MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 1 of 100

Correct — option (3), which pairs statement (d) with statement (a): 229 Talukas and 26 Districts. The state that came into being on 1 May 1960 was carved out of the bilingual Bombay State under the Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960, which split that state into Maharashtra and Gujarat and left the city of Bombay in Maharashtra — the single point on which the whole Samyukta Maharashtra agitation had turned. Maharashtra began life with 26 districts; that figure is the one carried by the standard district lists, which open by saying that the state 'was formed on 1 May 1960 with 26 initial districts', and it has grown since by ten more to the 36 of today, Palghar (2014) being the newest. The taluka figure the Commission keys alongside it is 229. Note carefully what the item is actually doing: it is not a single-fact recall question but a compound one. All four of the printed statements are plausible-looking administrative numbers, and each answer choice yokes exactly one district figure to exactly one taluka figure, so a candidate who remembers 26 districts but nothing about talukas still cannot get past two surviving choices — statement (a) appears in option (1) with 239 Talukas and in option (3) with 229 Talukas. Only knowing both halves settles it, and the printed order inside option (3) reverses the labels, giving the taluka figure first, which is a further small trap for anyone reading the option set at speed. The district count is the anchor to memorise, because it is the one that is documented everywhere and the one the exam has asked about repeatedly; the taluka count is the discriminator this particular question adds on top of it.

• (1)(a) and (c) correct — This choice gets the district count right and the taluka count wrong: it pairs 26 Dist. with 239 Talukas. It is the most dangerous of the three wrong choices precisely because half of it is true, and because 239 differs from the keyed 229 by a single substituted digit — the kind of near-miss an examiner plants when the real fact is a number rather than a name. A candidate who has revised only that Maharashtra started with 26 districts will find statement (a) inside this choice, feel the click of recognition and stop reading. The lesson is structural rather than factual: on a paper that yokes two figures into one answer choice, the moment you recognise one half you should treat the other half as the actual question and read every choice that contains your recognised half before committing.
• (2)(b) and (d) correct — This choice takes the correct taluka figure, 229, but attaches it to 28 Dist., which is not the number Maharashtra began with. Twenty-eight is a superficially attractive figure because the district map of Maharashtra did keep changing after 1960 and passed through intermediate totals on its way from 26 to today's 36 — Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri, Jalna, Latur, Mumbai Suburban, Nandurbar, Washim, Hingoli, Gondia and Palghar are all later creations. But the question asks what existed in the newly created state on 1 May 1960, not what existed a decade or two afterwards, and for that moment the documented figure is 26.
• (4)(c) and (b) correct — This is the choice on which both halves fail: 239 Talukas and 28 Dist., neither of them the figure for 1 May 1960. It exists in the option set to complete the combinatorial square — with two district figures and two taluka figures on offer, the paper is able to print all four possible pairings, so that a candidate who is guessing has no structural asymmetry to exploit and elimination by shape alone is impossible. That design is worth noticing in itself: when a matching-style option set is complete in this way, guessing buys nothing, and the only route through is the underlying fact.

Maharashtra was not created out of nothing; it was extracted from the bilingual Bombay State. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 had redrawn most of India on linguistic lines but had deliberately left Bombay State bilingual, holding Marathi and Gujarati areas together with the commercial city of Bombay at the centre of the dispute. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti led the agitation for a Marathi-speaking state that included Bombay, and 105 people died in police firing in the city during it — a toll commemorated by the Hutatma Chowk memorial at Flora Fountain. The Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960, finally split the state in two with effect from 1 May, giving Bombay to Maharashtra and creating Gujarat with its capital initially at Ahmedabad. The administrative skeleton the new state inherited is what this question tests: a state of 26 districts, grouped into revenue divisions, and subdivided into talukas — the taluka being the tahsil-level revenue unit under a tahsildar, the layer at which land records, revenue collection and much of rural administration actually sit.

MPSC's Maharashtra-specific section rewards a candidate who can hold the administrative map of the state in mind across time rather than only as it stands today. Questions of this family ask what the state looked like at formation, how many districts and divisions it has now, which districts were carved out of which parents and when, and which region — Vidarbha, Marathwada, Khandesh, Konkan, Western Maharashtra — a given district belongs to. The habit the question rewards is dating your facts: 'Maharashtra has 36 districts' is true today and useless for a question about 1960, and a candidate who has memorised only the current figure has no way of reaching the answer. The compound structure adds a second habit — reading the whole option set before answering. Because every choice pairs one district figure with one taluka figure, partial knowledge produces a false sense of certainty, and the candidate who stops at the first choice containing a number they recognise is exactly the candidate the option set was built to catch.

• Maharashtra was formed on 1 May 1960 under the Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960, which divided the bilingual Bombay State into Maharashtra and Gujarat and left the city of Bombay with Maharashtra; the day is observed as Maharashtra Din.
• The state was formed with 26 districts. Ten more have been created since, taking the total to 36; the most recent is Palghar, carved out of Thane district in 2014.
• The Commission's key to this question pairs those 26 districts with 229 talukas as the position at the moment of formation.
• The taluka (tahsil) is the revenue subdivision below the district, headed by a tahsildar; districts are grouped upward into revenue divisions, of which Maharashtra now has six — Konkan, Pune, Nashik, Aurangabad, Amravati and Nagpur.
• Yashwantrao Chavan was sworn in as the first Chief Minister of Maharashtra on 1 May 1960; Sri Prakasa was the first Governor.

• Answering with today's figure of 36 districts on a question that explicitly dates itself to 1 May 1960 — the stem supplies the date precisely so that the current number becomes a wrong answer
• Stopping at the first answer choice that contains the district figure you recognise; two of the four choices contain statement (a), and they differ only in the taluka number attached to it
• Reading 239 and 229 as interchangeable — the two figures differ by one substituted digit and the paper offers both
• Assuming the labels inside a choice run in the order the statements were printed; option (3) names statement (d) before statement (a)

MPSC returns to the administrative geography of Maharashtra every year, and it likes anniversaries and formation moments — the date the state came into being, the number of districts then and now, which district was created in which year, and which division a district sits in. The compound form used here, where each answer choice bundles two of the printed statements together, is one of this commission's standard devices and is not confined to history: it appears across geography, polity and economy whenever the examiner wants to test two facts in the space of one question. Prepare for it by revising numbers in pairs with their dates attached, and by drilling the reading discipline the format demands — identify what you know, then find every choice containing it, then let the unknown half decide.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The bilingual Bombay State was divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat with effect from 1 May 1960 by which enactment of Parliament ?

  • (a)The States Reorganisation Act, 1956
  • (b)The Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960
  • (c)The Andhra State Act, 1953
  • (d)The Bombay State (Alteration of Boundaries) Act, 1959

  Answer(b) The Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960 — the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 had reorganised most of India on linguistic lines but deliberately kept Bombay State bilingual, and it took a separate Act four years later, passed after the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation, to split that state into Maharashtra with the city of Bombay and Gujarat with its capital at Ahmedabad, both from 1 May 1960.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which district of Maharashtra, carved out of Thane district in 2014, is the most recently created district of the state ?

  • (a)Nandurbar
  • (b)Hingoli
  • (c)Palghar
  • (d)Gondia

  Answer(c) Palghar — created in 2014 from the northern portion of Thane district, it is the newest of Maharashtra's 36 districts. Nandurbar, Hingoli, Washim and Gondia were all created in the round of reorganisation of 1998-99, which makes them older and rules them out of a question that asks specifically for the most recent creation.