Geography - Resources, Agriculture and Population
Domain 2 - Geography
Geography combines resource and economic geography with India's population and environmental issues, and often asks for map work and simple data interpretation.
Resources and environment
- Resources are classified as natural or human, renewable or non-renewable, and by status: potential, developed, stock and reserve.
- Sustainable development (Brundtland Commission, 1987) means meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.
- Major environmental problems: deforestation, soil erosion, land degradation, water and air pollution, loss of biodiversity.
Agriculture and industry
- Farming types: subsistence and commercial, intensive and extensive, plantation (tea in Assam, coffee in Karnataka).
- Industries are agro-based (tea, sugar, cotton textiles) or mineral-based (iron and steel, cement), and basic or consumer goods.
Population
- Census 2011, India: 121.09 crore people, density 382 persons per km², sex ratio 943, literacy 74.04%.
- Assam 2011: population 3.12 crore, area 78,438 km², density 398, sex ratio 958, literacy 72.19%.
Worked example
Density = population ÷ area. Assam: 3,12,05,576 ÷ 78,438 = 397.8, rounded to 398 persons per km². Compared with India's 382, Assam is denser than the national average despite its forests and hills - density is an average and hides uneven distribution, since Kamrup Metro is far denser than Dima Hasao.
Traps
- Calculating sex ratio as males per 1000 females; it is females per 1000 males.
- Treating potential resources as reserves; reserves are what present technology can actually use.
- Forgetting that census literacy counts only persons aged 7 and above.
- Misplacing Brahmaputra tributaries (Subansiri, Manas, Dhansiri, Kopili) on the map.