Chapter 1 Solutions — Resources and Development

Black soil, also known as regur soil, covers the plateaus of Maharashtra, Saurashtra, Malwa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Three states having black soil are Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Black soil is ideal for growing cotton, which is why it is also known as black cotton soil.

Resources are a function of human activities. Human beings transform material available in the environment into resources using technology, and a higher level of technological development enables people to exploit and use resources on a much larger scale.

The history of colonisation reveals that the higher level of technological development of the colonising countries helped them exploit the resources of other regions and establish their supremacy over the colonies — showing how technology drives greater resource consumption.

It was believed that resources are free gifts of nature, so human beings used them indiscriminately. This has led to major problems: depletion of resources for satisfying the greed of a few individuals, accumulation of resources in few hands dividing society into haves and have-nots, and global ecological crises such as global warming, ozone layer depletion, environmental pollution and land degradation. Thus technical and economic development together have accelerated the consumption of resources.

Alluvial soil is found in the eastern coastal plains, particularly in the deltas of the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna and the Kaveri rivers.

Three main features: (1) It consists of various proportions of sand, silt and clay. (2) It contains adequate proportions of potash, phosphoric acid and lime, which are ideal for the growth of sugarcane, paddy, wheat and other cereal and pulse crops. (3) Being very fertile, regions of alluvial soil are intensively cultivated and densely populated.