Eastern India’s plateau edge is where the rivers fall and the forest survives

There is a raised block of old rock in the east and it is not flat

North of the Odisha coast and west of the Bengal delta the land rises into a series of uplands — the Chotanagpur plateau across Jharkhand, its extensions into West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, and the broken hill country of the Eastern Ghats running southwest through Odisha. This is old, hard rock, and the plateau surface sits several hundred metres above the plains around it.

Because it is a plateau rather than a range, the interior is comparatively level and the drama is concentrated at the edges. That geometry is the key to the whole region: gentle undulating country on top, an abrupt fall at the rim, and a hot plain below.

It also makes the region cooler than the plains beside it. Ranchi and the towns on the plateau surface run noticeably milder than Patna or the Bengal lowlands in the hot months, which is why the plateau acquired a reputation as a summer refuge long before anyone called it tourism.

Rivers leaving a plateau produce waterfalls, in one season

A river running across the plateau surface reaches the rim and drops. That single fact accounts for the concentration of waterfalls around Ranchi and through the plateau margins of Jharkhand and Odisha — Hundru and Dassam near Ranchi are the ones most often visited, and there are many more that see almost nobody.

These are monsoon-dependent in a way that catches people out. The rivers here are seasonal and the catchments are not large, so a fall that is thunderous in August can be a trickle over bare rock in April. The best of them run from the middle of the rains through to roughly the end of the year, thinning steadily after that.

The corresponding hazard is the same one every seasonal-waterfall region has. Wet rock is treacherous, the pools below are deeper and stronger than they look, and levels can rise fast if it is raining upstream even when the sky above you is clear. Drownings at these sites are a recurring local news story, which is why several now have barriers and guards.

The forest here is a different forest

Much of the plateau and the Eastern Ghats carries dry deciduous forest, dominated in large stretches by sal, which loses its leaves in the hot season and greens up spectacularly with the rains. It isn’t the tall wet forest of the Western Ghats and it shouldn’t be judged against it.

Winter and the early hot season strip the undergrowth back and open the sightlines, which is when the region’s protected areas are most rewarding to visit. Simlipal in Odisha is the best known, with a hill core and a considerable elephant population; Betla in Jharkhand and several sanctuaries along the Odisha hills sit in similar country.

Access to these areas is governed by state forest departments and has been affected at various times by security considerations as well as by season, so the current position on entry has to be checked rather than assumed from an older account.

This is Adivasi country and the towns reflect it

The plateau belt holds one of the largest concentrations of Adivasi communities in India — Santal, Munda, Ho, Oraon, Kondh and many others — and the culture, the languages and the village layout are visibly distinct from the plains an hour away.

Weekly markets, or haats, are the institution to look for. They rotate between villages on a fixed day of the week, they are where the rural economy actually happens, and they are far more informative about a district than any monument in it. A visitor is a curiosity but rarely an intrusion, provided the camera stays down unless asked for.

It is also a region shaped by mining and heavy industry. Coal, iron and bauxite have built substantial towns here, and the same plateau that produces the waterfalls produces the minerals. The landscape moves between forest, open-cast pit and steel town within a single hour of driving, and pretending otherwise gives a false picture of the place.

Travel here works on roads, and on a short list of them

Rail through the region is decent along the main corridors, because the mineral traffic needed it, and considerably thinner off them. The interesting country is generally not on a line, so a hired vehicle or the state bus network does the work of getting between the plateau towns.

Distances feel longer than they read. The roads wind, the towns are strung out and there is very little tourist infrastructure between them, so an itinerary that would be comfortable in Rajasthan will be tight here. Fuel and food stops need a little planning outside the main highways.

The reward for that friction is a landscape with almost no visitor pressure on it. Waterfalls that would carry a queue and a ticket office elsewhere are approached down a village lane. Whether that is worth the extra effort is a personal calculation, but the region is one of the few in India where the answer isn’t obviously no.