Which district of Uttarakhand is not situated along the Tibbet boundary?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Almora. Uttarakhand's northern frontier with Tibet (China) runs along the crest of the Great Himalaya, and only three of the state's thirteen districts actually reach it: Uttarkashi, Chamoli and Pithoragarh. Each of the three can be checked against its own district administration. Uttarkashi's site says the district ‘sprawls in the extreme north-west corner of the state’ and that ‘on its north lie Himachal Pradesh State and the territory of Tibet’. Chamoli is bounded by Tibet on the north — the frontier reached by the Mana and Niti passes, and the stretch in which the disputed Barahoti plain lies. Pithoragarh's site is blunter still: ‘the whole northern and eastern boundaries of Pithoragarh district are international’, and it names Lipulekh, Kungri Bingri, Lampiya Dhura and Belcha as the openings towards Tibet. Almora sits behind all three. Its own administration lists the district's neighbours as ‘Pithoragarh district to the east, Garhwal region to the west, Bageshwar district to the north and Nainital district to the south’ — four Indian neighbours and not one metre of international boundary. Almora is a mid-Himalayan ridge-top district of the Kumaon division whose headquarters town, founded in 1568 by the Chand king Kalyan Chand, sits on a horseshoe-shaped spur at roughly 1,600 m; it has no glacier, no high pass and no border post. So the district in the list that is not on the Tibet boundary is Almora.

It is worth being exact about which boundary the stem means, because Uttarakhand has two. The Ministry of Home Affairs' own statement of India's land frontiers gives the boundary with China as "3488 kms running along Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Union Territory of Ladakh", and the boundary with Nepal as "1751 kms running along Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim". Uttarakhand appears on both lists, which is why a district there can be a frontier district facing one country and interior with respect to the other — Champawat, for instance, is on the Nepal line and nowhere near Tibet. Almora is on neither.

What Almora is instead, on its own administration's numbers, is an old, densely settled interior district that has been losing people. Its demography page gives an area of 3,139 sq km of which 1,309 sq km is forest, a population of 622,506 made up of 291,081 men and 331,425 women — a sex ratio of about 1,139 women to 1,000 men — a density of 198 per sq km against the state's 189, and urbanisation of 11.79 per cent against the state's 30.23. On the same page the district's population growth is recorded as negative, at −1.64 per cent, while Uttarakhand's was +18.81. A hill district with more women than men, above-average density and a shrinking population is the signature of generations of male out-migration from long-cultivated mid-mountain country. That is the opposite profile to the thinly peopled, high-altitude, glacier-and-pass tehsils along the Tibet line.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Uttarkashi does lie on the Tibet boundary, so it cannot be the answer to a ‘not situated’ stem. It is Uttarakhand's largest district by area in the extreme north-west, its northern edge is the Tibet frontier, and the Nelong (Jadhang) valley beyond Bhairon Ghati is the old trade corridor through it. Gangotri and the source of the Bhagirathi lie in the same district.  (b) Chamoli is also a frontier district — bounded by Tibet to the north, with the Mana Pass above Badrinath and the Niti Pass above Joshimath as its historic crossings, and with Mana village on the Indo-Tibet border. The Barahoti pasture, one of the pockets India and China dispute in the middle sector, lies inside Chamoli.  (d) This option would only win if every district named were genuinely on the Tibet boundary, leaving no exception to pick. Two of the three are, but Almora is not, so an exception exists and ‘None of the above’ fails. On a negatively worded stem this option is the standard escape hatch for a candidate who is unsure, and it is exactly the wrong instinct here.

Concept: Uttarakhand covers 53,483 sq km, about 1.6 per cent of India's area, and is divided into two commissionerates — Garhwal and Kumaon — holding thirteen districts between them. Two of its four boundaries are international: Tibet (China) to the north and Nepal to the east across the Kali or Sharda river, with Himachal Pradesh to the west and Uttar Pradesh to the south. Because the Chinese boundary follows the high Himalayan watershed and the Nepal boundary follows a river, they touch quite different sets of districts. Uttarkashi, Chamoli and Pithoragarh reach the Tibet line; Pithoragarh and Champawat face Nepal across the Kali. Pithoragarh is therefore the only district of the state with two international neighbours, which is why the Kalapani–Lipulekh tract at the India–Nepal–China trijunction sits inside it. The remaining districts, Almora among them, are wholly interior.

State PCS 2023 Q99 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q99 — Geography PYQ with Answer