Resources and Development Class 10: NCERT Chapter PDF and Guide

This page is about Resources and Development, the first chapter of the NCERT Class 10 Social Science textbook Contemporary India II. It runs across 12 printed pages and is the opening chapter of the Geography section of the book.

The official PDF of this chapter is right below, followed by a section-by-section guide to what the chapter contains — the resource definition and classification, sustainable development, resource planning, land use, land degradation, the six soil types, and soil erosion and conservation.

Download the official NCERT chapter PDF

NCERT publishes the whole of Contemporary India II as one official PDF on its website, and this chapter is part of that file. Open the resources and development class 10 chapter PDF directly from ncert.nic.in — it is the same edition your school follows and the one this guide refers to.

Everything below explains what is inside that file, so you can revise from this page and use the PDF to check exact wording and to see the diagrams clearly.

Chapter at a glance: what is inside this NCERT chapter

The table below is the fastest way to see the chapter’s shape before you start reading. It lists what the official PDF holds.

Its route runs from the definition of a resource, through development and resource planning, to land resources, land use, land degradation, the six soil types, and soil erosion and conservation.

What this chapter covers, in order

Use this reading map to know where each idea sits before you start. It follows the chapter’s own section order.

1. Definition and classification of resources — what makes something a resource and the four bases of classification (p. 1).
2. Development of resources and sustainable development — the problems of overuse and the global response from Rio 1992 and Agenda 21 (p. 2).
3. Resource planning — the three-step planning process and why India needs it (pp. 2–3).
4. Land resources and land utilisation — relief features and the five purposes land is used for (p. 4).
5. Land use pattern in India — the national pattern, the reporting area and the forest question (pp. 4–5).
6. Land degradation and conservation measures — causes by region and the remedies (p. 6).
7. Soil as a resource — formation factors and the six soil types of India (pp. 6–9).
8. Soil erosion and soil conservation — gully, sheet and wind erosion and the farming methods that prevent them (p. 10).

What is a resource, and how are resources classified?

This is the chapter’s opening question, and nearly every later idea builds on it. A resource is anything in the environment that can satisfy a human need — but only if three conditions are met at the same time (NCERT, p. 1).

• Technologically accessible — we have the means to reach and use it.
• Economically feasible — using it is worth more than it costs.
• Culturally acceptable — society accepts its use.

The chapter is careful to say that resources are not free gifts of nature. They become resources when human beings act on them: people interact with nature through technology and create institutions to speed up economic development (NCERT, p. 1). How that interaction works is shown in Fig 1.1, read in the diagram walkthrough below.

Resources are classified on four bases (NCERT, p. 1):

• Origin — biotic (from living things, such as forests and wildlife) and abiotic (from non-living things, such as land and water).
• Exhaustibility — renewable (can be replenished, such as solar and wind energy) and non-renewable (exhausted with use, such as minerals and coal).
• Ownership — individual, community, national and international, depending on who controls the resource.
• Status of development — potential, developed, stock and reserves, depending on how far the resource has been surveyed and put to use.

The classification tree is shown in Fig 1.2, which the chapter expects you to be able to redraw from memory.

Sustainable development and the 1992 Earth Summit

This section explains why careless use of resources became a global problem and what world leaders agreed to do about it. Indiscriminate use created three major problems (NCERT, p. 2):

• Depletion of resources to satisfy the greed of a few.
• Unequal accumulation — resources concentrated in a few hands, dividing society into haves and have-nots.
• Global ecological crises — global warming, ozone layer depletion, environmental pollution and land degradation.

Against this background the idea of sustainable development entered global politics: development should take place without damaging the environment, and development in the present should not compromise the needs of future generations (NCERT, p. 2).

In June 1992, more than 100 heads of state met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the first International Earth Summit. They signed the Declaration on Global Climatic Change and Biological Diversity, endorsed the global Forest Principles, and adopted Agenda 21 (NCERT, p. 2).

Agenda 21 is the declaration aimed at achieving global sustainable development by fighting environmental damage, poverty and disease through cooperation on common interests, mutual needs and shared responsibilities. One of its major objectives is that every local government should draw up its own local Agenda 21 (NCERT, p. 2).

Before Rio, four milestones built the conservation argument:

Resource planning in India: why it is needed and how it works

Resource planning is the accepted strategy for the judicious use of resources, and India needs it because resource availability is extremely uneven across the country (NCERT, p. 2). The chapter gives four examples of that imbalance:

• Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are rich in minerals and coal deposits.
• Arunachal Pradesh has abundant water resources but lacks infrastructure.
• Rajasthan is well endowed with solar and wind energy but lacks water resources.
• Ladakh’s cold desert has a rich cultural heritage but is deficient in water, infrastructure and some vital minerals.

Because of this unevenness, resource planning works at national, state, regional and local levels. It is a complex process with three steps (NCERT, p. 3):

1. Identification and inventory of resources across the country — surveying, mapping, and qualitative and quantitative estimation and measurement.
2. Building a planning structure equipped with suitable technology, skill and institutional setup to implement development plans.
3. Matching resource development plans with overall national development plans.

India has worked at these goals right from the First Five Year Plan launched after Independence (NCERT, p. 3).

The chapter’s sharpest point: availability of resources is a necessary condition for development, but not a sufficient one. Resources contribute to development only when accompanied by appropriate technology and institutional changes (NCERT, p. 3). That is why some resource-rich regions stay economically backward while some resource-poor regions have developed — the chapter asks you to find examples yourself.

Gandhiji voiced the same concern about conservation in these words: “There is enough for everybody’s need and not for anybody’s greed.”

Land resources and the land use categories

Land matters to this chapter because it is a natural resource of finite magnitude — we cannot make more of it. It supports natural vegetation, wildlife, human life, economic activities, transport and communication, so available land has to be used with careful planning (NCERT, p. 4).

India’s land is unevenly divided among relief features, and Fig 1.3 maps them.

Three shares matter for answers (NCERT, p. 4): plains cover about 43 per cent of the land and provide facilities for agriculture and industry; mountains cover 30 per cent and ensure perennial river flow, tourism and ecological benefits; plateaus cover 27 per cent and hold rich reserves of minerals, fossil fuels and forests.

Land is used for five official purposes, and the differences between them are frequently tested (NCERT, p. 4):

1. Forests.
2. Land not available for cultivation — barren and waste land, plus land put to non-agricultural uses such as buildings, roads and factories.
3. Other uncultivated land (excluding fallow) — permanent pastures and grazing land; land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves not included in net sown area; and culturable waste land left uncultivated for more than five agricultural years.
4. Fallow lands — current fallow (left without cultivation for one agricultural year or less) and other than current fallow (left uncultivated for one to five agricultural years).
5. Net sown area — the physical extent of land on which crops are sown and harvested. Net sown area plus the area sown more than once in a year is the gross cropped area.

Land use is shaped by physical factors such as topography, climate and soil types, and by human factors such as population density, technological capability and culture and traditions (NCERT, p. 4).

Fig 1.4 shows the national pattern in two pie charts, for 1960-61 and 2026-27.

India’s total geographical area is 3.28 million sq km, but land use data is available for only 93 per cent of it. Most north-eastern states except Assam have not fully reported land use, and some areas of Jammu and Kashmir occupied by Pakistan and China have not been surveyed (NCERT, p. 5).

Forest is the chapter’s worry: forest area is far lower than the desired 33 per cent of geographical area outlined in the National Forest Policy, 1952, considered essential for maintaining ecological balance (NCERT, p. 5). The chapter also notes that if other-than-current-fallow land were counted with net sown area, net sown area would come to about 54 per cent of the reporting area.

The activity beside Fig 1.4 asks why net sown area and forest area changed so little between 1960-61 and 2026-27.

The text gives the pointers: most land that can be cultivated is already under the plough — net sown area is over 80 per cent in Punjab and Haryana and below 10 per cent in Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands — and most other-than-current-fallow land is of poor quality or too costly to cultivate (NCERT, p. 5).

One worked example fixes the idea of a land use percentage. Suppose a district has a total area of 3,000 sq km and reports 38 per cent net sown area. The net sown area is \( \frac{38}{100} \times 3000 = 1140 \) sq km, and the remaining 1,860 sq km falls in all the other categories together.

Land degradation: causes, states and conservation measures

This section answers a direct question — how do human activities ruin the land we need? The chapter begins with a striking fact: 95 per cent of our basic needs for food, shelter and clothing come from land (NCERT, p. 6).

The causes follow a clear regional pattern, which is the easiest way to remember them:

Conservation measures the chapter lists (NCERT, p. 6):

• Afforestation and proper management of grazing.
• Shelter belts of plants and control of overgrazing.
• Stabilising sand dunes by growing thorny bushes — the method for arid areas.
• Proper management of waste lands and control of mining activities.
• Proper discharge and disposal of industrial effluents and wastes after treatment.

The six soil types of India, explained

Soil is the most important natural resource — the medium of plant growth that supports living organisms — and it takes millions of years to form even a few centimetres of depth (NCERT, p. 6).

The factors that form soil are relief, parent rock or bedrock, climate, vegetation and other forms of life, and time; the forces doing the work include changes in temperature, running water, wind, glaciers and decomposers. Soil is a living system made of organic matter (humus) and inorganic materials, as the soil profile shows.

On the basis of colour, thickness, texture, age and chemical and physical properties, the chapter classifies Indian soils into six types. The map locates them; the table gives what to write in an answer.

The photographs give the visual cues. Alluvial soil (Fig 1.6) is the mix of sand, silt and clay that makes up the northern plains; black soil (Fig 1.7) is the sticky dark clayey soil of the Deccan trap region; laterite (Fig 1.8) is the leached acidic soil; arid soil (Fig 1.9) is the sandy saline soil of dry western India.

Soil erosion and the methods to conserve soil

Soil formation and soil erosion normally happen at the same time and stay in balance; human activity such as deforestation, overgrazing, construction and mining, and natural forces such as wind, glacier and water, disturb that balance (NCERT, p. 10). Soil erosion is the denudation of the soil cover and its subsequent washing down.

Three erosion types are tested again and again:

• Gully erosion — running water cuts deep channels into clayey soils; the land becomes unfit for cultivation and is called bad land, known as ravines in the Chambal basin.
• Sheet erosion — water flows as a sheet over large areas down a slope and washes the topsoil away.
• Wind erosion — wind blows loose soil off flat or sloping land.

Farming method matters too: ploughing up and down the slope creates channels for quick water flow and speeds up erosion, so the chapter treats ploughing direction as a cause of erosion as well (NCERT, p. 10).

Fig 1.10 shows soil erosion on a slope; Fig 1.11 shows the deep gullies formed when running water cuts channels into the soil — the step from erosion to bad land.

Four conservation methods appear in answers (NCERT, p. 10):

• Contour ploughing — ploughing along the contour lines, which decelerates the flow of water down the slope.
• Terrace cultivation — cutting steps into slopes so the terraces restrict erosion; the western and central Himalayas have well developed terrace farming.
• Strip cropping — dividing large fields into strips and leaving grass strips between crops to break the force of the wind.
• Shelter belts — rows of trees planted as shelter; they have contributed significantly to stabilising sand dunes and the desert in western India.

Reading the chapter’s diagrams and maps

Two concept figures carry the chapter’s argument, and you should be able to explain and redraw both. Fig 1.1 is the opening idea in one picture.

The diagram is a triangle of nature, technology and institutions. Nature provides materials; technology is the tool humans use to interact with nature; institutions — rules, organisations, markets — speed up economic development. A resource appears only where all three work together, which is why the chapter insists resources are not free gifts of nature (NCERT, p. 1).

Fig 1.2 is the classification tree: four branches from the single word “resources” — origin, exhaustibility, ownership and status of development. Practise redrawing this tree from memory, with one example hanging off each branch.

For the remaining figures, one reading tip each:

• Fig 1.3 (land under relief features, p. 4): match the shaded relief regions to the 43-30-27 split — plains for farming, mountains for rivers and tourism, plateaus for minerals and forests.
• Fig 1.4 (land use pie charts, p. 5): compare the two circles wedge by wedge rather than reading exact numbers — the exercise is about which categories stay almost fixed.
• Fig 1.5 (soil profile, p. 6): read the layers from top to bottom as humus-rich surface to weathered parent rock.
• India: Major Soil Types (p. 8): this is the one map to revise — connect each soil with the states in the table above.
• Soil photographs (Figs 1.6–1.9): use colour and texture — dark sticky clay is black soil, red-brown brick-like texture is laterite, sandiness is arid soil.

Key definitions from this chapter

The terms below are the ones exam answers expect you to use precisely. Each is written so you can repeat it in your own words.

Common mistakes students make in this chapter

Most lost marks in this chapter come from pairs of terms that look similar. Learn the correction before you make the mistake.

How the exercises test this chapter

The chapter ends with three exercise sets. The table maps each NCERT exercise question to the concept and the textbook page it tests, so your practice is targeted — not a promise that the same questions will appear in an exam.

The three MCQs are direct recall — each answer is a phrase found in the text. For the 30-word questions, a full answer names the states or soil first, then gives one point per feature.

For the 120-word questions, answer both halves as separate paragraphs and include at least one number from the text, such as the 93 per cent reporting area, the 33 per cent forest target, or the state variation in net sown area.

One caveat applies to every chapter: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical, so check the current official CBSE syllabus.

One page revision recap

Six steps in the chapter’s own order, for the night before. For each line, check that you can recall the detail behind it.

1. Resource and its classification — the three conditions of a resource and the four bases of classification; can you redraw Fig 1.2?
2. Sustainable development — the three problems of overuse, the Rio 1992 Summit and Agenda 21; the 1968 / 1974 / 1987 / 1992 conservation timeline.
3. Resource planning — the three steps and the uneven-regions examples (Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan).
4. Land use — the 43-30-27 relief split, five land use purposes, 93 per cent reporting area, 33 per cent forest target.
5. Land degradation — the four region-wise causes and the five conservation measures.
6. Soils — six soil types with states and crops; gully, sheet and wind erosion; contour ploughing, terrace cultivation, strip cropping and shelter belts.

Try the chapter’s activities to fix the ideas

The book includes four activity points. Doing them is the fastest way to turn definitions into recall.

• p. 2 — the oil-exhaustion thought experiment: imagine oil supplies run out and list what changes in daily life; and the recycling survey of attitudes in your colony or village toward domestic and agricultural waste.
• p. 3 — list the resources found in your state and the important ones that are deficit there; the “Find out” box alongside asks what resources communities develop with panchayat participation.
• p. 5 — compare the two Fig 1.4 pie charts and explain why net sown area and forest area changed so little; the chapter also asks how we feed the cattle population on shrinking pasture and what the consequences are.
• pp. 11–12 — the project on consumption and conservation in your locality, the class discussion on conserving school resources, and the word puzzle.

For the hidden puzzle at the end, the clues point to these chapter terms: minerals (a non-renewable resource, and part of the natural endowments in the first clue), black soil (soil with high water-retaining capacity), laterite (intensely leached soils of the monsoon climate), afforestation (plantation of trees on a large scale to check soil erosion) and alluvial soil (the soil the Great Plains are made of).

Related chapters and resources

Resources and Development is the opening chapter of Contemporary India II. Its natural next step is the second chapter, Forest and Wildlife Resources, which continues the same story of conservation. The Class 10 Social Science notes hub lists study pages for the other chapters of the book, and the Class 10 hub collects the other subjects.

If you need the general study index, start from CBSE notes.

One authority point: NCERT settles textbook contents, editions and official PDFs, while CBSE settles the syllabus and examinations. The official PDF of Contemporary India II is the edition this page follows.

Sources and data verification

• The figures, page numbers, exercise descriptions and content in this guide describe the NCERT textbook Contemporary India II (Class 10 Social Science), Chapter 1, official edition issued on ncert.nic.in.
• This page covers that one chapter. It does not describe other NCERT textbooks or the CBSE scheme of studies.
• It is maintained for the current session using the NCERT information published in the edition linked above.
• NCERT settles textbook contents, editions and official PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum, syllabus and examinations. Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official CBSE syllabus.

Frequently asked questions

What is the definition of a resource in Class 10 Geography?

A resource is anything in the environment that can be used to satisfy human needs when it is technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally acceptable (NCERT, p. 1).

Which is more fertile, Khadar or Bangar?

Khadar is more fertile. Khadar is the new alluvial soil with finer particles, while Bangar is the older alluvial soil with a higher concentration of kanker nodules (NCERT, p. 7).

Why is black soil also called black cotton soil?

Because it is black in colour and ideal for growing cotton; the chapter also calls it regur soil (NCERT, p. 7).

What is the difference between current fallow and other than current fallow land?

Current fallow is land left without cultivation for one agricultural year or less; other than current fallow is land left uncultivated for one to five agricultural years (NCERT, p. 4).

What is the main cause of land degradation in Punjab?

Over-irrigation. It causes waterlogging, which increases salinity and alkalinity in the soil (NCERT, p. 6).

What methods are used to check soil erosion in hilly areas?

Terrace cultivation and contour ploughing. The western and central Himalayas have well developed terrace farming, and ploughing along contour lines decelerates the flow of water down slopes (NCERT, p. 10).

Reference: NCERT Class 10 Social Science textbook, chapter 1, official edition on ncert.nic.in.