Comparing two regions: Egypt and the Ganges basin
Geography · Key Stage 3 · The School
Two ribbons of people
Egypt is a desert with one river through it. About 95 in every 100 Egyptians live on the strip of land the Nile waters. That strip is only about four parts in a hundred of the country. On a map of where people live it shows as a thin green ribbon in a wide brown space. The Ganges basin lies in northern India and Bangladesh. It is crowded in a different way. More than 400 million people live on a flat, rich plain. The plain is built from silt washed down from the Himalaya over millions of years. Both regions pack their people near a river. Only one of them had a choice.
Where the water comes from
The Nile is an EXOTIC river. That means it crosses land that adds almost no water to it. Its water is rain that fell on the Ethiopian Highlands and near Lake Victoria. It reaches Egypt months later. The Ganges is fed twice over. Snow melts in the Himalaya in spring. Then the SUMMER MONSOON brings about three quarters of the year rain between June and September. So Egypt worries about how much water arrives. Bangladesh worries about how fast it arrives, and where it goes when the river is full.
Making a living on the floodplain
Both plains are farmed hard, because river silt makes rich soil. Egypt grows cotton, rice and sugar cane. Nearly every field is watered from a pipe or a ditch, using water let out from a dam. Farmers in the Ganges delta grow rice in the wet season. In the dry season they grow wheat or beans. There the flood itself does the work of fertiliser. The big cities sit on the river too. Cairo is on the Nile. Kolkata and Dhaka sit on the channels of the delta. Trade, water and farmland all stack up along the same line.
The two regions share a problem. They have answered it in different ways. Egypt finished the Aswan High Dam in 1970. The dam ended the yearly flood and made irrigation water certain. It also trapped the silt. So Egyptian farmers now buy fertiliser that the river once brought for free. The delta is wearing away too, because no new mud reaches it. Bangladesh mostly did not build dams. It built raised banks, cyclone shelters and warning systems, and lives with the flood. Both deltas are now sinking. Both face a rising sea. That is a shared future arriving from outside either region. Similar physical geography does not force one human answer.