NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 127 of 150

Correct — C, Shirdi. The Sai Prasadalaya, the community kitchen run by the Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust at Shirdi in Maharashtra, is the site the question points to. It is the largest institutional kitchen of its kind in the country — the Sansthan's own account puts it at about 60,000 devotees fed daily, rising to 85,000 and more on festival days, from a hall of 11,550 square metres. A kitchen of that scale is exactly where a record-sized cooking installation gets built, and Shirdi's kitchen is a showcase of renewable cooking energy on every count: a bank of 73 solar concentrating dishes raising roughly 4,200 kg of steam a day, plus a five-tonne biogas plant that turns plate waste back into cooking fuel and saves about 200 kg of LPG daily.

• (a)Tirupati — The strongest trap, and for a real reason — the Tirumala Tirupati temple kitchen in Andhra Pradesh held the earlier record for the largest installation of this kind, and it also runs a very large solar steam cooking system. It was displaced by Shirdi, which is what the question is testing.
• (b)Amritsar — The Golden Temple langar at Amritsar serves enormous numbers of meals, so it feels like a natural answer, but its kitchen is known for its scale of service rather than for holding this particular renewable-cooking record.
• (d)Udupi — Udupi in Karnataka is famous for its temple cuisine and its Krishna Matha kitchen, but on a far smaller scale than Shirdi, and it holds no such record.

A community kitchen that cooks for tens of thousands of people a day burns fuel on an industrial scale, so it is the natural place to install renewable cooking technology. The two routes India has pushed through the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy are concentrating solar thermal systems, where parabolic dishes focus sunlight to raise steam that is piped to the cooking vessels, and improved biomass systems, where agricultural residue and firewood are burned in high-efficiency stoves or gasifiers instead of open hearths. Both cut the LPG bill and the smoke together.

This is a 2016 current-affairs item and needs its date read into it. Anchor it to the September 2016 exam: at that time Shirdi's Sai Prasadalaya was the flagship the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy pointed to, and it took the Ministry's Concentrated Solar Thermal and Solar Cooker Excellence Award for 2016. Ten years on, records of this kind have moved around and other large temple and institutional kitchens have added comparable systems, so treat the superlative as a fact about 2016 rather than about today. The durable takeaway is the pairing — very large pilgrimage kitchen plus renewable cooking energy — and the two Indian names that dominate it, Shirdi and Tirumala.

• The Sai Prasadalaya at Shirdi was built in 2009 and, by the Sansthan's own account, feeds about 60,000 devotees a day, rising to 85,000 or more during festivals.
• Its solar cooking installation uses 73 concentrating dishes and raises about 4,200 kg of steam in a day; the Sansthan cites the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy identifying it as the world's largest solar heating cooking system.
• A five-tonne biogas plant at the same kitchen converts leftover food into gas and saves roughly 200 kg of LPG every day.
• The kitchen received the Ministry's Concentrated Solar Thermal and Solar Cooker Excellence Award for 2016, the same year as this exam.
• The comparable earlier installation was at the Tirumala Tirupati temple kitchen in Andhra Pradesh, which is why Tirupati is the option most candidates mark.

• Marking Tirupati because it is the better-known temple kitchen — it held the earlier record, which is exactly why it is offered here.
• Treating a 2016 superlative as still current; records of this kind get overtaken, so quote them with their year.
• Confusing a solar steam cooking system with a biomass cookstove system — Shirdi runs both, and the question names only one of them.

Renewable energy current affairs reaches NDA as a single 'largest / first / where' line, usually about an installation that made the news in the twelve months before the exam, so the answer is almost always the site that was in the papers that year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In a concentrating solar cooking system of the kind installed at large temple kitchens in India, what is actually carried from the dishes to the cooking vessels?

  • (a)Hot air
  • (b)Steam
  • (c)Electric current
  • (d)Molten salt

  Answer(b) Steam — the dishes focus sunlight on a receiver to boil water, and the steam is piped to the vessels, which is why these are called solar steam cooking systems.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Unnat Chulha Abhiyan of the Government of India was launched to promote

  • (a)rooftop solar water heaters
  • (b)improved biomass cookstoves
  • (c)piped natural gas in cities
  • (d)electric induction cooking

  Answer(b) improved biomass cookstoves — the programme promotes higher-efficiency, lower-smoke stoves that burn firewood and agricultural residue.