Water-sheds in India

The life is very much dependent on water. Our agricultural, municipal, industrial, environmental and aesthetic well being depends on water. A watershed or basin of a river is a landform with highpoints that are connected by ridgelines that descend into lower elevations and stream valleys.

A watershed carries water after rainfall or melting of snow from the land which gets accumulated into soils, as groundwaters, in creeks, and streams, which later forms larger rivers and eventually the sea. The word “Water-shed” is used only for basin of a river of an area of 2000sq. Km.

There are mainly three water-sheds in India;

1. Himalayan range with its Karakoram branch-North
2. Vindhyan and Satpura ranges- Central India
3. Sahyadri or Western Ghats- West Coast
   
   

All the major rivers of India originate in one or the other of these watersheds.

The Himalaya and the Karakoram ranges

The Himalayan range is covered with snow hence rivers arising from the Himalayas are snow-fed and flows continously throughout the year. The flow of networks of rivers is dependant on the monsoons and shrinks into streams during the dry season.

Major twelve India's rivers cover the total catchment area of 2,528,000 km² (976,000 mile²). The rivers Indus, Beas, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, and Jhelum originated from Himalayas flow westward into Pakistan.
The Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghana system has the largest catchment area of 1,100,000 km² (424,700 mile²).

The river Ganga originates from the Gangotri Glacier in Uttaranchal and flows in south east to Bangladesh.  Western Himalayas is the home of Yamuna and Gomti rivers and merge with the Ganges in the plains. A tributary of Ganges, Brahmaputra, originates in Tibet and enters India in Arunachal Pradesh from the east proceeding towards west and meets Ganges in Bangladesh.