BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 79 of 143

Correct — A, Fodder. India's cropping calendar has three seasons, and zaid is the short one squeezed between them — the summer months from roughly March to June, after the rabi harvest is off the field and before the monsoon arrives to start the kharif sowing. Because there is no rain in that window, a zaid crop can only be grown where irrigation is available, and it has to be quick-maturing. The standard list of zaid crops given in the NCERT geography textbook is watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, vegetables and fodder crops, and fodder is the only item on that list that appears among these four options. That is what makes it the answer: the other three are not merely less likely, they belong to the other two seasons outright. Gram and mustard are textbook rabi crops, sown from October to December on the residual soil moisture after the monsoon and harvested in spring; cotton is a long-duration kharif crop sown with the onset of the south-west monsoon. So the four options are one zaid, two rabi and one kharif, and a candidate who has the three seasonal lists straight can eliminate three of them in a few seconds. Be honest about the residual softness in this item, because it is real: 'fodder' is a use, not a single crop, and fodder maize, jowar, bajra and berseem are grown in several seasons. What justifies the answer is that fodder is the one option the standard zaid list names, while the other three are firmly and exclusively placed elsewhere.

• (b)Gram — Gram, or chana, is one of the four archetypal rabi crops alongside wheat, barley and mustard — sown October to December and harvested in spring. It is a pulse that thrives on cool weather and residual soil moisture, which is the opposite of what defines the hot, irrigated zaid window.
• (c)Cotton — Cotton is a kharif crop, sown with the onset of the south-west monsoon and among the longest in the field — it needs roughly six to eight months of warm weather and picking runs into the winter. Its long duration alone rules it out of a season that lasts about three months.
• (d)Mustard — Mustard is a rabi oilseed, sown with the winter crops and harvested before the summer heat. It is the most tempting wrong answer for anyone who links 'mustard' to spring, since the yellow mustard fields of north India flower in late winter — but flowering in February is a rabi crop finishing, not a zaid crop starting.

India's three cropping seasons are defined by the monsoon rather than by the calendar. KHARIF crops are sown with the arrival of the south-west monsoon in June and July and harvested in September and October — paddy, maize, jowar, bajra, tur, moong, urad, cotton, groundnut and soyabean. RABI crops are sown from October to December on the moisture the monsoon leaves behind and harvested from April to June — wheat, barley, peas, gram and mustard, and rabi is the season that gained most from the Green Revolution because it is the irrigated, fertiliser-responsive season in the north-western plains. ZAID is the short summer interval between the two, roughly March to June, when nothing will grow without irrigation and only quick-maturing crops fit: watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, vegetables and fodder. Zaid is small in area but economically useful because it puts an otherwise idle field and an otherwise idle irrigation system to work, and because green fodder is scarcest in exactly these months, when pasture has dried out and the monsoon grass has not yet come.

Treat the seasonal lists as three closed sets and answer by elimination, because that is faster and safer than reasoning about any single crop. Ask of each option only which set it lives in. Gram — rabi. Mustard — rabi. Cotton — kharif. One option is left, and it is the one the zaid list actually names. The reason this works is that examiners build such questions from the standard textbook lists, so the discriminating knowledge is the list, not agronomy. There is one more thing to hold about zaid that explains why fodder belongs there. Zaid is the irrigation-dependent season, and its crops are chosen for speed and for the value of being available when nothing else is: melons and cucumbers because summer demand is high, and green fodder because the dry months from April to June are precisely when cattle have least to eat. A candidate who understands that logic will not be thrown when a paper offers 'fodder' rather than a named crop, which is the small unfairness of this item — it names a use rather than a plant, and the answer has to come from the textbook list rather than from botany.

• Zaid is the short summer cropping season between the rabi harvest and the kharif sowing, running roughly from March to June and dependent entirely on irrigation
• The standard zaid list in NCERT geography is watermelon, muskmelon, cucumber, vegetables and fodder crops
• Rabi crops are sown October to December and harvested April to June — wheat, barley, peas, gram and mustard are the standard five
• Kharif crops are sown with the south-west monsoon in June-July and harvested September-October — paddy, maize, jowar, bajra, tur, moong, urad, cotton, groundnut and soyabean
• Sugarcane is the standing awkward case: it is planted around the monsoon and listed with kharif, yet the cane stands in the field for close to a full year

• Associating mustard with spring and so guessing zaid — mustard flowers in late winter as a rabi crop finishing its cycle
• Treating cotton as a summer crop because it needs heat; it is kharif and stays in the field for six to eight months
• Expecting a named plant as the answer — the textbook zaid list includes the generic category 'fodder crops', which is what makes it correct here

BPSC asks the cropping seasons as a one-line odd-one-out: four crops, one season named in the stem, and the mark turns on whether you carry the standard textbook list rather than an intuition about weather. UPSC prefers the multi-item version — 'consider the following crops: which of the above are kharif crops' — which forces you to classify three or four crops at once and therefore to know the full lists rather than a single crop's season.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs of crops belong to the rabi season ?

  • (a)Paddy and cotton
  • (b)Gram and mustard
  • (c)Bajra and groundnut
  • (d)Watermelon and cucumber

  Answer(b) Gram and mustard — both are sown October to December and harvested in spring; paddy, cotton, bajra and groundnut are kharif, while watermelon and cucumber are zaid.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The zaid cropping season in India is best described as

  • (a)the monsoon season, June to October
  • (b)the winter season, October to March
  • (c)the short irrigated summer season between the rabi harvest and the kharif sowing
  • (d)the year-long season occupied by plantation crops

  Answer(c) the short irrigated summer season between the rabi harvest and the kharif sowing — roughly March to June, producing melons, cucumbers, vegetables and fodder.