| ★ The Ganga basin consists of a wide variety of soils. While soils of the high Himalayas in the north are subject to continuous erosion, the Gangetic plain provides a huge receptacle into which thousands of meters of thick layers of sediments have been deposited to form a wide valley plain. The Deccan plateau on the south has a mantle of residual soils of varying thickness arising out of weathering of ancient rocks of the peninsular shield. Some of the soils are highly susceptible to erosion. Mountain soils, submontane soils and alluvial soils, covering 58% of the basin area, have very high erodibility; red soils covering 12% of the basin area have high erodibility, red & yellow soils and mixed red and black soils covering an area of 8% have moderate erodibility, and deep black soils and medium black soils covering an area of 14% have low erodibility Shallow black soils and lateritic soils covering an area of 6% have very low erodibility.
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Broadly, it can be said that soils in Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, through which the main stem of Ganga and all its tributaries flow, have very high erodibility.
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