MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 22 of 100

Correct — option (3), which says all three statements are correct. Take them one at a time. Statement (a): the refinery the English column spells 'Nunmati' is the Guwahati Refinery, and it was built with the technical assistance of Romania, printed here as 'Rumania'. It was commissioned on 1 January 1962 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and it holds a first that is worth memorising — it was India's first public sector refinery, the Digboi refinery of 1901 having been a private one. Statement (b): that refinery stands at Noonmati in Guwahati, in Assam, and processes crude piped down from the Upper Assam fields; its installed capacity is about one million tonnes a year and it is run by Indian Oil. So (b) is correct as well. Statement (c): the Koyali refinery is the Gujarat Refinery of Indian Oil, at Koyali in Vadodara district. When it was commissioned in October 1965 it was designed expressly to run on crude from ONGC's Gujarat fields — Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam — so raw mineral oil does reach Koyali from Ankleshwar, and (c) is correct too. With every statement standing, the only row that can be right is the one that accepts all three, and that is option (3). Note what separates it from option (4): the two rows name the same three statements, and the whole difference is the single word 'incorrect' at the end of the fourth. Reading an option to its last word is the discipline this question tests as much as the refinery facts themselves.

• (1)Statements (a) and (b) are correct. — This row accepts statements (a) and (b) but drops (c), which would require the Koyali link to be false. It is not. The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, in Vadodara district, was commissioned in October 1965 and was designed to process crude from ONGC's Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam oilfields in Gujarat; Ankleshwar, discovered in 1960, was the first of them and is the field the statement names. The refinery has since grown far beyond what those fields can feed and now runs largely on crude brought in from the coast, but the statement is about supply from Ankleshwar and that supply is real. A candidate picks this row by verifying the two Assam statements, finding them sound, and stopping — which is the error the two-statement rows in this question are built to catch.
• (2)Statements (b) and (c) are correct. — This row accepts statements (b) and (c) but drops (a), which would require the Romanian connection to be false. It is not. The Guwahati refinery at Noonmati was set up with Romanian technical assistance and commissioned on 1 January 1962, and the collaboration is the fact by which the refinery is usually identified in an examination — India's early public sector refineries were each built with a different partner, Guwahati with Romania, Barauni in 1964 with the Soviet Union and limited Romanian participation, and Koyali in 1965 with Soviet assistance. Mixing those partners up is the standard error, and a candidate who half-remembers Koyali as the Soviet one may wrongly transfer the doubt onto the Guwahati statement and land here.
• (4)Statements (a), (b), (c) are incorrect. — This row says all three statements are incorrect, and it is the one place in this question where the word 'incorrect' appears. Every statement in fact stands: Guwahati was built with Romanian help, it is at Noonmati in Assam, and Koyali was designed around crude from Ankleshwar and the other Gujarat fields. The row is worth a moment's study anyway, because it is printed immediately below the row that says the same three statements are correct, and the two differ by one word. The stem of this question is not a negative one — it simply asks the reader to observe the statements — so the negation lives inside this option and nowhere else. A candidate who scans options rather than reads them can select this row while believing they have selected its neighbour.

India's refining industry began at Digboi in Assam in 1901, next to the field where oil was first struck in 1889, and that refinery was private. The public sector chapter opens in the 1960s, when the state built refineries with foreign technical partners because the technology and much of the finance had to be imported. Guwahati, at Noonmati, came first — commissioned on 1 January 1962 with Romanian assistance and inaugurated by Nehru, it was India's first public sector refinery, with a capacity of about one million tonnes a year. Barauni in Bihar followed in July 1964, built in collaboration with the Soviet Union with limited Romanian participation. The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, near Vadodara, was commissioned in October 1965 with Soviet assistance at a cost of about Rs 26 crore, after Nehru laid its foundation stone in May 1963. Each of these was located on a logic that examiners like to test: Guwahati and Barauni were placed to use Assam crude, Guwahati at the field and Barauni at the far end of a pipeline, while Koyali was placed on the Gujarat fields discovered around 1960 — Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam. Refineries built later, at the coast, are market-and-import oriented instead, which is why Jamnagar, Vadinar, Mangalore and Paradip sit where they do.

Mineral oil is a fixed item in the MPSC economic geography block, and the Commission tests it through the map rather than through production statistics — which refinery, in which state, on whose crude, built with whose help. That is deliberate: those facts are stable, whereas output and capacity figures change every year and cannot be examined fairly. The structure of this particular question is worth as much as its content. It prints three statements and four rows, two of which accept two statements each, one of which accepts all three and one of which rejects all three. A candidate who checks statements until they find two that hold and then picks the matching row will land on a wrong option here, because the row that accepts everything is the right one. The correct method is to give every statement a verdict before looking at the rows at all, and only then to find the row that carries your three verdicts. It costs nothing and it immunises you against a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer.

• The Guwahati Refinery at Noonmati in Assam was commissioned on 1 January 1962 with Romanian technical assistance and was India's first public sector refinery; it has a capacity of about one million tonnes a year and is run by Indian Oil.
• Digboi in Assam, in production since 1901, is India's oldest refinery and was a private one; the public sector story begins with Guwahati in 1962.
• Barauni Refinery in Bihar was commissioned in July 1964 in collaboration with the Soviet Union with limited Romanian participation, at an initial capacity of one million tonnes a year.
• The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, in Vadodara district, was commissioned in October 1965 with Soviet assistance and was designed to process crude from ONGC's Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam fields; its capacity is now about 13.7 million tonnes a year.
• Ankleshwar, struck in 1960, was the first major oilfield of the Gujarat basin, and the Koyali refinery was sited to use it — an example of a raw-material-oriented location, as against the import-oriented coastal refineries built later.

• Mixing up which foreign partner built which early refinery — Guwahati with Romania, Barauni and Koyali with the Soviet Union — since the three are always offered together in the same question
• Calling Guwahati India's oldest refinery; it is the oldest in the public sector, while Digboi, working since 1901, is older and was private
• Stopping at two verified statements in a three-statement question and choosing the row that names them, when the row accepting all three is available and correct
• Reading only as far as the statement labels in an option and missing the single word at the end that flips it from correct to incorrect

Mineral oil reaches MPSC papers as one-line factual items — which state has the Digboi refinery, where is the Bombay High field — and as statement clusters of this kind, where two or three facts about refineries have to be judged together. The Commission favours the fixed attributes: place, state, year, collaborating country, and the field that feeds the refinery. Production and capacity figures appear far less often because they move. The efficient preparation is one table of Indian refineries carrying state, ownership, commissioning year and any foreign partner, and a second of the oil and gas basins with their principal fields, learnt alongside a map. Add the early pipelines, since the Commission likes to ask which refinery a given pipeline serves.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following statements about India's early public sector refineries is correct?

  • (a)The Guwahati refinery at Noonmati was built with Romanian assistance and was India's first public sector refinery
  • (b)The Digboi refinery was India's first public sector refinery
  • (c)The Barauni refinery was built with Japanese assistance
  • (d)The Koyali refinery was built with American assistance

  Answer(a) The Guwahati refinery at Noonmati was built with Romanian assistance and was India's first public sector refinery — it was commissioned on 1 January 1962 and inaugurated by Nehru. Digboi, working since 1901, is India's oldest refinery but was a private one. Barauni, commissioned in July 1964, was built in collaboration with the Soviet Union with limited Romanian participation, and the Gujarat refinery at Koyali was commissioned in October 1965 with Soviet assistance.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali was originally designed to process crude oil from which of the following fields?

  • (a)Naharkatiya and Moran
  • (b)Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam
  • (c)Bombay High and Bassein
  • (d)Rawa and Ravva in the Krishna-Godavari basin

  Answer(b) Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam — the three ONGC fields of the Gujarat basin, Ankleshwar having been struck in 1960, which is why the refinery was sited at Koyali in Vadodara district and commissioned in October 1965. Naharkatiya and Moran are Assam fields that feed the Assam refineries and, by pipeline, Barauni; Bombay High is offshore Maharashtra; and the Krishna-Godavari fields lie off Andhra Pradesh.