Indo-Gangetic Plain

Now it is Uttarakhand onwards.

Whichever Tarai is between the Bhabar or the low Himalayas and the Gangetic plains, the foothills, is long and it's a very productive land.

because of the rivers, because of the monsoon, because of the things.

And then it was present up to, from here to Bengal.

So I was somewhere always interested, just that it became a full-time vocation or you can say passion only from when I got a chance to really do my own independent project on freshwater dolphins.

So you mentioned a Gangetic River Dolphin.

What is its current distribution and conservation status across India and the wider subcontinent?

The Ganges River Dolphin, which is called Platanista gangetica, it's the scientific name, it's distributed across the Ganga, Brahmaputra, Meghna and the Karnapuli-Sanghu basins of India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

There's also a sibling species, the Indus River Dolphin, which is found in Pakistan and a very small population exists in India's Punjab also.

But the Ganges River Dolphin is relatively much widespread.

It occurs in almost all the major perennial rivers of the Gangetic Plains of India and Bangladesh, including the Brahmaputra, of course, and other basins like the Meghna and Karnapuli Sanghu, which is in southeastern Bangladesh.

And that covers almost a fairly large range in terms of riverine habitat, even though that habitat is fragmented and by dams and other things.

And eventually, after centuries of trying to mitigate these effects, they realize, "We can't live here in the numbers that we have before." Tons of people just move out.

They mostly move to the Gangetic Plain, and this ends up being the genesis much later for the second state system that emerges in South Asia.

You know, centuries and centuries and centuries later, this ends up being the roots of that.

But you've got a, you know, thousand years in between where there's no states.

Orissa is also a good state which has a lot of diversity of rice ecologies.

And of course, some amount of eastern Bihar, Jharkhand, Gangetic Plains.

Basically, this crop is one of a floodplain.

If you are on the banks of a river that floods up during the monsoon season, then on the banks of this river is where rice was grown traditionally.

Tons of people just move out.

They mostly move to the Gangetic Plain.

And this ends up being the genesis much later for the second state system that emerges in South Asia.

You know, centuries and centuries and centuries later, this ends up being the roots of that.

Sorry.

Um, and, and then in this, this smaller region, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, um, I don't know how d- how you pronounce it in, in Hindi, but, um-

Yeah

... there's al- already 900 million people living.

So if we see Manas landscape, Manas, I told before also, this is unique because of the geographical location of Manas.

It's, it is situated in a confluence of the Brahmaputra Valley, then Gangetic Plain, the Eastern Himalaya.

It's a confluence.

So on the northern side, because they are in the history, like it was, there are dwars.