Human Environment
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
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Understand the various aspects of human environment
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Know the spread of population across India with various associated
aspects of population
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such as density and growth
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Explore the various kinds of settlements
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Become familiar about the different types of transportation in India
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Understand the concept of migration and reasons of migration
INTRODUCTION
Human environment is constituted by humans, their
activities, and environmental features they have created for their convenience
and comfortable life. How do they live, where do they live, their population,
their mode of communication among themselves, and how they survive, all these
questions are the matter of human environment. In this chapter, we will focus
on certain aspects of human environment such as human settlements, migration,
transportation, and population.
POPULATION
When we think about the word population in the context of
human beings, the few things that immediately come to our mind are people,
specific geographical area, composition of different groups, density,
distribution, and so on. These words have a very important role to define the
status of population of a region, country, or continent. In this section, we
will discuss about Indian population.
India is the second most populous
country of the world, and China being the first. However, as we are growing
very fast in numbers, we will definitely snatch the crown of world's most
populous country from China. At present, according to 2011 census, the total
population of India is 1,210,726,932. As mentioned earlier, if we want to
understand population, we have to focus on its different traits such as
distribution, density, growth, and composition. Hence, first we will start with
the concept of distribution in the way to understand Indian population.
Distribution of Population
India has unequal distribution of population. Some states
have very high population and some have very less. Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra,
Bihar, and West Bengal are the highly populated states of India. States such as
Sikkim, Jammu & Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand have very small
share of population of the total population of India. There are various reasons
behind this unequal distribution in India. 'Among the socioeconomic and
historical factors of population distribution, the important ones are evolution
of settled agriculture and agricultural development, pattern of human
settlement, development of transport network,industrialisation, and
urbanisation. It is observed that the regions falling under river plains and
coastal areas of India.
have remained the regions of high population
concentration. Even though the uses of natural resources such as land and water
in these regions have shown the sign of degradation, the con centration of
population remains high because of an early history of human settlement and
development of transport network. On the other hand, the urban regions of
Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata Bangalore, Pune.'Ahmadabad, Chennai,
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