The river Subarnarekha originates near which of the following villages?

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Correct — D, Nagri. India-WRIS, the Central Water Commission's national water-resources information wiki, states it without qualification, and states it twice on the same basin page: "The Subernarekha River rises near Nagri village in the Ranchi District of Jharkhand at an elevation of 600 m. It flows for a length of 395 km before outfalling into the Bay of Bengal", and again in the basin summary, "It originates near Nagri village in Ranchi district of Jharkhand at an elevation of 600 m." Nagri is a village in the Nagri community development block of the Ranchi Sadar subdivision, roughly 15–16 km west of Ranchi city on the Chota Nagpur plateau; the spring itself is the Rani Chuan at Piska/Nagri, and you will meet the source written both ways — Piska–Nagri is one locality pair, not two rival claims. (Where sources differ it is only by a few metres of elevation: the Commission prints 600 m, some gazetteer-derived accounts 610 m. Nothing turns on that; the village name is not in dispute.) The 600 m figure is itself a check on the answer, because it places the source on the plateau rim that India-WRIS names as the basin's own northern and western boundary — the river then loses that entire 600 m over its 395 km run to sea level. From Nagri it goes south-east across Ranchi, Seraikela-Kharsawan and East Singhbhum districts, cuts through Paschim Medinipur in West Bengal and Balasore in Odisha, and reaches the Bay of Bengal near Talsari. The Commission gives the basin 29,196 sq km across Jharkhand, Odisha and a smaller part of West Bengal, lying between 85°8′ and 87°32′ E and 21°15′ and 23°34′ N, with a maximum length of about 297 km and width of 119 km, average annual rainfall near 1,800 mm and an average water-resource potential of 12,370 MCM of which 6,800 MCM is rated utilizable. Its principal tributaries all join from the right — the Kharkai (136 km, 6,611 sq km, the largest tributary catchment, meeting the main stream at Domuhani in Jamshedpur), the Karkari (110 km, 1,341 sq km) and the Kanchi (76 km, 1,096 sq km) — with the Dulang (84 km, 1,200 sq km) the one left-bank entrant. The name itself records the source: subarna means gold and rekha a streak or line, after the gold traditionally panned in the riverbed near its origin.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The best-constructed decoy, because Ormanjhi genuinely sits on the Subarnarekha — just about 50 km downstream of the source. Ormanjhi is a village and CD block of Ranchi Sadar subdivision, on the eastern side of Ranchi, and the Getalsud (Rukka) Dam, opened in 1971 and 35.5 m high, was thrown across the river there to supply Ranchi city's drinking water and to feed the Sikidiri hydel units below it. A candidate who remembers 'Ormanjhi = Subarnarekha' but not the direction of flow will pick it. The geometry settles it: the river rises west of the city at 600 m and runs east and south-east, so a place east of Ranchi is by definition downstream, and a dam site is chosen for the storage a river has already accumulated, never for its first trickle.  (b) Mandar is a village and CD block in Ranchi Sadar subdivision, north-west of Ranchi, off the Subarnarekha's headwater catchment. The name is doing double duty as a trap for Bihar candidates, who know Mandar Hill (Mandar Parvat) at Bounsi in Banka district, Bihar — the roughly 700-foot pilgrimage hill of the Samudra Manthan tradition, an isolated hill carrying Jain and Hindu shrines, which stands roughly 230 km north-east of Ranchi in a different state and a different drainage, and is nowhere near any river source. Two different places with one name in two different states is exactly the shape of trap a state commission builds.  (c) Hehal is not a village outside Ranchi at all but a locality inside Ranchi city, on its north-western side — the address of DAV Public School, Hehal and of a CIPET campus. The stem asks for a village, and Hehal is urban ward territory, which is a structural reason to drop it before any hydrology is considered. No gazetteer and no Central Water Commission document associates it with the Subarnarekha's source; India-WRIS names exactly one place, and it is not this one.

Concept: The Subarnarekha is one of the east-flowing rivers of the Chota Nagpur plateau — a compact, rain-fed, inter-state system that never touches the Gangetic plain. It rises on the plateau near Ranchi, runs 395 km south-east and empties independently into the Bay of Bengal instead of joining the Ganga or the Mahanadi. India-WRIS describes the basin as sitting in the north-east corner of peninsular India, bounded by the Chhotanagpur plateau on the north and west, by the ridges separating it from the Baitarani basin on the south, by the Bay of Bengal on the south-east and by the Kasai valley of the Kangsabati on the east — a basin fenced by watersheds on every land side, which is why nothing drains out of it into a bigger river. It is a two-river basin, not one: the Commission counts the Subernarekha and the Burhabalang as the basin's two major systems, the Burhabalang rising south of Similipal village in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha at about 800 m and running 164 km to the sea on its own. The main stem is not even the dominant catchment — it accounts for 7,383 sq km or 39.0% of the tributary-wise total, against the Kharkai's 6,611 sq km or 34.9%, which is why Jamshedpur's water politics has always been about two rivers meeting rather than one arriving. Land use is 53.76% agricultural with 2.39% under water bodies, and the geology is Pre-Cambrian/Archaean gneiss, mica schist, phyllite, dolomite and granite in the Jharkhand and West Bengal reaches, giving way to Tertiary rocks and alluvium in Odisha — the same formations that carry the region's coal, iron and bauxite. That is what makes a 'minor' 29,196 sq km basin economically heavy: Jamshedpur, Ghatshila and the Singhbhum copper-uranium belt all sit on it, and the Subarnarekha Multipurpose Project (Chandil dam on the main stem, Icha dam on the Kharkai, the Galudih barrage) was built to irrigate and supply that belt. A BPSC candidate meets it because the entire Chota Nagpur plateau was part of Bihar until Jharkhand was carved out on 15 November 2000 under the Bihar Reorganisation Act, 2000, and the Commission has never dropped the region from its geography syllabus.

State PCS 2023 Q85 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q85 — Geography PYQ with Answer