New Delhi:
One of the greatest mysteries of India is how and why the flourishing Indus Valley Civilisation disappeared. Now, researchers from IIT Gandhinagar propose that it was a series of extended droughts that forced the people of the region to abandon the urban cities of Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi and Lothal.
The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in what is now northwest India and Pakistan, and was one of the world’s earliest urban societies. So advanced that cities had drainage systems and the metal craft so advanced that beauties like the ‘Dancing Girl’ were crafted 5,000 years ago.
Renowned for its advanced cities, water management, and trade networks, the IVC’s decline has long puzzled archaeologists and historians. Recent research led by Vimal Mishra of IIT Gandhinagar and colleagues provides compelling evidence that successive, severe droughts played a central role in the civilisation’s gradual disappearance. An eleven-page research paper in the journal ‘Communications Earth and Environment’ suggests it was water scarcity that killed the flourishing civilisation
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