Maharashtra
Maharashtra Geography & Climate
Geography
Maharashtra is built on one of the largest volcanic formations on earth, and everything about its landscape follows from that.
The Deccan Traps
Around 66 million years ago, enormous eruptions laid down basalt across half a million square kilometres in flows that are in places two kilometres thick. The event coincides with the end-Cretaceous extinction and is argued about as a contributing cause. The rock is horizontally layered, which is why the plateau erodes into flat-topped hills with stepped sides — and why it could be cut into so readily at Ajanta and Ellora.
The Western Ghats
The escarpment runs down the state’s western edge, rising to around 1,600 metres. It intercepts the monsoon, which is why the coastal strip and the western slopes are drenched while the plateau immediately behind sits in a rain shadow and is semi-arid. The Ghats are a UNESCO-listed biodiversity hotspot.
The Konkan coast
A narrow strip between the escarpment and the sea, tropical, forested and cut by creeks, with Mumbai at its northern end on reclaimed land.
The plateau
Rolling black-soil country east of the Ghats, good for cotton and sugarcane where irrigated and drought-prone where not.
Mumbai’s made ground
The city sits on seven islands that were progressively joined by reclamation from the eighteenth century, and the process has not stopped — Nariman Point, Backbay and much of the western seafront are made land. The consequence is a city on a narrow peninsula with almost nowhere to expand, drainage designed for a smaller place, and a low-lying core that the monsoon and rising sea levels both threaten.
Lonar
A crater lake formed by a meteorite impact in basalt, one of very few of its kind.
Climate Patterns
Maharashtra’s climate is dominated by the monsoon and by the rain shadow the Ghats create.
The monsoon
From June to September the south-west monsoon strikes the Ghats and dumps most of the year’s rain in a few months. The difference the escarpment makes is dramatic: the western slopes receive several metres, with places above Mahabaleshwar among the wettest in India, while the plateau eighty kilometres east gets under 700 millimetres. Mumbai receives around 2,200 millimetres, most of it in July, and the city floods most years.
Summer
March to May is hot — above 40°C on the plateau and in Vidarbha, where Nagpur regularly exceeds 45. Mumbai is cooler but humid to the point of misery.
Winter
November to February is the good season: 20 to 32°C, dry, with genuinely cool nights inland. Mumbai stays warm and pleasant.
Drought
The rain-shadow districts of Marathwada suffer recurrent and severe drought, which combines with agricultural debt into a long-running crisis.
Watching the monsoon arrive
The monsoon reaches Mumbai around the first week of June and its arrival is a genuine civic event, tracked on the news for weeks beforehand and greeted with relief and a certain amount of celebration. The first rain is a specific sensory experience the city has a great deal of writing and song about, and the eleven months of anticipation are part of why.
The Ghats in monsoon
The reason Mumbai empties into the hills at weekends between June and September — waterfalls, mist and green — and the reason those roads become dangerous.