Meteorologist R.L. Singh (1971) has classified Indian Climate Region into how many zones ?

Question

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Correct — option (4), ten. R.L. Singh's classification of 1971 divides India into ten climatic divisions, and the criteria on which it rests are worth carrying with the number, because they are what distinguish it from the other schemes a candidate meets: the temperature of the hottest month, the temperature of the coldest month, and average annual rainfall. That is a deliberately simple set of measurements, and it produces a division designed to be read alongside India's regional geography rather than to slot into a global scheme. The work in which it appears, India: A Regional Geography, was published by the National Geographical Society of India at Varanasi in 1971, and R.L. Singh is more usually described as a geographer than as a meteorologist, which is what the stem calls him — a small looseness in the printed question that changes nothing about the answer. This is a pure citation-recall item with no structure to exploit. Four consecutive whole numbers are offered, no two of them can both be true, and nothing in the stem can be reasoned from, so a candidate either carries the number or does not. That has a direct consequence for how the item should be handled in the hall. With two marks for a correct answer and a quarter of them deducted for a wrong one, guessing between four consecutive integers is a losing proposition across a paper, and the honest move on a question of this shape is to leave it unless the figure is genuinely remembered. The productive preparation is not to memorise every scheme's count but to attach one number and one criterion to each of the classifications the syllabus names, because the numbers are only distinguishable when the criteria are.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not the figure attached to R.L. Singh's 1971 scheme. Seven is a number that floats around this topic because several textbook treatments of Indian climate present a small set of broad climatic types — the tropical rainy, the semi-arid and arid, the humid subtropical and the mountain climates, with their subdivisions — and a candidate who has revised a summary table of that kind may carry seven without an author attached to it. That is the specific hazard of this question type: the count belongs to a named scheme, and a number remembered without its author is worse than no number at all, because it feels like knowledge.  (b) The strongest distractor, because eight is a real and heavily taught figure in this area — it is the number of climatic types the standard textbook treatment yields when Köppen's global scheme is applied to India, running from the monsoon types through the semi-arid and arid types to the cold humid and polar types of the mountains. A candidate who has revised Köppen carefully and R.L. Singh only in passing will reach for it. Keeping the two apart is the point: Köppen classifies by temperature, rainfall and vegetation within a worldwide framework, while R.L. Singh's divisions rest on the hottest and coldest month temperatures and annual rainfall and are built for India alone.  (c) A filler value, and it is there for a structural reason worth understanding rather than resenting. When a setter wants to test whether a number has been memorised exactly, the surest method is to offer consecutive integers on either side of it, because that removes every route to the answer except recall — no approximation helps, no reasoning about India's geography helps, and a candidate who remembers 'about ten' is left with two live options and a coin toss. Recognising this shape early is the practical value of the question: consecutive-integer options are a signal to answer from memory or not at all.

Concept: Climatic classification is the attempt to reduce a continuum of weather into a manageable number of regions, and because there is no single natural way to do it, several rival schemes coexist and the syllabus expects them to be told apart by their criteria. Köppen's is the best known and the most widely taught: a global scheme that groups climates by temperature and rainfall and takes vegetation as the visible expression of both, using letter codes for the type, the rainfall regime and the temperature character, and the standard textbook treatment applies it to India as eight types. Thornthwaite's approach of the 1930s starts from the plant's point of view, working with the effectiveness of precipitation and evaporation rather than with raw totals. Blanford, in the nineteenth century, produced the first classification of India's climatic regions. Stamp and Kendrew each proposed divisions for India, and R.L. Singh's of 1971 is the one this question names, resting on the temperature of the hottest and coldest months together with average annual rainfall and dividing the country into ten. The differences between them are not merely academic: a scheme built for the world will place India's monsoon regime inside categories designed elsewhere, while a scheme built for India can take the monsoon as its organising fact.

State PCS 2026 Q16 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q16 — Geography PYQ with Answer