← 🌍 Earth science · usually met in Std 5-9
Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection — the same water going round, driven by the Sun and gravity.
The Sun evaporates water from oceans, lakes and soil, and plants release more through transpiration. The vapour rises, cools, and condenses into droplets around tiny particles, forming clouds. When droplets grow heavy enough they fall as rain, snow or hail. Some runs off into rivers, some soaks into the ground to become groundwater, and the rest evaporates again.
Groundwater is the part most often forgotten and most heavily used. It moves slowly and recharges slowly, so an aquifer pumped faster than it refills falls year after year — which is happening across large parts of northern and western India. Rainwater harvesting and recharge structures exist to put water back into the ground rather than letting it run away.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “The water cycle” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. Geological Survey of India ↗Rocks, earthquakes, the Himalaya and seismic zoning. India Meteorological Department ↗The monsoon, rainfall and cyclone warnings, from the department that issues them.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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