India has been divided into how many Agro Climatic Zones ?

Concept: Agro-climatic zoning is a regional planning technique that groups a country's areas by shared physical conditions — rainfall, soil type, temperature, and growing season — so that agricultural policy, irrigation planning, and crop-diversification strategy can be tailored to each region's natural conditions instead of being applied uniformly across the whole country.

Application: The Planning Commission of India (now NITI Aayog) formally demarcated the country into 15 broad Agro-Climatic Zones during the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985-90), based on physiography, soil type, rainfall pattern, and cropping pattern:

• Western Himalayan Region

• Eastern Himalayan Region

• Lower Gangetic Plains Region

• Middle Gangetic Plains Region

• Upper Gangetic Plains Region

• Trans-Gangetic Plains Region

• Eastern Plateau and Hills Region

• Central Plateau and Hills Region

• Western Plateau and Hills Region

• Southern Plateau and Hills Region

• East Coast Plains and Hills Region

• West Coast Plains and Ghats Region

• Gujarat Plains and Hills Region

• Western Dry Region

• The Islands Region

This 15-zone framework is the basis used for regional agricultural planning, irrigation allocation, and crop-zoning across the country. (ICAR's National Agricultural Research Project later carried out a finer 127-agro-climatic-sub-zone classification for more granular planning; that separate, more detailed scheme does not change the 15 broad Planning Commission zones this question is asking about, and 127 is not among the options offered.)

Contrast with the other counts offered:

• 12 does not correspond to any standard national-level agro-climatic classification of India.

• 22 matches an unrelated fact — India's 22 scheduled languages under the Eighth Schedule — not the count of agro-climatic zones.

• 9 is close to the commonly cited number of India's major soil types (alluvial, black, red, laterite, etc.), which is a different classification from agro-climatic zoning.

These contrasts confirm that the Planning Commission's 15-zone national framework is the answer among the options offered.