NDA (I) 2017 General Ability Test · Question 118 of 149

Correct — A, Jharkhand. Take the other three off the list first. Chhattisgarh has Bilaspur, the headquarters of the South East Central Railway. Odisha has Bhubaneswar, the headquarters of the East Coast Railway. Bihar has Hajipur, the headquarters of the East Central Railway. That leaves Jharkhand, and although the state is criss-crossed by some of the busiest freight routes in the country and contains three divisional headquarters at Dhanbad, Ranchi and Chakradharpur, no zonal headquarters has ever been located in it. A division is not a zone, and that distinction is the whole question.

• (b)Chhattisgarh — Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh is the headquarters of the South East Central Railway, a zone carved out to handle the coal and steel traffic of the region.
• (c)Odisha — Bhubaneswar is the headquarters of the East Coast Railway. Candidates sometimes place this zone at Cuttack, but the headquarters is at Bhubaneswar.
• (d)Bihar — Hajipur, across the Ganga from Patna, is the headquarters of the East Central Railway, a zone created in the reorganisation of the early 2000s.

Indian Railways is organised in a two-tier field structure. The country is divided into zones, each under a General Manager at a zonal headquarters, and each zone is split into divisions under Divisional Railway Managers. As of the 2017 exam there were seventeen zones, counting the Kolkata Metro Railway, and Kolkata was unusual in hosting two of them, the Eastern Railway and the South Eastern Railway. The zonal map does not follow state boundaries, which is why a state as important to rail freight as Jharkhand can hold several divisions without holding a zone.

Questions of this shape are answered by elimination, and the elimination is easy if you have four or five zonal headquarters fixed in memory — Hajipur, Bhubaneswar, Bilaspur, Gorakhpur, Jaipur, Maligaon. Anchor them by state and the odd one out falls out at once. Keep the anchoring current, though. The zone list is not frozen: a further zone with its headquarters at Visakhapatnam was announced in 2019, after this paper was set. The particular fact this question rests on has held through those changes, since Jharkhand still hosts no zonal headquarters, but the total number of zones is a figure to re-check rather than to memorise once.

• East Central Railway is headquartered at Hajipur in Bihar.
• East Coast Railway is headquartered at Bhubaneswar in Odisha.
• South East Central Railway is headquartered at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh.
• Jharkhand has divisional headquarters at Dhanbad, Ranchi and Chakradharpur but no zonal headquarters; Kolkata hosts two zones, the Eastern and the South Eastern.

• Counting a divisional headquarters as a zonal one; Ranchi and Dhanbad are divisions.
• Placing the East Coast Railway at Cuttack instead of Bhubaneswar.
• Confusing the North Eastern Railway at Gorakhpur with the Northeast Frontier Railway at Maligaon.

NDA asks where a named zone is headquartered, or which state or city does or does not host one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The headquarters of the East Central Railway zone is located at

  • (a)Patna
  • (b)Hajipur
  • (c)Gorakhpur
  • (d)Bilaspur

  Answer(b) Hajipur — the zone is administered from Hajipur in Bihar, not from the state capital.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which city hosts the headquarters of two railway zones of Indian Railways?

  • (a)Mumbai
  • (b)Chennai
  • (c)Kolkata
  • (d)New Delhi

  Answer(c) Kolkata — both the Eastern Railway and the South Eastern Railway are headquartered there, besides the Kolkata Metro Railway.