CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 24 of 120

Correct — D, Mormugao. It is the ore port of India, and the textbook fact behind the answer is unambiguous: Mormugao port in Goa is the premier iron-ore exporting port of the country, accounting for about fifty per cent of India's iron ore export. Geography made it so. The port occupies a naturally protected open harbour at the mouth of the Zuari estuary, and the iron and manganese fields of the Goan interior lie close behind it, so ore could move by barge down the Mandovi and Zuari and be loaded straight into bulk carriers. It became a major port in 1963, under the Major Port Trusts Act of that year, soon after Goa's incorporation into India, and it is the ore trade that gave it its standing. On the Japan connection specifically, the textbooks of this period tie the port's rise to long-term ore contracts with Japanese steel mills; that destination could not be confirmed here from a primary or reference source, so treat the port's identity as the examinable fact and the buyer as period colour. The buyer has in any case moved: of the roughly 54.5 million tonnes of iron-ore traffic Mormugao handled in 2010-11, about 90 per cent went to China.

• (a)Kandla — Built for an entirely different purpose. Now Deendayal Port, it was the first port developed soon after Independence to ease the volume of trade on Mumbai port after the loss of Karachi at Partition. It is a tidal port on the Gulf of Kachchh serving the north-western hinterland, and it handles petroleum and general cargo rather than ore.
• (b)Ennore — Wrong coast and wrong cargo direction. Ennore, now Kamarajar Port, lies just north of Chennai and was developed principally as a coal port serving thermal power stations; it is also known as the first Indian major port registered as a company. Its coal moves inward, not outward.
• (c)Kochi — A natural harbour on the Malabar coast at the head of a lagoon, whose trade is built on petroleum, containers, spices and the passenger and naval functions of the Cochin complex. It is not an ore port.

Indian ports specialise by hinterland and by cargo. Ore ports need a deep, sheltered approach and a mineral field within short haul; oil ports need tank farms and pipelines; container ports need land and road-rail links. Mormugao and New Mangalore are the two that grew on iron ore — the second on the Kudremukh concentrates piped to the coast — while Paradip and Visakhapatnam carry ore on the eastern side. Goan ore mining, and with it the port's traffic, was interrupted by court-ordered suspensions in the 2010s, so the port's cargo mix has broadened since the years this question describes.

Port questions are usually settled by attaching one defining cargo or one defining fact to each name, and the four here are easy to separate that way: Kandla the first post-Partition port on the Gulf of Kachchh, Ennore the coal port north of Chennai, Kochi the natural harbour of the Malabar coast, Mormugao the iron-ore port of Goa. Note also that the paper's spelling, Mormugao, is the modern official form; older textbooks write Marmagao, and both refer to the same port on the Zuari.

• Mormugao port in Goa is the premier iron-ore exporting port of India, accounting for about fifty per cent of the country's iron ore export.
• It has a naturally protected open-type harbour at the southern side of the mouth of the river Zuari.
• It was recognised as a major port in 1963 under the Major Port Trusts Act, shortly after Goa's incorporation into India.
• It handled about 54.5 million tonnes of iron-ore traffic in 2010-11, of which roughly 90 per cent went to China, falling to 29.21 million tonnes the following year.
• Deendayal Port, formerly Kandla, was the first port developed after Independence to relieve Mumbai after the loss of Karachi port at Partition.
• New Mangalore port handles iron-ore concentrates from the Kudremukh mines.

• Confusing Mormugao with New Mangalore, which also ships iron ore but from the Kudremukh mines.
• Reading the old spelling Marmagao as a different port.
• Assuming a port named for a cargo in one decade still carries it to the same buyer; Mormugao's ore now goes largely elsewhere.

As an identify-the-port item from a cargo or a characteristic, or as a match-the-following pairing ports with their coasts and specialities.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Mormugao port stands at the mouth of which one of the following rivers?

  • (a)Mandovi
  • (b)Zuari
  • (c)Kali
  • (d)Sharavati

  Answer(b) Zuari — the port occupies a naturally protected open harbour on the southern side of the mouth of the Zuari in Goa.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Indian port was developed first after Independence to relieve the pressure on Mumbai port following the loss of Karachi?

  • (a)Kochi
  • (b)Deendayal (Kandla)
  • (c)Paradip
  • (d)Jawaharlal Nehru Port

  Answer(b) Deendayal (Kandla) — a tidal port on the Gulf of Kachchh, built to serve the north-western hinterland that had used Karachi before Partition.