MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 26 of 100

Correct — option (4), 'India has a natural land border with Pakistan and Bangladesh.' Note first that the stem's word 'incorrect' is printed in bold: this is a negative question, so the answer is the one statement that is false, and the other three have to be verified as true and then rejected. Option (4) is the false one, and the word that makes it false is 'natural'. Geographers divide international boundaries into natural boundaries, which follow a physical feature that already existed — a mountain crest, a permanent river channel, a desert or a sea — and artificial boundaries, which are lines agreed or imposed by people and then demarcated on the ground. India's northern frontier is the textbook natural boundary: the Himalaya separates India from China, Nepal and Bhutan along a mountain wall. The boundaries with Pakistan and with Bangladesh are the opposite case. Both were created in 1947 by the Radcliffe Award, which had a few weeks to divide Punjab and Bengal and did so largely along existing district and tehsil lines rather than along any physical feature. The result runs across open plain and cultivated land, cutting through fields, villages and in places through individual holdings, and it had to be surveyed, pillared and fenced precisely because nothing on the ground marked it. That is the definition of an artificial boundary, and it is why the statement is wrong. The other three statements are all sound: Lakshadweep does lie in the Arabian Sea off the Kerala coast; the Andaman and Nicobar Islands — the paper prints 'Andman' — do lie in the Bay of Bengal; and India's territorial waters do extend 12 nautical miles seaward, the limit fixed by the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act of 1976. Since a negative question asks for the exception, each of those three correct statements is a wrong answer.

• (1)The Lakshadweep island group is in the Arabian Sea. — This statement is true, so on a question asking which statement is incorrect it must be rejected. Lakshadweep is a group of coral atolls, reefs and small islands lying in the Arabian Sea off the Malabar coast of Kerala, and it is India's smallest union territory by area. The pairing candidates must keep straight is that Lakshadweep sits in the Arabian Sea to the west while the Andaman and Nicobar Islands sit in the Bay of Bengal to the east; a candidate who has the two the wrong way round will mark this option and lose the question.
• (2)India's maritime boundary is 12 nautical miles from the coast. — This statement is true as a description of the territorial sea and so cannot be the answer. Under the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act, 1976, India's territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from the baseline, within which the country exercises full sovereignty. The statement is easy to doubt because the maritime zones do not stop there — the contiguous zone reaches 24 nautical miles and the exclusive economic zone 200 — but the limit of the territorial sea itself, which is what a bare reference to the maritime boundary means, is 12 nautical miles.
• (3)Andman and Nicobar Islands are located in the Bay of Bengal. — This statement is true and therefore has to be rejected. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands — the paper's spelling 'Andman' is a misprint for Andaman — form a long chain in the Bay of Bengal — the Nicobar group lying south of, and separated from, the Andaman group by the Ten Degree Channel — and lie much closer to Southeast Asia than to the Indian mainland. Their capital is Port Blair, and Indira Point on Great Nicobar is India's southernmost point. A printing error in a name is not a reason to mark a statement false; the geography it asserts is correct.

International boundaries are classified by what determines them. A natural or physiographic boundary follows a feature that exists independently of the agreement — a mountain crest line, a watershed, a river channel, a lake or a sea — and its advantage is that it is visible and defensible, while its weakness is that rivers shift and mountains contain passes. An artificial boundary is a line settled by people, whether by negotiation, arbitration or award, and then demarcated with pillars, fences and survey markers; a geometric boundary drawn along a parallel or a meridian is the extreme case. India's frontiers illustrate both. In the north, the Himalaya gives a natural boundary with China, Nepal and Bhutan. In the west and east, the boundaries with Pakistan and Bangladesh were produced by the Radcliffe Award of 1947, which partitioned Punjab and Bengal along administrative lines under extreme time pressure, and they run across level, densely settled farmland with no physical feature to mark them. India's boundary with Bangladesh, at roughly 4,096 kilometres, is its longest land border, and the fact that it had to be fenced and pillared rather than simply pointed to is the practical consequence of its artificiality.

This item is a compact test of Indian boundary and maritime geography, and its difficulty lies entirely in the negation. A candidate who reads the stem as 'which is correct' will find three defensible statements and mark one of them; a candidate who registers the bold 'incorrect' will look instead for the single false claim. On this paper eleven questions carry a negation printed in bold, so the first move on any stem containing a negative word is to fix the polarity before reading the options. The substantive lesson is that adjectives carry the falsehood in geography statements as often as nouns do: everything in option (4) is true except the word 'natural', and India certainly does have land borders with both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Learning to notice which single word in an otherwise correct sentence is doing the work is the skill this question rewards.

• A natural boundary follows an existing physical feature such as a mountain crest or a river; an artificial boundary is a line agreed or awarded by people and then demarcated on the ground.
• India's boundaries with Pakistan and Bangladesh were created by the Radcliffe Award of 1947, which divided Punjab and Bengal largely along administrative lines rather than along any physical feature, making them artificial boundaries.
• India's boundary with Bangladesh, at roughly 4,096 kilometres, is the country's longest land border, and it runs mostly across level, densely settled plains.
• Lakshadweep, a group of coral atolls and islands, lies in the Arabian Sea off the Kerala coast, while the Andaman and Nicobar Islands lie in the Bay of Bengal.
• Under the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act, 1976, India's territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from the baseline, the contiguous zone 24 nautical miles and the exclusive economic zone 200 nautical miles.

• Missing the bold 'incorrect' in the stem and marking one of the three true statements — on a negative question a correct fact is always a wrong answer
• Reversing Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, placing the coral atolls in the Bay of Bengal and the Andamans in the Arabian Sea
• Rejecting the 12 nautical mile statement because the exclusive economic zone extends to 200 — the territorial sea and the EEZ are different zones with different limits
• Treating a misprint in a name, such as 'Andman' for Andaman, as making a statement false when the geographical claim it makes is sound

MPSC regularly builds a question out of four unrelated one-line geography facts and asks which one is wrong, which makes the item a test of breadth rather than depth — India's islands, its maritime limits and its boundary types can all appear in the same four options. The negation is printed in bold in this paper, and the false statement is usually made false by a single adjective or number rather than by an obviously absurd claim. The productive way to prepare is to hold each fact in a form precise enough to be checked word by word: not 'Lakshadweep is an island group' but 'Lakshadweep is a coral atoll group in the Arabian Sea off Kerala'.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act, 1976, how far from the baseline does India's exclusive economic zone extend ?

  • (a)12 nautical miles
  • (b)24 nautical miles
  • (c)200 nautical miles
  • (d)350 nautical miles

  Answer(c) 200 nautical miles — the exclusive economic zone, within which India has sovereign rights over the exploration and exploitation of living and non-living resources. The territorial sea, over which India exercises full sovereignty, extends 12 nautical miles, and the contiguous zone extends 24 nautical miles from the baseline.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's land boundary with Bangladesh is best described as which of the following ?

  • (a)A natural boundary following the Himalayan watershed
  • (b)An artificial boundary produced by the Radcliffe Award of 1947
  • (c)A geometric boundary drawn along a line of latitude
  • (d)A relict boundary no longer in force

  Answer(b) An artificial boundary produced by the Radcliffe Award of 1947 — it was drawn largely along existing district lines when Bengal was partitioned, runs across level and densely settled farmland, and had to be surveyed and demarcated because no physical feature marked it. The Himalayan watershed forms India's natural boundary in the north, not in the east.