Artificial Lakes and Reservoirs of India

Not every large Indian water body is a natural lake — many of the biggest are reservoirs, created by damming a river, and exam questions frequently test whether a student can correctly identify a named water body as natural or artificial. The table below gathers the most commonly tested reservoirs alongside the river and dam that created each.

The Chambal river's three-reservoir cascade — Gandhi Sagar, then Rana Pratap Sagar, then Jawahar Sagar, in that order downstream — is a favourite "arrange in sequence" question, since all three sit on the same river within a fairly short stretch across the Madhya Pradesh–Rajasthan border region. Bhopal's Upper Lake (see "More States, One Lake Each" above) is worth remembering as the outlier in this table's logic: it is artificial by origin (an 11th-century dam) yet old and ecologically established enough that it is now almost always discussed alongside natural Ramsar wetlands rather than alongside modern hydroelectric reservoirs — a reminder that "artificial" and "recent" are not the same thing.

Memory hook: "Gandhi first, then Rana Pratap, then Jawahar — three dams, one river, in that order downstream." The Chambal cascade, sequenced.

Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the three reservoirs on the Chambal river in downstream order, and the river and dam behind Nagarjuna Sagar.

Answer: Gandhi Sagar → Rana Pratap Sagar → Jawahar Sagar; Nagarjuna Sagar is on the Krishna river, behind the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam.