisfies India's statutory demographic criteria for urban status but is administered as a rural unit without a municipal government.

The Chota Nagpur Plateau is a Precambrian plateau in eastern India, spanning Jharkhand and parts of adjacent states, renowned for its mineral wealth and tribal population.

The Circum-Pacific belt is the horseshoe-shaped zone of seismic and volcanic activity ringing the Pacific Ocean, accounting for most of Earth's earthquakes and volcanoes.

Coffee is a tropical plantation beverage crop grown from the seeds of the evergreen shrub Coffea, cultivated chiefly as the Arabica and Robusta species.

The common heritage of mankind is a principle of international law designating certain territories and resources beyond national jurisdiction as belonging to all humanity and managed for the benefit of present and future generations.

A convergent plate boundary is a zone where two lithospheric plates move toward each other, producing subduction, mountain-building, or continental collision.

Cotton is a kharif fibre crop grown on the seed hairs of the Gossypium plant, requiring frost-free days, 21–30°C temperatures, and moderate rainfall on black regur soils.

Critical minerals are metals and non-metals deemed essential to economic and national security yet vulnerable to supply disruption owing to concentrated extraction or processing.

Cropping pattern refers to the proportion of area under different crops in a region at a given point in time and the sequence in which they are grown.

The Damodar is a river of eastern India, rising in the Chota Nagpur plateau and joining the Hooghly, historically called the "Sorrow of Bengal" for its floods.

The Deccan Plateau is a large triangular volcanic and crystalline upland covering most of peninsular India south of the Indo-Gangetic plain, bounded by the Western and Eastern Ghats.

The demographic dividend is the accelerated economic growth a country can achieve when its working-age population is larger than its dependent population.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, marked by anomalous warming of central and eastern equatorial Pacific surface waters that disrupts global weather.

The Indian monsoon is the seasonal reversal of wind direction over the Indian subcontinent that produces a rainy southwest summer phase and a dry northeast winter phase.

The Indus Waters Treaty is a 1960 water-distribution agreement between India and Pakistan, brokered by the World Bank, allocating the eastern rivers to India and the western rivers to Pakistan.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 is a water-sharing agreement between India and Pakistan, brokered by the World Bank, that allocates the three eastern rivers to India and the three western rivers to Pakistan.

The International Solar Alliance is a treaty-based intergovernmental organisation, headquartered in India, that coordinates deployment of solar energy among sun-rich member states.

Jamshedpur is a planned industrial city in Jharkhand, India, founded in 1908 as the site of India's first integrated private steel plant, the Tata Iron and Steel Company.

A jet stream is a narrow band of fast-flowing, geostrophic wind in the upper troposphere driven by steep horizontal temperature and pressure gradients.

La Niña is the cool phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, marked by abnormal cooling of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific surface waters.

The National Green Hydrogen Mission is India's flagship programme, approved in January 2023, to make the country a global hub for production, use and export of green hydrogen.

The National Population Policy, 2000 is India's framework document committing to a stable population by 2045, with the immediate, medium-term and long-term objectives of addressing unmet contraceptive needs, reducing the Total Fertility Rate to replacement level, and achieving a stable population.

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission is one of India's eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, launched in 2010 to promote grid-connected and off-grid solar power.

Net Zero by 2070 is India's pledge to balance its anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions with removals by the year 2070, announced at the Glasgow climate summit.

Over-urbanization is a condition in which a region's level of urbanization outpaces its industrial and economic growth, producing urban populations that the urban economy cannot productively absorb.

PM-KUSUM is a Government of India scheme launched in 2019 to promote solar pumps and grid-connected solar power plants among farmers for irrigation and income.

Water is the constitutionally and administratively regulated natural resource governing irrigation, drinking supply, hydropower, and inter-state and trans-boundary river disputes across South Asia.

The Western Ghats are a 1,600-km mountain chain running parallel to India's western coast, recognised as one of the world's eight "hottest" biodiversity hotspots.