MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 8 of 100

Correct — option (2): (a)-(i), (b)-(iii), (c)-(ii), (d)-(iv). All four are landmarks of the first phase of public-sector industrialisation after Independence, and each place is remembered for exactly one product. Sindri, in the Dhanbad region of what was then Bihar and is now Jharkhand, was the site of India's first large public-sector fertilizer plant, built on the coalfield to use its coal and later run under the Fertilizer Corporation of India — so Sindri goes to the fertilizer factory. Chittaranjan, in the Asansol belt of West Bengal, is the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, the plant established to make India self-sufficient in railway engines; it takes the locomotive factory. Perambur, on the northern edge of Chennai, is the Integral Coach Factory, Indian Railways' coach-building works, so it takes the railway coach factory. Pimpri, in Pune district, is Hindustan Antibiotics, the country's first public-sector drug undertaking and the plant built to manufacture penicillin in India — it takes the penicillin factory. Two anchors settle the item and neither of them requires the other two to be recalled. Fix Sindri to fertilizers, which is the most familiar of the four associations, and options (3) and (4) fall, since one sends Sindri to coaches and the other to penicillin. Then separate the two railway plants, which is the only real work the question asks: Chittaranjan makes engines and Perambur makes coaches. Option (1) reverses exactly that pair, giving Chittaranjan the coach factory and Perambur the locomotive factory, so it falls, and option (2) stands alone. The Chittaranjan–Perambur distinction is the whole point of the item, and the mnemonic worth carrying is that Chittaranjan pulls and Perambur carries.

• (1)(a) - (i), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iii), (d) - (iv) — The distractor the whole question is designed around, and the one a half-prepared candidate will mark. It gets Sindri and Pimpri right — fertilizers and penicillin — and then swaps the two railway plants, making Chittaranjan the coach factory and Perambur the locomotive factory. That is precisely backwards: Chittaranjan Locomotive Works in West Bengal builds engines, and the Integral Coach Factory at Perambur near Chennai builds carriages. Because the option is correct at both ends, it survives a quick scan, and a candidate who checks only the first and last pair will walk into it. In a matching item, check the pair the setter has made hard, not the pairs you already know.
• (3)(a) - (ii), (b) - (i), (c) - (iv), (d) - (iii) — Every pair displaced. Sindri is given the coach factory, Chittaranjan the fertilizer plant, Perambur the penicillin factory and Pimpri the locomotive works. The last pair is the most obviously wrong to a candidate in Maharashtra: Pimpri, in Pune district, is the home of Hindustan Antibiotics and of the country's first public-sector penicillin manufacture, and no railway locomotive works has ever stood there. One securely known local fact is enough to retire an entire permutation, which is why regional geography is worth revising even for a question that looks all-India.
• (4)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — Gets the two railway plants right — Chittaranjan to locomotives, Perambur to coaches — and then exchanges the other two, giving Sindri the penicillin factory and Pimpri the fertilizer factory. It therefore fails on the pair that is easiest of all: Sindri and fertilizers is the single most repeated association in the early public-sector story, the plant built beside the Damodar valley coalfield and treated as the beginning of India's fertilizer industry. The pattern is the mirror image of option (1) — right where the item is hard, wrong where it is easy — and it catches candidates who assume the difficulty must lie in the pairs they find difficult.

The four places in this question belong to the first great push of state-led industrialisation after 1947, when the Industrial Policy Resolutions of 1948 and 1956 reserved the commanding heights of the economy for the public sector and the early Five Year Plans built the plants that were meant to occupy them. The pattern of that investment is worth holding as a map. Heavy engineering and metals went where the coal and iron were, along the eastern belt: the steel plants at Rourkela, Bhilai and Durgapur in the Second Plan, the Sindri fertilizer works on the Damodar coalfield, the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works in the Asansol region, and the heavy machine-building complex at Ranchi. Railway workshops were placed where the network and the labour were, which put the coach factory at Perambur outside Madras. Pharmaceuticals, a strategic industry in a country with no domestic antibiotic capacity, went to Pimpri in Pune district as Hindustan Antibiotics, and later to Rishikesh as Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals. The logic in every case was the same: the state built what private capital would not, in the places where the inputs or the skills already were.

MPSC returns to this list because it does two jobs at once — it tests the economic history of the plan era and it slips in a Maharashtra location, here Pimpri, which the state's own candidates are expected to know cold. The reasoning the item wants is simple association, but the difficulty has been placed deliberately in one spot: the two railway plants. Chittaranjan and Perambur are both railway manufacturing towns of the same decade, both public-sector, both remembered in the same breath, and two of the four options differ from each other only in how they are assigned. So the efficient reading of this question is to find the pair the setter has made hard and decide that first, rather than confirming the pairs you already knew. On the marking arithmetic, this matters: a matching item is all-or-nothing, and with a quarter of the marks deducted for a wrong answer, an option that is right at both ends and wrong in the middle costs the same as one that is wrong throughout.

• Sindri, in the Dhanbad region of present-day Jharkhand, was the site of India's first large public-sector fertilizer plant, sited on the Damodar valley coalfield and later operated under the Fertilizer Corporation of India.
• Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, in the Asansol belt of West Bengal, was established to make India self-sufficient in railway engines and is the locomotive plant of the early public-sector programme.
• The Integral Coach Factory at Perambur, on the northern edge of Chennai, is Indian Railways' coach-building works — the counterpart to Chittaranjan, building carriages rather than engines.
• Hindustan Antibiotics at Pimpri in Pune district was India's first public-sector drug undertaking, set up to manufacture penicillin domestically, and it is the Maharashtra entry in this standard list of early public-sector plants.
• The framework behind all four is the Industrial Policy Resolutions of 1948 and 1956 and the first two Five Year Plans, which reserved basic and strategic industries for the state and placed the new plants where coal, ore, rail links or skills were already available.

• Swapping Chittaranjan and Perambur — both are railway manufacturing towns of the same era, and the exchange is the single error two of the four options are built on; remember that Chittaranjan makes the engine and Perambur the carriage
• Confirming only the pairs you already know: an option that is correct at both ends and wrong in the middle is the commonest matching distractor and survives a quick scan
• Confusing Pimpri's Hindustan Antibiotics, the penicillin plant, with the later public-sector drug undertaking at Rishikesh, or with the private pharmaceutical firms of the same region
• Placing Sindri in the wrong state — it lay in Bihar when it was built and is in Jharkhand today, which is a standard way for a question in this area to be complicated

MPSC likes matching questions built from place-and-industry pairs of the plan era, because they can be answered from a single revision table and because they let the paper carry a Maharashtra location inside an all-India list — Pimpri here, and elsewhere Trombay, Chembur or the MIDC estates. Expect the same pool to reappear with different combinations. UPSC asks the plan era through policy rather than place: the objectives of a particular Plan, the reasoning of the Mahalanobis model, the classification of industries under the 1956 Resolution. That means a candidate preparing both should learn the place-industry table for MPSC and, for UPSC, one sentence per Plan on what it was trying to achieve and whether it achieved it. The two together are less work than they look, because the plants are simply the Plans made visible on a map.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Integral Coach Factory, one of the earliest public-sector railway manufacturing units set up after Independence, is located at which of the following places ?

  • (a)Chittaranjan, West Bengal
  • (b)Perambur, Tamil Nadu
  • (c)Kapurthala, Punjab
  • (d)Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

  Answer(b) Perambur, Tamil Nadu — on the northern edge of Chennai, the Integral Coach Factory builds carriages for Indian Railways. Chittaranjan in West Bengal is the locomotive works, and Kapurthala and Varanasi host later railway production units, so all four are genuine railway manufacturing towns and the question turns on which product belongs to which.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Hindustan Antibiotics Limited, established as India's first public-sector undertaking for the manufacture of penicillin, is situated at which of the following places in Maharashtra ?

  • (a)Trombay
  • (b)Chembur
  • (c)Pimpri
  • (d)Nashik

  Answer(c) Pimpri — in Pune district, where Hindustan Antibiotics was set up to give India domestic capacity in antibiotics, and which appears in the standard list of early public-sector plants alongside Sindri, Chittaranjan and Perambur. Trombay and Chembur are associated with the fertilizer and refinery complex in Mumbai, and Nashik with later industrial development including the security press.