Climate, Soils and Vegetation of India

The south-west monsoon:

• It brings most of the rain from June to September and lasts about 100 to 120 days.
• It comes in two branches, from the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, which merge over the north-western Ganga plains.
• The Tamil Nadu coast stays dry then, because the Bay of Bengal branch blows parallel to it. It gets heavy rain in October to December from the retreating north-easterly winds.

Temperature: December and January are the coldest months in the north. Coastal Kerala has almost no difference between day and night; the Rajasthan desert has a great one.

The six traditional seasons run Vasant (spring), Grishma, Varsha, Sharad, Hemant (November and December) and Shishir.

Black soil covers the Deccan trap, formed from its lava rock.

The types:

• Tropical evergreen (more than 200 cm of rain): ebony, mahogany, rosewood. The moist forests of the Western Ghats and the North-East also hold bamboo, epiphytes, aini and semul. Semi-evergreen forest grows on the Meghalaya plateau, the Sahyadri and the Nicobar islands.
• Tropical deciduous (monsoon forests): teak, sal, sandalwood, shisham. Tendu leaves, used for bidis, come from the dry deciduous forests.
• Mangrove (tidal) forests: the sundari tree, which gives the Sundarbans its name and hard, durable timber.
• Shola: stunted evergreen forest in the folds of valleys, surrounded by grassland, on the high Western Ghats (Nilgiris, Anamalai).
• Himalayan yew, a medicinal tree, grows in the temperate Himalayas, as in Himachal Pradesh.

The facts:

• The National Forest Policy of 1988 called for people to share in protecting forests, which led to Joint Forest Management.
• The India State of Forest Report 2019 put forest cover at 21.67% of the country.
• Parks and sanctuaries: Similipal (Odisha), Namdapha (Arunachal Pradesh), Bandipur (Karnataka), Vansda (Gujarat), and Chandra Prabha sanctuary (Uttar Pradesh).