Bagepalli is a town
municipal council
A municipal council is the legislative body of a municipality or local government area. Depending on the location and classification of the municipality it may be known as a city council, town council, town board, community council, rural counci ...
in
Chikballapur district
Chikkaballapura district is a district in the state of Karnataka, India. On 23 August 2007, it was carved out of the pre-existing Kolar district which was the fourth largest district (before bifurcation) of Karnataka by moving the talukas of Ga ...
in the state of
Karnataka
Karnataka (; ISO: , , also known as Karunāḍu) is a state in the southwestern region of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act. Originally known as Mysore State , it was renamed ''Karnat ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. Bagepalli is situated 100 km north of
Bangalore
Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...
on the Bangalore-
Hyderabad
Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part ...
National Highway. The region is just below the southern border of the
Rayalaseema in
Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...
, South India. It is semi-arid and drought prone with 535 mm of erratic and spatial rainfall.
Geography
Bagepalli is located at . It has an average elevation of 707 metres (2319 ft).
The region is a semi arid drought prone one with low, erratic and spatial rainfall. The dust brown rocky terrain is severely undulating, with small hill ranges and outcrops that stud the topography. There is no mineral wealth and only a very thin and fragile soil cover.
An adverse land:person ratio creates a strong thirst for cultivable land since less than one-half of the total land is fit for
cultivation, with the remaining taken over by the hills and rocky fields. Hardly 5% of the cropped lands are irrigated by an age old network of rain-fed tanks (small lakes), each irrigating 2 to 10 hectares of wet land. The low water table is tapped through bore-wells drilled to more than 100 meters depth. Even these dry up in the summer months, from April to September every year, when temperatures rise to a dry heat of 38 °C.
The average rainfall is 535 mm a year and this is, moreover, erratic and spatial. As a result there is only 1 rain-fed crop a year, whose stand is from late June till December. Groundnuts are grown on these dry lands, inter-cropped with
red gram
The pigeon pea (''Cajanus cajan'') is a perennial legume from the family Fabaceae native to the Old World. The pigeon pea is widely cultivated in tropical and semitropical regions around the world, being commonly consumed in South Asia, Southeast ...
,
cowpea
The cowpea (''Vigna unguiculata'') is an annual herbaceous legume from the genus ''Vigna''. Its tolerance for sandy soil and low rainfall have made it an important crop in the semiarid regions across Africa and Asia. It requires very few input ...
, field beans,
green gram,
jowar
''Sorghum bicolor'', commonly called sorghum () and also known as great millet, broomcorn, guinea corn, durra, imphee, jowar, or milo, is a grass species cultivated for its grain, which is used for food for humans, animal feed, and ethanol produc ...
,
maize
Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Th ...
and
castor on the field bunds. Irrigated
groundnut
Groundnut may refer to:
* Seeds that ripen underground, of the following plants, all in the Faboideae subfamily of the legumes:
** '' Best Basketball Player'', Obinna Udunni
** '' Arachis villosulicarpa'', a perennial peanut species
** ''Vigna sub ...
,
mulberry
''Morus'', a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of diverse species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. Generally, the genus has 64 identif ...
,
onions
An onion (''Allium cepa'' L., from Latin ''cepa'' meaning "onion"), also known as the bulb onion or common onion, is a vegetable that is the most widely cultivated species of the genus ''Allium''. The shallot is a botanical variety of the onion ...
and
sunflower
The common sunflower (''Helianthus annuus'') is a large annual forb of the genus ''Helianthus'' grown as a crop for its edible oily seeds. Apart from cooking oil production, it is also used as livestock forage (as a meal or a silage plant), as ...
are the common bore-well irrigated crops.
Ragi (golden millet) and a coarse variety of paddy are cultivated under irrigation tanks. Every fifth or sixth year is a drought, followed by near famine conditions.
Demographics
As of 2001 India
census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...
, Bagepalli had a population of 1,69,689.
Chikballapur District Profile
Males constitute 50.7% of the population and females 49.3%. Bagepalli has an average literacy rate of 63%, higher than the national average of 59.5%; with 56% of the males and 44% of females literate. 12% of the population is under 6 years of age.
References
{{reflist
Cities and towns in Chikkaballapur district