MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 22 of 100

The Commission cancelled this question. It carries no correct option and no credit in the final key, so there is nothing here to mark right or wrong — a candidate who attempted it lost nothing and a candidate who left it blank lost nothing. Do not memorise any of the four printed combinations as 'the answer'; none of them is. The Commission does not publish its reasons for a cancellation, so what follows is only what is visible on the printed page, and it is worth seeing because two of the four pairings are ordinary general-knowledge and two are not sound. Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar as the 'City of Gates' and Gondia as the rice district of eastern Vidarbha are both standard. The other two items are the trouble. Item (iv), printed in English as 'Satellite hearing center', renders the Marathi 'उपग्रह अनुश्रवण केंद्र' — a satellite monitoring or tracking station; 'hearing' is a literal mis-rendering of अनुश्रवण and not the sense intended. India's first satellite communication earth station, the Vikram Earth Station, does stand at a place called Arvi, but that Arvi is in Junnar taluka of PUNE district, about 80 km north of Pune — not the Arvi that is a taluka town of Wardha district. The identical place name is exactly the kind of coincidence that makes a match item unsafe. Item (i), 'Independent district in 1962', fits none of the four on the record: Wardha was separated from Nagpur in 1862, a full century earlier and one digit away from the printed year; Jalna was carved out of Aurangabad in 1981; Gondia was carved out of Bhandara in 1999; and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar's district long predates all of them. With two of the four right-hand items unable to attach securely to any left-hand entry, no one-to-one mapping survives, and the question ends where the Commission put it — struck out. The topic itself is still worth an hour of your time, so read the background below and let the question go.

Maharashtra's 36 districts each carry two kinds of examinable identity. The first is administrative history — when a district was constituted and out of which parent district it was carved. The state's district map has been redrawn repeatedly: some units go back to British-era reorganisation of the Central Provinces and the Nizam's Marathwada, while a whole cohort was created in the 1980s and 1990s by splitting large districts to bring administration closer to people. The second identity is the popular epithet: the City of Gates, the rice district, the orange city, the sugar belt. Epithets are soft knowledge — they come from tourism literature and local usage rather than from a statute — which is why a matching question built on them is only as safe as its weakest pair. The examiner's own safeguard is that each right-hand item should attach to exactly one left-hand item, and to no other; when a feature can plausibly belong to two districts, or to none of the four, the match has no solution.

Questions of this shape are common in Paper-I because they compress four facts into one mark, and they are usually solvable from a single certain pair: fix the one you know, then eliminate every option that contradicts it. Here 'City of Gates' for Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar is the certain pair, and it alone kills option (1) and option (3), which both assign something else to (a). That is the correct method and it is worth practising even on a question that was later withdrawn — most matching questions in this paper reward it. What this question also teaches is the limit of the method: after fixing the certain pair, two options still stood, and separating them required knowing whether a satellite tracking station sits in Wardha or somewhere else, which turns on the coincidence of two villages named Arvi in two different districts of the same state. Worth noting as well that a four-by-four match has twenty-four possible one-to-one assignments and the paper prints only four of them, so the option list is itself a substantial hint — but that hint is only as good as the underlying premise that each right-hand item belongs to exactly one left-hand item, and it is precisely that premise which fails here.

• Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, renamed from Aurangabad in 2023, is popularly called the 'City of Gates' for the fortification gateways ringing the old city. The district also holds the Ajanta and Ellora cave complexes, Bibi ka Maqbara, Daulatabad (Devagiri) fort and the Panchakki water mill.
• Gondia district in eastern Vidarbha was carved out of Bhandara district in 1999. Its heavy paddy cultivation and concentration of rice mills give it its rice epithet; the district also contains Navegaon National Park and part of the Nagzira wildlife tract.
• Wardha district was separated from Nagpur district in 1862 because Nagpur had grown too large to administer and the cotton trade of the Wardha valley needed closer supervision.
• The Vikram Earth Station at Arvi — India's first satellite communication earth station, — is in Junnar taluka of Pune district, about 80 km north of Pune. It is named after Vikram Sarabhai. Wardha district contains a separate and unrelated town of Arvi.
• Jalna district was carved out of Aurangabad district in 1981. Wardha district's Sevagram, where Gandhi settled in 1936, and Paunar, Vinoba Bhave's ashram, are the two sites that most often carry Wardha into a general studies paper.

• Identical place names in different districts. Arvi in Pune district hosts the Vikram Earth Station; Arvi in Wardha district is a taluka headquarters with no connection to it. Maharashtra has several such repeats, and a match item built on one of them is unsafe by construction.
• Reading an English match item without checking the Marathi column. 'Satellite hearing center' means nothing in English; 'उपग्रह अनुश्रवण केंद्र' means a satellite monitoring station, and only the Marathi tells you what is being asked.
• Treating a cancelled question as if it still has an answer. Once the Commission strikes a question out, no option is credited, and memorising a 'probable' key from a coaching sheet installs a wrong association that will surface in a later exam.

District-feature matching is a standing item in MPSC Paper-I, and it comes in two grades of difficulty. The easy grade uses one hard administrative fact — a formation year or a parent district — with three soft epithets, and is cracked by the single certain pair. The hard grade uses four soft epithets, where nothing can be confirmed from a statute and the candidate is reduced to recall. Prepare for both by building a two-column table of your own: for each of the 36 districts write the year of formation with the parent district, and one epithet with the reason behind it. The reason matters more than the epithet, because an examiner can ask for either — 'which district is called the rice district' and 'why is Gondia so called' are the same fact asked from two directions.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which city of Maharashtra, renamed in 2023 and long known for the fortification gateways ringing its old quarter, is popularly called the 'City of Gates' ?

  • (a)Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
  • (b)Ahilyanagar
  • (c)Dharashiv
  • (d)Nanded

  Answer(a) Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — the former Aurangabad, whose surviving city gateways give it the epithet. It is also the base for Ajanta and Ellora, Bibi ka Maqbara and Daulatabad fort, which is why the district appears in tourism, history and geography questions alike.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Vikram Earth Station at Arvi, India's first satellite communication earth station, is located in which district of Maharashtra ?

  • (a)Wardha
  • (b)Pune
  • (c)Nagpur
  • (d)Ahilyanagar

  Answer(b) Pune — the station stands at Arvi in Junnar taluka, roughly 80 km north of Pune city,. The trap is the unrelated town of Arvi in Wardha district, which shares only the name.