From the Himalayas to the tropics: the geography that shapes India.

India is the seventh-largest country in the world by area — nearly a third larger than the combined area of every country in the European Union. That expanse holds deserts, mountain ranges, tropical coastlines, and fertile plains, which makes any generalization about "the Indian climate" about as imprecise as talking about "the South American climate."

A subcontinent between mountains and sea

To the north, the Himalayas form a natural barrier with the highest peaks on the planet, including stretches within Indian territory that top 7,000 meters. South of that range, the vast Indo-Gangetic Plain — cut through by the Ganges River — holds the country's highest population density. Further south still, the Deccan Plateau and the two Ghats mountain ranges (Western and Eastern) descend to a tropical coastline over 7,000 kilometers long, bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east.

Four seasons, one entire country

Rather than four seasons in the Western sense, much of India experiences four distinct climatic periods: winter (December to February), milder; summer (March to May), hot and dry across most of the territory; the summer monsoon (June to September), when moisture-laden winds from the Indian Ocean bring 70% to 90% of the country's entire annual rainfall in just a few months; and the post-monsoon period (October and November), a time of transition. The monsoon isn't just a weather phenomenon — it's the event that organizes the agricultural calendar for hundreds of millions of families.

The rivers that sustain billions of lives

No other geographic feature shapes Indian life as much as its great rivers. The Ganges, the most revered and the longest in the country, runs about 2,525 km from the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas — formed by the confluence of the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers at Devaprayag, in the state of Uttarakhand — to its mouth at the Bay of Bengal, already in Bangladesh, where it's known as the Padma. The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet, crosses four countries, and runs about 916 km within India, entering through the state of Arunachal Pradesh, where it's known as the Dihang. The Godavari, nicknamed the "Ganges of the South" at 1,465 km, is the longest river running entirely within Indian territory without crossing international borders; the Krishna, at 1,400 km, rises in Mahabaleshwar and crosses the Deccan Plateau. Together, these river systems irrigate the lands that feed most of the country's population.

West Bengal and Odisha on the map

The two regions where this project works lie in the east of the country, along the Bay of Bengal coast. West Bengal holds, in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, one of the most fertile and densely populated regions on the planet — it's there, on the border with Bangladesh, that you find the Sundarbans, the world's largest continuous mangrove forest. Odisha, further south, combines coastline, an interior plateau, and a robust agricultural tradition. Both regions face intense monsoons between June and September and lie in the path of cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal, more frequent between April and December — after the 1999 Odisha cyclone, one of the deadliest ever recorded in the region, the state invested heavily in early-warning systems and shelters, significantly reducing the death toll in more recent cyclones.