North India lies mainly on continental India and a very small part of it lies on the Indian peninsula. Towards its North are the Himalayas which largely define the boundary between India and China. To its west is the Thar desert and the Aravalli hills. The Vindhya mountains are generrally taken to be the southern boundary of North India.

The predominant geogrphical feature of North India is the Indo-Gangetic plain which spans the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and supports more than half the regions population. The melting of glaciers in the summer and the monsoon rains ensure that the Ganges and its tributaries are perennial, this along with the fertile alluvial nature of the soil have historically been able to be support increasing populations. Additionally, the plains in Punjab and Haryan support large populations there.

The Thar desert is an arid and semi-arid region that receives very little rain from the monsoons. The state of Madhya Pradesh has large areas under forest cover as do Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Chattisgarh. The sate of Jammu and Kashmir is generally mountainous and only supports a population of around 6 million people.

Traditional economy The economy of northern India, especially the region surrounding is growing at a remarkable pace. Shown here are commercial buildings in Gurgaon,Haryana

The economy of this region is predominantly agrarian; culturally, socially and historically the country has always been defined by its village societies. It is therefore proper to devote space to a detailing of the north Indian socio-agrarian structure.

North India largely retains a feudal agricultural setup, with a preponderance of tenant farmers as against South India or East India, where extensive land reforms and land redistribution policies over the second half of the 20th century put in place an equally bad system of small, fragmented land holdings being farmed by their owners, who are actually almost as impoverished as the tenant farmers of north India. Some of these differences stem from the later Mughal emperors' practice of relying on zamindars, or 'hereditary tax farmers', who collected taxes from rural communities in return for a percentage of the proceeds, and were granted certain administrative powers. The Zamindari system was never as prevalent in the south, as Mughal rule did not extend to much of the South.

The British administrators of the Bengal Presidency (Eastern India) inherited and expanded upon the Zamindari system, while the Madras Presidency which governed much of south India, relied on textpanchayats, or village councils, for rural administration and tax collection. Although the zamindari system was formally abolished after India's independence, a rural economy dominated by landlords is still prevalent across much of northern India. Tensions between landlords and their tenant farmers are widespread in northern India, notably in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh these tensions have given rise to landlord-tenant strife in several northern states, and has fueled Naxalite movements.