CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 64 of 120

Correct — D, Ladakh. All three landmarks in the stem sit within a day's drive of Leh. Khardung La is the pass on the Ladakh range that carries the road north out of Leh; the Nubra valley lies beyond it, at the meeting of the Nubra and Shyok rivers, with Diskit and its cliffside monastery on one side and the sand dunes of Hunder on the other; and the monastic landscape the question gestures at — Hemis, Thiksey, Alchi, Lamayuru, Diskit — is Ladakh's most recognisable feature. The stem's slightly odd phrasing, 'States / UT', is deliberate: Ladakh ceased to be part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir on 31 October 2019 and has been a Union Territory since, so at the time of this paper Ladakh was the only Union Territory that could answer the question at all.

• (a)Himachal Pradesh — Himachal Pradesh has a genuine Buddhist monastic belt in Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur — Tabo and Key among them — but Khardung La and the Nubra valley are not in it; they lie north of Leh.
• (b)Uttarakhand — Uttarakhand's high passes and shrines belong to a different tradition altogether — Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri — and the State has no Nubra valley.
• (c)Sikkim — Sikkim has famous monasteries at Rumtek, Pemayangtse and Tashiding and high passes such as Nathu La, but Khardung La and Nubra are more than two thousand kilometres to the west.

Ladakh is the trans-Himalayan cold desert of India, lying between the Great Himalaya to the south and the Karakoram to the north, drained by the upper Indus and its tributary the Shyok. Rainfall is very low because the Himalaya intercept the monsoon, so agriculture depends on snow and glacier melt led along channels to terraced fields. Its Buddhist culture is of the Tibetan Vajrayana kind, organised around gompas that are both monasteries and the social centres of their valleys.

Questions of this shape — a traveller visits three places, name the State — are really place-name recall dressed up as a scenario, and the fastest route is to find the one name that occurs nowhere else. Nubra is that name. Khardung La is often advertised as the world's highest motorable pass at 18,380 feet, the figure on the signboard, but surveys put it closer to 5,359 metres, about 17,582 feet, and several passes elsewhere are higher; treat the signboard number as a claim, not a fact.

• Khardung La lies on the Ladakh range north of Leh and carries the road towards the Nubra valley.
• The Nubra valley is formed by the Nubra and Shyok rivers; Diskit monastery and the dunes at Hunder are its best-known sights.
• Ladakh became a Union Territory on 31 October 2019, when the State of Jammu and Kashmir was reorganised.
• Hemis, Thiksey, Alchi, Lamayuru and Diskit are among Ladakh's major gompas.
• Ladakh is a cold desert in the rain shadow of the Great Himalaya, watered mainly by snow and glacier melt.

• Placing Khardung La in Himachal Pradesh because both States have high passes and gompas.
• Quoting the signboard height of Khardung La as if it were surveyed; measured values are appreciably lower.
• Forgetting that Ladakh has been a Union Territory since 2019, which is why the stem says 'States / UT'.

As a place-to-State identification, as a pass-to-range match, or as a pairing of monastery to location.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Nubra valley is formed by the confluence of the Nubra river with which one of the following rivers?

  • (a)Zanskar
  • (b)Shyok
  • (c)Suru
  • (d)Dras

  Answer(b) Shyok — the Nubra joins the Shyok, itself a tributary of the Indus, in the valley north of Khardung La.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Ladakh was constituted as a Union Territory in which one of the following years?

  • (a)2014
  • (b)2017
  • (c)2019
  • (d)2021

  Answer(c) 2019 — the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir took effect on 31 October 2019, creating two Union Territories.