As a class activity, measure the length of your classroom, a school corridor or a playground with the help of any measuring tape. Compare these lengths with the length of the largest reservoir in Dholavira.

Question

Accepted Answer

The largest reservoir at Dholavira measured 73 metres in length — and the reservoir photographed in Fig. 6.8, cut straight into the rock, is 33 metres long. Measure your own school first, then do the division.

What you measure	Typical length	How many fit into 73 m?
Your classroom	about 8 m	73 ÷ 8 ≈ 9 classrooms end to end
A school corridor	about 30 m	73 ÷ 30 ≈ 2½ corridors
A school playground / small field	about 70 m	roughly the whole field
A full football ground	about 100 m	about ¾ of the ground

Drawn to scale, the Harappan structures in this chapter look like this:

Harappan water structures against things you can measure in school. The Lothal basin is “just a little more than two football grounds”, exactly as page 98 says.

Why the activity is worth doing with a real tape: a number on a page means nothing until your legs have walked it. Pace out 73 metres in the playground and you suddenly understand that this was dug or cut by hand, out of rock, with copper and stone tools, more than 4,000 years ago — and that Dholavira had at least six of them, most connected by underground drains.

Sample answer: “Our classroom is 7.6 m long and the corridor is 28 m. The largest Dholavira reservoir would need almost ten of our classrooms in a row, or two and a half corridors. Our whole playground is 60 m — shorter than one reservoir. We could not believe that people 4,500 years ago cut something that long into solid rock without machines.”

NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 6 Water Management — LET'S EXPLORE