Indian Geography Trivia
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100 free Indian Geography trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
India is a subcontinent folded into one country: the youngest mountains on Earth along the top, some of the oldest along the west, a volcanic plateau in the middle and two long coastlines that meet at a point closer to Sumatra than to Chennai. Most quizzes stop at the tallest peak and the longest river. This one starts where they stop. The fifty questions cover the passes and tunnels that keep the Himalaya open, the plateaus and rift valleys that shape the peninsula, the lakes, lagoons and river islands, the winds and storms behind the monsoon calendar, and the map facts that trip people up: which city is really a state capital, which state is wrapped on three sides by a neighbour, and why the whole country runs on a single clock. It suits anyone revising for a school or competitive exam, a pub-quiz setter who wants questions with a reasoning path, or a traveller who has looked at a map of India and wondered what all the gaps are. Every answer carries a source and a one-line explanation.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Maharashtra lake fills a crater that a meteorite blasted into volcanic basalt?
Lonar
Lonar Lake's crater sits in ancient lava, so some geologists first took it for a volcano before shock-altered rock proved a meteorite strike.
Q 02When Shillong went to the new state of Meghalaya, Assam moved its capital to which suburb of Guwahati?
Dispur
Dispur holds the state secretariat, but Guwahati has grown right around it. Shillong had been Assam's seat since the British chose it as their headquarters in 1874.
Q 03Which planned Indian capital was laid out by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier?
Chandigarh
Chandigarh was built to replace Lahore, lost to Pakistan at Partition, and since 1966 it has been the capital of both Punjab and Haryana while being run as a union territory of its own.
Q 04Which narrow strip between Nepal and Bangladesh is the only land link to India's eight northeastern states?
Siliguri Corridor
The Siliguri Corridor, nicknamed the Chicken's Neck, was created by the 1947 partition of Bengal, which left East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, lying between the northeast and the rest of India.
Q 05Which line crosses India through eight states, from Gujarat in the west to the Myanmar border in the east?
Tropic of Cancer
The Tropic of Cancer splits India almost in half, yet most of the country counts as tropical, because the Himalayas shut out Central Asia's cold winter air and keep the north warm.
Q 06Which Assam river island, among the largest on Earth, became India's first island district in 2016?
Majuli
Majuli is listed by Guinness as the world's largest river island, and it is the seat of Assam's neo-Vaishnavite monasteries, the sattras. Erosion has been eating it away for decades.
Q 07Which Manipur lake, dotted with floating phumdi islands, holds the world's only floating national park?
Loktak
Loktak Lake's largest floating mat carries Keibul Lamjao National Park, created to save the sangai, a 'dancing deer' once thought extinct whose hooves suit the spongy ground.
Q 08Which state's coast does the southwest monsoon normally reach first on the Indian mainland, around 1 June?
Kerala
Kerala takes the monsoon's first burst, and the rains then need about a month to work north to Delhi and longer still to cover the whole country.
Q 09Which forest in Gujarat's Saurashtra peninsula is the only place on Earth where Asiatic lions still live in the wild?
Gir
Gir's lions form a single population that one epidemic could wipe out, so in 2013 India's Supreme Court ordered some moved to Madhya Pradesh, a transfer Gujarat has resisted.
Q 10Which state, carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, shared Hyderabad as its capital with its parent for a decade?
Telangana
Telangana arrived as India's 29th state, and the count fell back to 28 only when Jammu and Kashmir was reorganised into union territories in 2019.
Q 11Which peak in Uttarakhand is the highest mountain that lies entirely within India's borders?
Nanda Devi
Nanda Devi is India's second-highest summit but the highest wholly inside the country, since Kangchenjunga straddles the Nepal border. Its sanctuary has been closed to climbers since 1983.
Q 12Which Indian plateau sits on flood basalts that erupted about when the dinosaurs died out, some 66 million years ago?
Deccan
The Deccan Plateau rests on the Deccan Traps, lava layers more than 2 km thick. 'Trap' comes from a Swedish word for stairs, after the stepped hills the flows left behind.
Q 13Which range forces the summer monsoon to drop its rain on the coast, and had 39 sites inscribed by UNESCO in 2012?
Western Ghats
Q 21Which 9 km road tunnel beneath Rohtang Pass, opened in 2020, links Manali to Lahaul?
Atal
The Atal Tunnel, named after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ended an old isolation: before it opened, heavy snow on the pass cut Lahaul off from the rest of India for nearly six months a year.
Q 22Which pass on the old Silk Road above Gangtok reopened to India–China border trade in 2006, after 44 years shut?
Nathu La
Nathu La was sealed after the 1962 war, and Indian and Chinese troops clashed there again in 1967. It finally reopened to traders on 6 July 2006.
Q 23Which break in the mountains lets monsoon winds blow through to the plains around Coimbatore?
Palakkad Gap
The Western Ghats are older than the Himalayas, and UNESCO counts them among the world's eight 'hottest hotspots' of biological diversity. The listing covers seven clusters of sites.
Q 14Which river, India's longest west-flowing, runs through a rift valley to the Gulf of Khambhat near Bharuch?
Narmada
The Narmada rises at Amarkantak and is one of only two major peninsular rivers to reach the Arabian Sea, ending in an estuary where the big east-flowing rivers build deltas.
Q 15Which river, rising at Trimbakeshwar near Nashik and called the Dakshina Ganga, is India's second-longest?
Godavari
The Godavari rises in the hills just inland of India's west coast, northeast of Mumbai, yet turns its back on the nearby Arabian Sea and crosses the whole peninsula to the Bay of Bengal.
Q 16Which Gujarat expanse floods every monsoon, then dries to a white salt crust grazed by the Indian wild ass?
Rann of Kutch
The Rann of Kutch was a shallow arm of the Arabian Sea until rising land cut it off, which is why it still fills with water every summer and dries back to salt.
Q 17Which union territory, India's smallest by area, is governed from Kavaratti?
Lakshadweep
Lakshadweep means 'a hundred thousand islands' in Sanskrit and Malayalam, a grand name for an archipelago of just 36 coral islands, only ten of them inhabited.
Q 18Which spot on Great Nicobar, far closer to Indonesia's Sumatra than to the Indian mainland, is India's southernmost land?
Indira Point
Indira Point is India's true southern tip, since Kanyakumari is only the end of the mainland. It was Pygmalion Point until it was renamed for Indira Gandhi in the mid-1980s.
Q 19Which Assam park on the Brahmaputra, largely under water each monsoon, holds the world's most one-horned rhinos?
Kaziranga
Kaziranga is credited with pulling the one-horned rhino back from the brink of extinction a century ago, and when floods cover most of the park its animals trek to the nearby Karbi Anglong hills.
Q 20Which Uttarakhand reserve, opened in 1936 under the name Hailey National Park, was India's first national park?
Jim Corbett
Jim Corbett National Park is named after the hunter-turned-naturalist who shot the man-eaters of Kumaon and then helped found the reserve, later the first to come under Project Tiger.
The Palakkad Gap is the main doorway through the range: the highway and railway from Coimbatore to the coast run through it, and the winds it funnels drive one of India's big wind-power belts.
Q 24Which plateau covering most of Jharkhand holds Jamshedpur's steelworks and the Jharia and Bokaro coalfields?
Chota Nagpur
The Chota Nagpur Plateau holds iron ore, coal and limestone within reach of one another, the mix Tata's prospectors spent years hunting for before siting their steelworks here. Its Damodar valley is India's prime coking-coal field.
Q 25Which lake near Jaipur, India's largest inland salt lake, draws tens of thousands of flamingos each winter?
Sambhar
Sambhar fills only with the monsoon and shrinks back to salt flats in the dry months, and its flamingo flocks have been thinning as the rains turn erratic and the wetland shrinks.
Q 26Which Andhra Pradesh lagoon, India's second-largest brackish one, is walled off from the Bay of Bengal by Sriharikota island?
Pulicat Lake
Pulicat Lake's barrier island, Sriharikota, carries the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, so India's rockets lift off beside a bird sanctuary.
Q 27Which volcano in the Andaman Sea, India's only confirmed active one, erupted again in 2025?
Barren Island
Barren Island is uninhabited, as its name suggests, and woke in 1991 after nearly a century and a half of silence. It has erupted on and off ever since.
Q 28Which 150 km-wide strait separates the Andaman Islands from the Nicobar Islands?
Ten Degree Channel
The Ten Degree Channel takes its name from the 10° N line it lies along. North of it the Andamanese speak languages with no known relatives; south of it the Nicobarese speak Austroasiatic ones, the family of Khmer and Vietnamese.
Q 29Which Ganges distributary, the river Kolkata stands on, is fed by the Farakka Barrage to flush silt from the port?
Hooghly
The Hooghly has been topped up through a feeder canal from Farakka since 1975, yet the extra flow proved too weak to scour Kolkata's harbour, which still has to be dredged.
Q 30Which salty river, rising near Ajmer and crossing the Thar, peters out in Gujarat's marshes without reaching the sea?
Luni
The Luni is the Thar's only major river, running fresh until Balotra, where salt in the soil turns it saline. What is left soaks away in the marshes before it can reach the Arabian Sea.