Divide Uttar Pradesh into major physical regions and describe the geographical features of Bhabar and Terai regions.

Major physical regions of Uttar Pradesh

• The Siwalik and outermost Himalayan fringe occupies a narrow northern strip in districts such as Saharanpur, Bijnor, Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Shravasti, Balrampur, Siddharthnagar, Maharajganj, and the Nepal-facing terai edge.
• South of that fringe lie Bhabar and then Terai, transitional belts before the vast Ganga plain.
• The Ganga–Yamuna alluvial plain — bangar (older alluvium) and khadar (floodplain) — is the core of the state, split in teaching as western, central (Awadh), and eastern (Purvanchal) plains.
• The southern uplands are the Bundelkhand plateau of gneiss and granite (Jhansi, Lalitpur, Jalaun, Hamirpur, Mahoba, Banda, Chitrakoot) and the Vindhyan–Kaimur–Sonbhadra scarp of sandstone and plateau in Mirzapur–Sonbhadra.

Bhabar

• Bhabar is a porous pebble-and-gravel piedmont along the Siwalik foot, where Himalayan streams sink into coarse alluvium and surface flow often disappears in the dry season.
• Soils are coarse, the water table is deep, forest was historically sal and mixed, and settlement is thinner than in the Terai because wells must go deep and canals are harder to hold.

Terai

• Terai lies immediately south of the Bhabar: finer alluvium, a high water table, and the re-emergence of streams as springs and marshes.
• It is naturally swampy, malarial in older descriptions, with tall grass and sal; after nineteenth- and twentieth-century drainage and colonisation it became a belt of rice, sugarcane, and settlement in districts from Pilibhit through Kheri to Maharajganj.
• Dudhwa and allied forests mark the remaining wet wilderness; the belt is flood-prone because the gradient is low and rivers such as the Sharda, Ghaghara, and Rapti spill.