Distribution of Rainfall

The map is a choropleth of India, shaded by annual rainfall totals, with a graticule of latitude and longitude lines running across the country. Four bands of shading divide the land: more than 200 cm, 100–200 cm, 50–100 cm, and less than 50 cm. A scale bar at the bottom runs from 0 to 600 km, giving the map its spatial reference. The shading itself is the entire content — there are no arrows, no point markers, no named cities or rivers drawn on it. The pattern is what carries the lesson.

Read the map from the wettest to the driest. The deepest shade, for rainfall above 200 cm, hugs the west coast along the Western Ghats and covers the sub-Himalayan northeast, including the hills of Meghalaya. That band is narrow on the western side but broad in the northeast, and it is here that the map's extreme values sit — the Khasi and Jaintia hills, where rainfall exceeds 1,000 cm, lie within this zone. The next band, 100–200 cm, wraps around this core: southern Gujarat, east Tamil Nadu, and a northeastern Peninsula sweep covering Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, and eastern Madhya Pradesh, plus the northern Ganga plain along the sub-Himalayas and the Cachar Valley and Manipur. Notice the Brahmaputra valley and its adjoining hills fall in this middle band, not the highest one — the map makes that distinction explicit.

The lower two bands tell the drier story. The 50–100 cm shade covers western Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, eastern Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the Deccan Plateau — a broad swath running from the northwest down through the peninsula's interior. The lightest shade, below 50 cm, marks the truly inadequate rainfall zones: parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra in the peninsula, Ladakh in the far north, and most of western Rajasthan. The map's visual message is the spatial contrast — a wet western coast and northeast against a dry northwest desert and the rain-shadowed interior Deccan. …