Visit Madhya Pradesh, Incredible Madhya Pradesh, India Ka Dil Dekho: 2013

Bhopal (/boʊˈpɑːl/ (Hindustani pronunciation: [bʱoːpaːl] (

listen)) is the capital of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and the administrative headquarters of Bhopal District and Bhopal Division. The city was the capital of the former Bhopal State. Bhopal is known as the City of Lakes for its various natural as well as artificial lakes and is also one of the greenest cities in India.

A Y-class city, Bhopal houses various institutions and installations of national importance. Some of these include ISRO's Master Control Facility, the CSIR, AIIMS Bhopal National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) AMPRI, MANIT, IISER,SPA, IIFM, BHEL and NLIU. The city attracted international attention after the Bhopal disaster, when a Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide manufacturing plant leaked a mixture of deadly gases including methyl isocyanate on the intervening night of 2 / 3 December 1984, leading to the worst industrial disaster in the history of industrialization and a loss of thousands of lives. Since then, Bhopal has been a center of protests and campaigns which have been joined by people from across the globe.

Geography

According to current master plan, the municipality covers 697 square kilometres It has two very beautiful big lakes, collectively known as the Bhoj Wetland. These lakes are the Upper Lake (now renamed to Bhojtal) and the Lower Lake. Locally these are known as the Bada Talab and Chota Talab respectively. The catchment area of the Upper Lake is 360 km² while that of the Lower Lake is 9.6 km². The Upper Lake drains into the Kolar River. The Van Vihar National Park is a national park situated besides the Upper Lake.Bhopal has an average elevation of 500m metres (1401 ft). Bhopal is located in the central part of India, and is just north of the upper limit of the Vindhya mountain ranges. Located on the Malwa plateau, it is higher than the north Indian plains and the land rises towards the Vindhya Range to the south. The city has uneven elevation and has small hills within its boundaries. The major hills in Bhopal comprise of Idgah hills and Shyamala hills in the northern region and Arera hills in the central region.