West Bengal
West Bengal Geography & Climate
Geography
West Bengal is unusually shaped — a long narrow state stretching roughly 600 kilometres from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal — and it contains almost every landscape India has except desert.
The north
The Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills rise from the plains to over 3,600 metres, with Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on earth at 8,586 metres, visible on the Sikkim border. Below them the Terai and Dooars are a belt of forest, tea gardens and rivers coming off the mountains.
The Ganges plain
Flat, intensely farmed alluvium, among the most densely populated agricultural land anywhere. The Hooghly, the westernmost distributary of the Ganges, carries the river past Kolkata to the sea and is the reason the city is where it is.
The delta
The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta is the largest in the world, a shifting maze of channels, silt islands and tidal flats. The land is barely above sea level and is being lost to erosion and rising seas in places.
The Sundarbans
Around 10,000 square kilometres of mangrove across the India-Bangladesh border, the largest such forest on earth, submerged and exposed twice daily by tides. Its trees breathe through pneumatophores pushed up through the mud, and it buffers the coast against cyclones.
A river that moved
The Ganges has been shifting east for centuries, and the Hooghly — once the main channel — now carries a fraction of the flow. The silting that followed is why Kolkata’s port declined, and it is the reason for the Farakka barrage upstream, built to flush the channel and a standing source of friction with Bangladesh over water sharing.
The west
The Chota Nagpur plateau’s eastern fringe, lateritic and drier, around Bankura and Purulia.
Climate Patterns
West Bengal’s climate divides sharply between the plains and the hills, and the monsoon dominates both.
The plains
Hot and humid. Kolkata runs 12 to 27°C in January and 26 to 36°C from April to June, with humidity that makes the summer genuinely unpleasant — the felt temperature regularly exceeds 45°C. The monsoon delivers around 1,600 millimetres between June and September, and the city’s drainage cannot cope, so streets flood most years.
The hills
Darjeeling at around 2,000 metres runs 5 to 15°C in winter and 13 to 20°C in summer, with frequent cloud and some three metres of monsoon rain. It occasionally snows.
Kalbaisakhi
The pre-monsoon squalls of March to May — violent, short thunderstorms with damaging winds that arrive in the late afternoon and are a Bengal speciality.
Cyclones
The Bay of Bengal generates some of the deadliest tropical cyclones on earth, and the delta is directly exposed. The season runs April to June and October to November, and recent storms have caused severe damage in the Sundarbans and Kolkata.
The delta and sea level
The Sundarbans sit barely above the tide, and the combination of rising seas, subsidence and reduced upstream sediment is taking islands. Several inhabited islands in the Indian delta have lost most of their area within living memory and some have gone entirely, displacing their populations — one of the clearest cases anywhere of climate-driven displacement already happening rather than forecast.
Best conditions
November to February everywhere, with the clearest mountain views in October and November.