Indian Soils, Major Crops and Cropping Seasons — Alluvial to Laterite, Kharif to Zaid

Soils and crops look like a memorising chapter and are usually studied as one — long tables of soil names, crop names and states, learnt on Sunday and gone by Tuesday. That is the wrong way in, and it is why students find this section heavy.

The better way is causal. Every Indian soil is the record of one process: a river depositing silt, lava weathering in place, iron oxidising, or heavy rain washing minerals downward. Name the process and the soil's colour, texture, fertility and crop all follow from it. You are then reconstructing four facts from one, instead of storing five.

It earns its time. Soils and cropping seasons carry two to four questions in SSC CGL and CHSL, one or two in Railway NTPC and Group D, and they sit inside the geography portion of BPSC TRE-4 and CTET as well.

1. Which soil covers the largest area of India?

2. "Regur" is another name for which soil?

3. The new alluvium found in flood plains and renewed almost every year is called:

4. Which of the following is a rabi crop?

5. Laterite soil is formed mainly by:

6. Zaid crops are grown mainly:

7. Which crop is known as the "golden fibre"?

8. Red soil owes its colour to: