← Back to the map

India's most sacred and most populous river — the lifeline of the northern plains.

The Ganga gathers from Himalayan glaciers above Gangotri, joins its headstreams at Devprayag, spills onto the plains at Haridwar, and then flows some 2,500 km across the Indo-Gangetic Plain to the Bay of Bengal.

Its enormous sediment load — shed from the rising Himalaya — built, together with the Brahmaputra, the world’s largest delta (the Sundarbans). This outline covers the Indian reach; downstream the river continues through Bangladesh as the Padma.

Sources

• Central Water Commission

A short reference note: this summary draws on third-party sources such as the Geological Survey of India and Wikipedia. In time I plan to give every geological feature its own learning-oriented write-up — with custom diagrams, graphs, and study pointers — as I’ve already done for the 11 locations that have an Instagram reel.