FARIDPUR, a town and district of British India, in the Dacca division of Bengal. The town, which has a railway sta tion, stands on an old channel of the Ganges. Pop. (1931), 15,516. There are a Baptist mission and a college. The district has an area of 2,356 sq.m. and a population of 2,362,215. In the north the land is comparatively high, with a light sandy soil, covered with water during the rainy season, but dry during the cold and hot weather. From the town of Faridpur the ground slopes, until in the south, on the confines of Bakarganj, it becomes one immense swamp, never entirely dry. The villages are built on artificially raised sites or the high banks of the deltaic streams. Along many of the larger rivers the line of hamlets is unbroken for miles together, so that it is difficult to say where one ends and another begins. The plains between the rivers are almost invariably more or less depressed towards the centre, where usually a marsh or lagoon is found. These marshes, however, are gradually filling up by the silt deposited from the rivers; in the north of the district there now only remain two or three large swamps, and in them the process may be seen going on.
The principal rivers are the Ganges, the Arial Khan and the Haringhata. The Ganges, or Padma as it is locally called, flows along its northern boundary as far as Goalundo, where it receives the waters of the Jamuna or main stream of the Brahmaputra; thence the united stream turns southwards and forms the eastern boundary of the district. Rice is the great crop of the district.
The north of the district is crossed by the line of the Eastern Bengal State railway to Goalundo, an important place of call for the Ganges and Brahmaputra steamers, and a branch runs to Faridpur town. Most of the trade is conducted by river. The subdivisional town of Madaripur (pop. 25,297) in the south of the district, is a centre of steamer traffic and also of the jute baling industry of eastern Bengal.
See J. C. Jack, The Economic Life of a Bengal District (1916).