MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 13 of 100

Correct — option (1). This question is built differently from the other matching items in the paper. Three lists are printed side by side — four dams or projects labelled (a) to (d), four rivers labelled (i) to (iv) and four states labelled (I) to (IV) — but each option offers a single triple rather than a complete four-row grid, and the instruction is to find the one pair, or rather the one combination, that is correct. So the task is not to match all twelve items but to test four triples and keep the one that survives. Option (1) offers Shivasamudra Dam with the Kaveri in Karnataka, and all three parts hold. Shivanasamudra is the island in the Kaveri in Mandya district of Karnataka around which the river divides and falls in the two cascades known as Gaganachukki and Bharachukki, and the hydroelectric station built at the falls and commissioned in 1902 was among the first in Asia, its power being carried more than a hundred kilometres to the Kolar Gold Fields. River and state therefore belong to the dam, and the triple is sound. The correct arrangement of the whole question, which is worth working out because it explains the other three options, is Tehri on the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand, Dulhasti on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir, Shivasamudra on the Kaveri in Karnataka, and Rana Pratap Sagar on the Chambal in Rajasthan. Note the trap in how the wrong options are built: in each of them the river and the state genuinely belong together, and only the dam has been changed. Checking the river against the state will therefore tell you nothing, and the test has to be made against the dam.

• (2)(a) - (iv) - (I) — This triple offers Tehri Dam with the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir, and the river and state are indeed a genuine pair — but they are Dulhasti's pair, not Tehri's. The Tehri Dam stands on the Bhagirathi at Tehri in Uttarakhand, is the tallest dam in India at about two hundred and sixty metres, and impounds the river that joins the Alaknanda at Devprayag to become the Ganga. The option works precisely because its second and third elements are consistent with each other, so a candidate who checks only whether the Chenab flows in Jammu and Kashmir will find nothing wrong and will mark it. The rule this teaches is that in a three-column item the element to test is the one that fixes the other two — here the dam — and that internal consistency between two elements of a triple is not evidence that the third belongs with them.
• (3)(d) - (ii) - (III) — This triple offers Rana Pratap Sagar with the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand, again pairing a river and a state that do belong together while attaching them to the wrong project. The Bhagirathi and Uttarakhand are Tehri's. Rana Pratap Sagar is on the Chambal at Rawatbhata in Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan and belongs to the Chambal Valley Project, the joint undertaking of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh whose other works are the Gandhi Sagar dam upstream and the Jawahar Sagar dam and Kota barrage downstream. The Chambal itself rises in the Vindhyan hills of Madhya Pradesh and flows north-east to join the Yamuna, so it never comes near Uttarakhand. A candidate who has learnt the Chambal Valley Project as a group will reject this triple on the name alone.
• (4)(b) - (iii) - (II) — This triple offers the Dulhasti Project with the Chambal in Rajasthan, and it repeats the pattern of the other two wrong options: the river and the state are a true pair, but they belong to Rana Pratap Sagar. Dulhasti is a hydroelectric project on the Chenab in Kishtwar district of Jammu and Kashmir, built by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and rated at three hundred and ninety megawatts, and it belongs with the other Chenab valley schemes such as Salal and Baglihar rather than with the Chambal works of Rajasthan. Dulhasti is the least familiar of the four names in the first column, and unfamiliarity is what the option relies on: a candidate who cannot place the project will judge the triple by whether the Chambal is a Rajasthan river, which it partly is, and will be caught.

River valley projects are best learnt as triples of dam, river and state, because that is the unit in which they are examined, and a small number of them recur constantly. On the Himalayan rivers, Tehri stands on the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand and is the tallest dam in the country; Bhakra Nangal is on the Sutlej between Himachal Pradesh and Punjab; Salal, Baglihar and Dulhasti are on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir; and Pong and Pandoh are on the Beas. In the peninsula, Shivanasamudra on the Kaveri in Karnataka carries the country's earliest hydroelectric station, of 1902, and Krishnarajasagar is on the same river upstream; Nagarjunasagar and Srisailam are on the Krishna; Hirakud is on the Mahanadi in Odisha and is among the longest dams in the world; Sardar Sarovar is on the Narmada in Gujarat; and Koyna, Jayakwadi on the Godavari and Ujani on the Bhima are the principal works in Maharashtra. In central India the Chambal Valley Project links Gandhi Sagar, Rana Pratap Sagar, Jawahar Sagar and the Kota barrage across Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Learning them as triples has a second advantage: it makes visible the multipurpose character of the projects, since almost all of them combine irrigation, power generation, flood moderation and water supply, which is the theme the descriptive questions are set on.

Dams and river valley projects are among the most reliably examined topics in the geography sections of state commission papers, because a project name carries a river, a state and often a purpose, and any of those can be tested. MPSC uses the three-column find-the-correct-pair format for it, which is harder than a conventional match for two reasons. First, only one of the four triples is correct, so a candidate cannot work by elimination on the strength of a single confident pairing; each triple has to be tested in full. Second, and more subtly, the wrong triples here are constructed so that the river and the state are always consistent with each other. That defeats the usual quick check and forces the candidate to test the element that actually fixes the other two — the dam. The general lesson is to identify which column in a multi-column item is the determining one and to test from there. It is also worth registering that a three-column layout of this kind is rare, so the instruction line must be read carefully: this question asks for the correct pair, not for a complete matching.

• Shivanasamudra lies on the Kaveri in Mandya district of Karnataka, where the river divides around an island and falls as the Gaganachukki and Bharachukki cascades.
• The hydroelectric station at Shivanasamudra was commissioned in 1902 and was among the first in Asia; its power was transmitted more than a hundred kilometres to the Kolar Gold Fields.
• The Tehri Dam is on the Bhagirathi at Tehri in Uttarakhand and is the tallest dam in India; the Bhagirathi joins the Alaknanda at Devprayag to form the Ganga.
• The Dulhasti hydroelectric project is on the Chenab in Kishtwar district of Jammu and Kashmir, built by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, and belongs with the Salal and Baglihar schemes on the same river.
• Rana Pratap Sagar is on the Chambal at Rawatbhata in Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan and forms part of the Chambal Valley Project with Gandhi Sagar, Jawahar Sagar and the Kota barrage.

• Checking the river against the state in a three-column item, when in every wrong option here those two are a genuine pair and only the dam has been changed
• Working by elimination from a single confident pairing, which does not work when each option is a separate triple rather than a row of a grid
• Confusing the Bhagirathi with the Chenab or the Chambal with the Kaveri because the projects on them are recalled by name rather than by location
• Reading a three-column layout as an ordinary four-by-four match and looking for a complete pairing, when the instruction asks only for the one correct combination

River valley projects appear in MPSC papers as matching items joining dams to rivers or to states, as one-line questions naming a project and asking for its river, and as statement items about the purposes a project serves. The Commission draws on a stable list of about twenty-five projects, of which the Maharashtra works and the largest national ones recur most often. The three-column variant used here is the most demanding form, since it tests two associations at once and offers no partial credit for knowing one of them, and it rewards the candidate who has learnt each project as a single fact with all its attributes attached rather than as a name in a list. Adding the purpose and the year to each entry covers the descriptive variants as well.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Tehri Dam, the tallest dam in India, is built on which river ?

  • (a)Alaknanda
  • (b)Bhagirathi
  • (c)Chenab
  • (d)Mandakini

  Answer(b) Bhagirathi — the dam stands at Tehri in Uttarakhand on the Bhagirathi, which joins the Alaknanda at Devprayag to form the Ganga. The Chenab carries the Salal, Baglihar and Dulhasti projects in Jammu and Kashmir, and the Mandakini is another headstream of the Ganga system, joining the Alaknanda at Rudraprayag rather than carrying the Tehri project.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Rana Pratap Sagar dam forms part of which river valley project ?

  • (a)The Damodar Valley Project
  • (b)The Chambal Valley Project
  • (c)The Tungabhadra Project
  • (d)The Kosi Project

  Answer(b) The Chambal Valley Project — a joint undertaking of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh whose works are the Gandhi Sagar dam, the Rana Pratap Sagar dam at Rawatbhata, the Jawahar Sagar dam and the Kota barrage. The Damodar Valley Project belongs to Jharkhand and West Bengal, the Tungabhadra Project to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and the Kosi Project to Bihar and the Nepal border.