BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 106 of 150

Correct — B, Majuli Island. Majuli is the great river island of the Brahmaputra in upper Assam, bounded by the Brahmaputra to its south and east, the Subansiri to its west and an anabranch of the Brahmaputra to its north. Guinness World Records recognises it as the world's largest INLAND river island, and that one qualifier is worth carrying: Encyclopaedia Britannica awards the plain title of largest river island to Bananal Island on Brazil's Araguaia, and Ilha do Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon is also routinely cited as bigger. The two claims coexist precisely because the Guinness citation is worded 'inland'. For this question the distinction never bites, because nothing else on the option list is in contention on scale: Majuli measured about 880 sq km in 2024, against Agatti's 3.226 sq km, Bhavani Island's 133 acres (54 hectares) and Srirangam's narrow strip in the Kaveri delta. Note also that Majuli is shrinking: it was roughly 1,300 sq km in the 1790s and 1,255 sq km in the early twentieth century, so about 420 sq km has gone to Brahmaputra bank erosion — roughly a third of the loss in the second half of the twentieth century alone, with more than 35 villages washed away since 1991. In 2016 it became the first island in India to be constituted as a district, and it has been on the UNESCO tentative list under the Cultural category since March 2004 as the heartland of Assam's neo-Vaishnavite satra tradition.

• (a)Srirangam Island — Srirangam is a genuine river island — the strip at Tiruchirappalli enclosed by the Kaveri to the south and its distributary the Kollidam to the north. Its fame is religious, not geographical: it holds the Ranganathaswamy temple, which UNESCO calls the biggest functioning Hindu temple in the world at about 631,000 sq m. Fame, not size, makes it the tempting pick.
• (c)Bhavani Island — Bhavani Island is a real river island, in the Krishna at Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh — but at 133 acres (54 hectares, about 0.54 sq km) it is roughly one-sixteen-hundredth of Majuli. It is heavily developed as an APTDC tourist island, with Shilparamam, a ropeway and theme parks, which gives it a public profile far out of proportion to its area.
• (d)Agatti Island — Agatti is not a river island at all. It is a 3.226 sq km coral island sitting on the Agatti atoll in Lakshadweep, 459 km west of Kochi, and it carries Agatti Airport — the only airport in the Union Territory. The word 'Island' plus a familiar Indian name is the entire trap; an Arabian Sea atoll has no river anywhere near it.

A river island (a fluvial or mid-channel island) is built, not carved. Where a river slows and drops more sediment than it can carry, it deposits a bar in mid-channel, splits around it, and the bar grows until it stabilises under vegetation. The Brahmaputra is the classic factory for these: it carries one of the highest sediment loads of any river on Earth and runs in a wide braided channel across the Assam valley, throwing up sand-and-silt islands that Assam calls chars and chaporis. Because they are unconsolidated deposits rather than bedrock, they are created and destroyed by the same process — every flood season adds land on one bank and eats it on the other. That is why Majuli's area is a moving number rather than a fixed one. A coral island like Agatti is the opposite kind of object: biogenic limestone accumulated by reef organisms on a submarine platform in the open sea, with no river involved at all.

Read the option list before reaching for the fact. All four end in 'Island', but only three are river islands, and Agatti — a Lakshadweep atoll in the Arabian Sea — is a free elimination for anyone who registers that a coral island cannot be a river island. That leaves three, and the correct move is then to think in orders of magnitude rather than in names, because a world record needs a very large number. Bhavani Island is a city recreation park of 133 acres. Srirangam is a temple town on a delta strip. Majuli is large enough to be a revenue district of Assam in its own right and to have carried 65 monasteries. When an island is a district, it is not competing with a 133-acre theme park. The single discriminating fact is therefore scale — about 880 sq km against 3.226, 0.54 and a delta strip — and the single thing to say carefully afterwards is the qualifier: Guinness's citation reads largest inland river island, which is what leaves room for Bananal Island in Brazil.

• Majuli's area was about 880 sq km in 2024, down from about 1,255 sq km in the early twentieth century and roughly 1,300 sq km in the 1790s — some 420 sq km lost to Brahmaputra bank erosion, about a third of it in the latter half of the twentieth century, with more than 35 villages washed away since 1991
• Guinness World Records recognises Majuli as the world's largest INLAND river island; Encyclopaedia Britannica separately names Bananal Island, on Brazil's Araguaia, as the world's largest river island — the two statements coexist only because of the word 'inland'
• Majuli is bounded by the Brahmaputra to the south and east, the Subansiri to the west and an anabranch of the Brahmaputra to the north; in 2016 it became the first island in India to be constituted as a district
• Srimanta Sankardeva's neo-Vaishnavite movement established 65 satras (monasteries) on Majuli, of which 23 remain active; the island has been on the UNESCO tentative list under the Cultural category since March 2004
• Scale check on the distractors: Agatti 3.226 sq km, a coral atoll 459 km west of Kochi holding Lakshadweep's only airport; Bhavani Island 133 acres (54 hectares) in the Krishna at Vijayawada; Srirangam, between the Kaveri and the Kollidam at Tiruchirappalli, home to the Ranganathaswamy temple that UNESCO calls the biggest functioning Hindu temple in the world

• Writing the bare claim 'Majuli is the largest river island in the world' without the word 'inland' — Britannica gives the unqualified title to Bananal Island in Brazil, and Ilha do Marajó is also cited as larger
• Treating Agatti as a river island because the option says 'Island' — it is a coral atoll in Lakshadweep with no river within hundreds of kilometres
• Quoting a stale area for Majuli — the figure has fallen from about 1,255 sq km to about 880 sq km, so older and newer textbooks give genuinely different numbers

BPSC asks it flat: a one-line superlative with three other 'Islands' whose only job is to look plausible, and no statement structure to slow you down. UPSC almost never asks a superlative bare — in 2004 it buried this very fact inside a 'which statement is NOT correct' set, next to Tawang monastery, the Konyak language and Sikkim's population, so a candidate had to know four separate things to earn one mark.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Majuli, recognised as the world's largest inland river island, is enclosed principally by which pair of rivers?

  • (a)Ganga and Gandak
  • (b)Brahmaputra and Subansiri
  • (c)Mahanadi and Brahmani
  • (d)Krishna and Tungabhadra

  Answer(b) Brahmaputra and Subansiri — the Brahmaputra bounds Majuli on the south and east and the Subansiri on the west, with an anabranch of the Brahmaputra closing it off to the north. The other pairs are wrong on geography rather than on scale: the Ganga and Gandak meet at Sonpur in Bihar, the Mahanadi and Brahmani have separate deltas in Odisha, and the Tungabhadra is a tributary of the Krishna far to the south.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The satras of Majuli are associated with the religious movement founded by:

  • (a)Ramanuja
  • (b)Srimanta Sankardeva
  • (c)Chaitanya Mahaprabhu
  • (d)Basavanna

  Answer(b) Srimanta Sankardeva — his neo-Vaishnavite Ekasarana tradition established 65 satras on Majuli, of which 23 are still active, and the same movement produced Ankiya Naat and the Sattriya dance. Ramanuja's Sri Vaishnavism belongs to Tamil Nadu, Chaitanya's Gaudiya Vaishnavism to Bengal and Odisha, and Basavanna's Lingayat movement to twelfth-century Karnataka.