River · India
Ganges
The Ganges is the longest river in India and the holiest river of the country. It starts high in the Himalayas as meltwater and finally spreads into the Bay of Bengal through a huge delta.
Picture credit: krebsmaus07 (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Ganges?
The river starts here: Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas, India.
It ends in the Bay of Bengal.
Countries on the river: India.
The story behind it
The Ganges is born in an ice cave at the edge of the Gangotri Glacier, where the water is grey with rock dust and bitterly cold. It then crosses one of the most crowded plains on Earth, where hundreds of millions of people farm rice, wheat and sugarcane on the rich soil it leaves behind. In the holy city of Varanasi, pilgrims walk down wide stone steps to bathe and to float small oil lamps on the current. Rare animals still live here: the Ganges river dolphin, which is almost blind and finds fish by sound, and the gharial, a crocodile with a long thin snout. Every summer the monsoon rains make the river swell and flood whole villages. Sadly the water carries a lot of rubbish and waste today, so many groups now work to clean it.
Questions children ask
How long is the Ganges?
The Ganges measures about 2 525 kilometres. It is the longest river of India, and its journey from glacier to sea takes many weeks of water travel.
Which country does the Ganges flow through?
In this entry the Ganges counts as the longest river of India. It crosses the north of the country from the mountains in the west to the delta in the east.
Where does the Ganges flow into?
The Ganges flows into the Bay of Bengal. Before that it breaks into many arms and builds the largest delta in the world, full of mangrove forest.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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