BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 12 of 150

Correct — C, Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj, Katihar. On 28 March 2025 the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the inclusion of the Kosi–Mechi Intra-State Link Project of Bihar under the Ministry of Jal Shakti's Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana – Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme, and the Government's own release names the beneficiary districts in exactly these words: additional annual irrigation in the Kharif season over 2,10,516 hectares in Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj and Katihar districts of Bihar. The approval carried an estimated project cost of Rs 6,282.32 crore including Rs 3,652.56 crore of central assistance to Bihar, with completion targeted by March 2029, and it made Kosi–Mechi the tenth project taken into the AIBP list under PMKSY 2.0. The engineering explains the district list better than any memorised set can. The project does not dig a new canal from scratch: it remodels the existing Eastern Kosi Main Canal up to RD 41.30 km and then extends it beyond its present tail all the way to the river Mechi at RD 117.50 km, so that two rivers which both flow through Bihar are joined inside Bihar. That extended canal is designed to divert about 2,050 million cubic metres of the Kosi's surplus monsoon water eastward into the Mahananda basin command, and the remodelling simultaneously restores the shortfall supply to the 1.57 lakh hectares that the Eastern Kosi Main Canal already commands. A canal running from the Kosi to the Mechi can only water the country lying between them — which is the four-district Purnia division, the Kosi–Seemanchal belt of north-east Bihar. Read the option list against the map and the point closes itself: the Kosi joins the Ganga near Kursela in Katihar district, and the Mechi ends by joining the Mahananda inside Kishanganj district, so two of the four names in option (c) are fixed by the two rivers in the question's own title. When candidates objected to this item, the Commission dismissed the objection in one line and confirmed that C stands.

• (a)Patna, Nalanda, Gaya, Siwan — These are central, southern and western Bihar, on the wrong side of the state entirely. Patna and Nalanda sit on the Ganga's south bank in the Magadh–Patna belt, Gaya lies in the drought-prone Falgu country of south Bihar whose canal water comes from the Sone system, and Siwan is in Saran division, west of the Gandak. Not one of them lies between the Kosi and the Mechi; the option is tempting only because it lists the districts a candidate has heard of most often.
• (b)Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi, Begusarai — The intelligent wrong answer, and the one a flood-aware candidate falls for. These are north-central Bihar — the Tirhut and Mithila plains drained by the Burhi Gandak, Bagmati and Kamla-Balan, with Begusarai on the Ganga's north bank. They flood as badly as Seemanchal does, so they feel like the natural beneficiaries of any Kosi scheme. But they lie WEST of the Kosi, upstream and outside the Eastern Kosi Main Canal's command; a canal carrying Kosi water eastward to the Mechi flows away from them, not towards them.
• (d)More than one of the above — Only one of the three district sets is right, so the compound option fails. Sets (a) and (b) name districts in wholly different drainage belts — the Sone and Punpun catchments of south Bihar and the Burhi Gandak–Bagmati belt of north-central Bihar — and neither shares a single district with the four the Cabinet release actually names. BPSC's fourth option is live only when the earlier options are independent claims that could all hold at once, which mutually exclusive district lists cannot.

India's river-linking idea is administered as a National Perspective Plan framed in 1980 and executed through the National Water Development Agency, set up in 1982 and now under the Ministry of Jal Shakti. It began with two components — Himalayan Rivers Development and Peninsular Rivers Development — and an intra-State component was added in 2005; NWDA has prepared reports on 14 Himalayan links, 16 peninsular links and 37 intra-State links. The distinction between those categories is the whole point of this question. Kosi–Mechi appears in the Himalayan list of inter-links, but because both the Kosi and the Mechi flow through Bihar it is being built as an INTRA-State project, cleared by one state government and one central programme rather than by an inter-state water-sharing agreement — which is exactly why it moved while celebrated inter-state links did not. The money comes through a different channel again: the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana, launched in 2015-16 and re-approved for 2021-26 with an outlay of Rs 93,068.56 crore including Rs 37,454 crore of central assistance. Its Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme component exists to finish ongoing major and medium irrigation projects rather than to start new ones, and had completed 63 projects and created 26.11 lakh hectares of additional irrigation potential since April 2016 when the Kosi–Mechi approval was announced. So three separate frameworks meet in this one project — a 1980 perspective plan, a 2005 intra-State category and a 2015-16 irrigation scheme.

Do not memorise the district list; derive it. The question names both rivers, and each river fixes a district on its own. The Kosi rises as the Sapta Koshi where the Sun Kosi, Arun and Tamur meet at Triveni in Nepal, crosses into north Bihar and joins the Ganga near Kursela in Katihar district. The Mechi rises in the Mahabharat Lekh in Nepal, runs down the eastern margin as an India–Nepal boundary stream and ends by joining the Mahananda inside Kishanganj district. A canal built to carry Kosi water eastward to the Mechi must therefore cross the country between Katihar and Kishanganj — and the districts in between are Purnea and Araria. That is the whole of Purnia division, the four-district Kosi–Seemanchal block of north-east Bihar, and it is option (c) exactly. The single discriminating fact, if you want one line to carry into the hall, is direction of flow: the transfer runs from the Kosi EASTWARD into the Mahananda basin, so every candidate district must lie east of the Kosi. That instantly kills option (b), which is the only distractor with any pull, because Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur and Sitamarhi all lie west of the Kosi in the Burhi Gandak and Bagmati country. The deeper trap is assuming that a flood-control name implies a flood-control benefit for the worst-flooded districts. Kosi–Mechi is not a flood project at all — the Cabinet approved it as a Kharif irrigation project that uses surplus monsoon water, and the benefit it promises is assured irrigation in a rain-fed belt, not protection for the Kosi's embankment districts.

• CCEA approved inclusion of the Kosi–Mechi Intra-State Link Project under PMKSY–AIBP on 28 March 2025: estimated cost Rs 6,282.32 crore, central assistance Rs 3,652.56 crore, completion targeted by March 2029, making it the tenth project added to the AIBP list under PMKSY 2.0.
• The project provides 2,10,516 hectares of additional annual Kharif irrigation in Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj and Katihar — the four districts of Purnia division, Bihar's Kosi–Seemanchal belt (10,009 sq km, population 1.08 crore at the 2011 Census).
• Engineering: remodelling of the existing Eastern Kosi Main Canal up to RD 41.30 km and its extension to the river Mechi at RD 117.50 km, diverting about 2,050 million cubic metres of surplus Kosi water into the Mahananda command in the monsoon, while restoring shortfall supply to the canal's existing 1.57 lakh hectare command.
• The Kosi is the third-largest tributary of the Ganga by discharge after the Ghaghara and the Yamuna — about 720 km long, draining roughly 74,500 sq km across Tibet, Nepal and Bihar, formed at Triveni in Nepal from the Sun Kosi, Arun and Tamur and joining the Ganga near Kursela in Katihar district.
• Called the 'Sorrow of Bihar' because its floods hit about 21,000 sq km of fertile land; its alluvial fan is among the world's largest, with evidence of lateral channel shifting of more than 120 km through at least twelve major channels over 250 years — though a review of 28 historical maps from 1760 to 1960 found the shift random and oscillating rather than a simple east-to-west march.
• The Kosi Project born of the 1954 floods had three stages — a barrage at Bhimnagar, embankments above and below it, and a high multipurpose dam proposed at Barakshetra in Nepal; the third stage was never built, and the embankment breach of 18 August 2008 produced the catastrophic Bihar flood of that year.

• Assuming a Kosi project must benefit the most flood-affected Kosi districts — this is a Kharif IRRIGATION project using surplus monsoon water, and its command lies east of the river
• Confusing the intra-State Kosi–Mechi link with the inter-state Kosi–Ghaghara link, which is a separate entry in the Himalayan component and has not been approved for construction
• Writing 'Purnia' when the paper prints 'Purnea', or dropping Araria from the set — the four districts are Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj and Katihar, exactly the districts of Purnia division
• Treating 'More than one of the above' as a hedge when the earlier options are mutually exclusive lists

BPSC asks Bihar water projects as flat recall of the beneficiary districts, the cost or the year of Cabinet approval, and it draws them straight from a Cabinet or state-budget announcement of the preceding twelve months — so a candidate who reads PIB's Jal Shakti releases for one year answers these without any special preparation. UPSC almost never asks which district benefits; it asks what a programme is FOR, which is how the same syllabus area appeared in 2015 as a pair of statements on the aims of the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme and the Command Area Development Programme, and in 2024 as the west-to-east order in which the Himalayan tributaries meet the Ganga.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Kosi–Mechi Intra-State Link Project of Bihar, approved by the CCEA in March 2025, was included under which central scheme?

  • (a)Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana – Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme
  • (b)Namami Gange Mission
  • (c)Atal Bhujal Yojana
  • (d)Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana

  Answer(a) Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana – Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme — the CCEA cleared its inclusion under PMKSY-AIBP on 28 March 2025 with central assistance of Rs 3,652.56 crore against a project cost of Rs 6,282.32 crore.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Kosi river joins the Ganga near which of the following places in Bihar?

  • (a)Kursela in Katihar district
  • (b)Sonepur in Saran district
  • (c)Barauni in Begusarai district
  • (d)Bhagalpur in Bhagalpur district

  Answer(a) Kursela in Katihar district — the Kosi, the Ganga's third-largest tributary by discharge, meets the main river near Kursela; Sonepur is where the Gandak joins, opposite Patna.