Discuss the distribution and density of population in the Ganga River Basin with special reference to land, soil and water resources.

The dense core

From western Uttar Pradesh through Bihar to the West Bengal delta, rural densities are among India’s highest. Alluvial soils — khadar and bhangar — hold water and nutrients. Canals and tube wells made a second green-revolution layer, especially in the western basin. Patna, Varanasi, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Kolkata sit on that corridor because a river is a road as well as a field. The delta packs people onto every unflooded levee.

Where it thins

The Himalayan districts of Uttarakhand and Nepal’s hills (the basin’s head) are steeper, colder, and thinner. The Chambal–badland and some western dry margins of the basin hold fewer people per square kilometre. The Sundarbans edge is dense but fragile: people live with tide and tiger because the alternative is the already packed mainland.

Soil, water, hazard

Fertile alluvium explains the crowd. Arsenic in some groundwater, fluoride, and polluted surface water now tax that gift. Annual flood in north Bihar is the river taking back the plain it made. Density without drainage is a disaster statistic. Urban Kolkata and the million-plus UP cities show rural density become urban crush on the same soils.

The geographical explanation is therefore simple and harsh. The Ganga plains are a gift of Himalayan sediment and monsoon water. That gift supports a dense agrarian civilisation. It also concentrates flood, pollution and land fragmentation on the same map.