Consider the following pairs with reference to National Waterways (NW) in India and the associated rivers: NW No. — River 1. NW–1 : Ganga 2. NW–10 : Amba 3. NW–100 : Tapi Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?

Correct — D, 1, 2 and 3. NW-1 is the oldest and best known — the Ganga-Bhagirathi-Hooghly system from Haldia up to Prayagraj, declared in 1986 and the spine of the Jal Marg Vikas Project. NW-10 is the Amba river in Maharashtra, a short Konkan waterway of about forty-five kilometres running to the coast south of Mumbai. NW-100 is the Tapi, which rises in Madhya Pradesh and flows west across Maharashtra into Gujarat to reach the Arabian Sea at Surat. All three come from the same schedule to the National Waterways Act of 2016, which declared 106 waterways in one go and produced most of the numbers above five.

• (a)1 only — Recognises the famous one and discards the rest. The Amba and the Tapi are both genuine entries in the 2016 schedule, which named more than a hundred rivers, creeks and canals.
• (b)1 and 2 only — Drops the Tapi. NW-100 is the Tapi river, running across Maharashtra and Gujarat to the sea at Surat.
• (c)2 and 3 only — Drops the one pairing every candidate should be certain of. NW-1 has been the Ganga since 1986 and is the waterway on which the Jal Marg Vikas Project is built.

India had five national waterways until 2016, when the National Waterways Act declared 106 in a single schedule, absorbing the old five and adding rivers, creeks, estuaries and canals across the country. The Inland Waterways Authority of India develops and maintains them, and the flagship project is Jal Marg Vikas on NW-1, which built terminals at Varanasi, Sahibganj and Haldia and a navigation lock at Farakka.

Nobody carries 106 numbers in their head, so the workable approach is to be certain of the first handful and then reason about plausibility. NW-1 Ganga, NW-2 Brahmaputra, NW-3 the West Coast Canal in Kerala, NW-4 Godavari and Krishna, NW-5 the Brahmani and the Mahanadi delta rivers — those five are worth knowing exactly. Beyond them, an item is usually testing whether the river named actually exists as a waterway rather than whether you have memorised its number, and rivers of the western coast, the Konkan creeks and the Tapi among them, are heavily represented because the 2016 list was drawn up to include short coastal stretches.

• NW-1 is the Ganga-Bhagirathi-Hooghly system, Haldia to Prayagraj, declared in 1986.
• NW-10 is the Amba river in Maharashtra, a short Konkan waterway of about 45 km.
• NW-100 is the Tapi river, flowing across Maharashtra and Gujarat to the sea at Surat.
• The National Waterways Act, 2016 declared 106 waterways, absorbing the earlier five.
• The Inland Waterways Authority of India is the developing agency; Jal Marg Vikas is the NW-1 project.

• Assuming a high waterway number must be fictional.
• Confusing NW-2, the Brahmaputra, with NW-1, the Ganga.
• Placing the Tapi in the east; it is one of India's few large west-flowing rivers.

A pairing item that rewards certainty about the low numbers and plausibility judgement about the high ones.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  National Waterway 2 is situated on which river?

  • (a)Ganga
  • (b)Brahmaputra
  • (c)Godavari
  • (d)Mahanadi

  Answer(b) Brahmaputra — from Dhubri near the Bangladesh border to Sadiya in Assam.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  How many waterways were declared national waterways under the National Waterways Act, 2016?

  • (a)26
  • (b)56
  • (c)106
  • (d)150

  Answer(c) 106 — the Act absorbed the earlier five and added a hundred and one more.