The College of Military Engineering affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University is situated at
- (a)New Delhi
- (b)Dehradun
- (c)Nainital
- (d)Pune
Correct — D, Pune. The College of Military Engineering stands at Dapodi in the north of Pune, on the highway beside the Khadki cantonment, and it is the training institution of the Indian Army's Corps of Engineers. It is affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University for its combat training and its B.Tech and M.Tech degrees, which is the detail the stem uses to identify it. Its history explains the location: it began as the School of Military Engineering at Thomason College in Roorkee in 1943, moved to Dapodi by 1948 after independence, and was upgraded from school to college in November 1951 to match the degree-level engineering courses it had begun to run. The other three options are all places with genuine defence or academic institutions, which is what makes them plausible, but none of them houses this college.
- (a)New Delhi — New Delhi has the service headquarters and the National Defence College, but the Corps of Engineers' training college is not there.
- (b)Dehradun — The most attractive wrong answer, because Dehradun holds the Indian Military Academy and the Rashtriya Indian Military College. Officer training of a different kind sits there; engineering training sits at Pune.
- (c)Nainital — Nainital is a hill station in Uttarakhand with schools and an observatory, but no Army corps training institution of this kind.
The Indian armed forces run a network of specialised training establishments, several of them affiliated to civilian universities so that officers earn recognised degrees alongside their professional courses. Jawaharlal Nehru University has such affiliations with a number of defence institutions. The Corps of Engineers is the arm responsible for combat engineering, bridging, field fortification, demolition, water supply and military works, and its centre of instruction is the College of Military Engineering.
Pune is the anchor to hold. The city and its neighbourhood carry an unusual concentration of defence establishments — Southern Command, Khadki and Dehu Road cantonments, the Armed Forces Medical College, and the National Defence Academy across the lake at Khadakwasla — so a defence training institution not obviously placed elsewhere is more likely to be at Pune than anywhere else. Dehradun is the distractor to resist, because it is the answer to a different question: it holds the Indian Military Academy, where cadets are commissioned. Attach the specialisation to the city, and the item becomes a one-step recall.
- The College of Military Engineering is at Dapodi, Pune, beside the Khadki cantonment.
- It belongs to the Indian Army's Corps of Engineers and is affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University for combat training and its B.Tech and M.Tech degrees.
- It began as the School of Military Engineering at Roorkee in 1943 and completed its move to Dapodi in 1948.
- It was upgraded from school to college in November 1951 to reflect its degree-level engineering courses.
- The Indian Military Academy, at Dehradun, is a separate institution that commissions officers into the Army.
- Answering Dehradun by reflex; that is the Indian Military Academy, not the engineering college.
- Assuming an institution affiliated to a Delhi university must itself be in Delhi.
- Confusing the College of Military Engineering with the Military College of Telecommunication Engineering at Mhow.
As an institution-to-city identification, or as a matching set pairing defence establishments with their locations.
The Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School of Indian Army is situated at :
- (a) Dehradun
- (b) Vairengte
- (c) Gulmarg
- (d) Mhow
Answer(b) Vairengte
The same recall task on a different school, and it offers Dehradun as a wrong answer for the same reason this paper does. Army training establishments are scattered by function — jungle warfare at Vairengte in Mizoram, combat engineering at Pune — and the trick in both papers is that Dehradun sounds like the safe guess.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The College of Military Engineering at Pune is the training institution of which arm of the Indian Army?
- (a)The Corps of Signals
- (b)The Corps of Engineers
- (c)The Regiment of Artillery
- (d)The Armoured Corps
Answer(b) The Corps of Engineers — the arm responsible for combat engineering, bridging, fortification and military works.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Indian Military Academy, which commissions officers into the Indian Army, is located at
- (a)Pune
- (b)Dehradun
- (c)Khadakwasla
- (d)Mhow
Answer(b) Dehradun — a different institution from the College of Military Engineering, and the standard distractor for it.