Q1.
With the help of NCERT’s School Bhuvan portal, you can also map your own village/city. You can access and explore the NCERT’s School Bhuvan portal by visiting the website: app1.nrsc.gov.in/mhrd_ncert/
Answer
This is a hands-on mapping activity, so the map must be of your own village or city. Fig. 1.1 shows the portal open on India, which is where you begin.
Method — how to do it:
- Open app1.nrsc.gov.in/mhrd_ncert/. Bhuvan is India's own Earth-observation portal, run by the National Remote Sensing Centre; School Bhuvan is the version made for school students.
- Use the search box to type your village or city name, or enter its latitude and longitude, and zoom in until individual buildings, fields and roads become distinct.
- Switch between the satellite image and the map view. The image shows what is actually on the ground; the map view shows boundaries and names that someone has added to it.
- Use the drawing tools to mark features. A useful set for a first map: your school, the main road, the bus stop or railway station, the health centre, the panchayat or municipal office, the market, the river, tank or canal, and the ward or village boundary.
- Use the measurement tool to record one distance and one area — for example, how far your home is from school, and roughly how much land the school occupies.
- Save your map, and write a short caption.
What a good map must contain: a title naming the place; a north arrow; an indication of scale or one measured distance; a legend explaining every symbol and colour you used; the date of the satellite image; and a source line — Bhuvan / NRSC. A map without a legend and a date is a picture, not a map.
Sample answer: "I mapped my village, Kanhaiyapur, on School Bhuvan using imagery dated March 2024. I marked eight features: the government senior secondary school, the primary health centre, the panchayat bhavan, the weekly market ground, the bus stop on the state highway, the village pond, the canal along the northern edge, and the village boundary. Measured on the portal, the school is 640 m from my house along the road, and the pond covers roughly 0.4 hectares. Two things surprised me. First, almost all the houses are clustered on the higher ground west of the pond, while the fields lie to the east and slope towards the canal — the settlement has avoided the low, damp land. Second, the market ground sits exactly where the village road meets the highway, which is presumably why the weekly market grew up on that spot rather than nearer the centre of the village."
Why this activity is worth doing: Geography "views the world as a system of interdependencies". On a map you can see the interdependence instead of being told about it — where the houses stand relative to the water, why the market is where the roads meet, which fields the canal can and cannot reach. That is what the chapter means when it says tools such as maps, atlases and GIS "enhance your understanding of the discipline".