In which city of Bihar the recently inaugurated National Dolphin Research Centre is located ?

Question

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Correct — A, Patna. The National Dolphin Research Centre was inaugurated on Monday 4 March 2024 by the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, at Patna, on the bank of the Ganga, and was reported at the time as the first facility of its kind in Asia devoted to the Gangetic dolphin. Its stated purpose is to bring scientists and researchers together to study the animal in its own habitat rather than in captivity — its food habits, its behaviour and its adaptation to a changing river — and to train fishermen so that dolphins stop being killed accidentally in nets, which is one of the principal causes of mortality. Patna is a deliberate choice rather than a default one: the Ganga runs through the city, Bihar holds one of the two largest riverine dolphin populations in India, and a centre studying a river animal has been placed beside the river it studies. There is one specific way a well-prepared candidate can go wrong here, and it is worth naming in advance. Bihar's other and older dolphin institution is the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary, notified on 7 August 1991 over a sixty-kilometre stretch of the Ganga from Sultanganj to Kahalgaon, and that lies in Bhagalpur district — which is not among the four options at all. A candidate who has revised Bihar's dolphin geography will reach for Bhagalpur, fail to find it, and then guess between the remaining names. The distinction to hold is simple: the protected habitat is at Bhagalpur, the research institution is at Patna.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Darbhanga — a major city of north Bihar and the cultural centre of Mithila, but it does not stand on the Ganga. It lies in the northern plain drained by the Bagmati and Kamla systems, well away from the main stem where Gangetic dolphins live, so it would be an odd place to site a research centre on a river animal that occurs only in the Ganga and its larger tributaries.  (c) Gaya — in south Bihar, on the Phalgu, a river that is seasonal and runs largely dry for much of the year. It is one of Bihar's great religious and tourist centres, with Bodh Gaya nearby, and that prominence is what puts it on the list. It has no Gangetic dolphin habitat of any kind, since a dolphin needs a deep perennial channel and the Phalgu offers none.  (d) Munger — the strongest wrong answer, and the only one a candidate can defend on geography. Munger does stand on the Ganga, does lie inside the dolphin's range, and sits close to the stretch of river protected as the Vikramshila sanctuary. It is a real dolphin district. But the National Dolphin Research Centre was not built there, and Munger's own wildlife association is with the Bhimbandh sanctuary in the Kharagpur hills rather than with dolphin research.

Concept: The Gangetic or Ganges river dolphin, Platanista gangetica gangetica, is one of only five river dolphin species in the world, and it is the reason Bihar figures so heavily in India's freshwater conservation policy. It lives exclusively in fresh water — it cannot survive in the sea — and it is effectively blind, navigating and hunting entirely by echolocation, emitting ultrasonic clicks that bounce off fish in water far too silty for eyes to be of any use. It is a mammal, so it must surface every thirty to a hundred and twenty seconds to breathe through the blowhole on top of its head, and the sound of that breath gives it its local name, susu. Females are larger than males and produce a single calf only once every two or three years, which makes the population very slow to recover from losses. Its legal and conservation standing is a standard examination package: Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, Endangered on the IUCN Red List, Appendix I of CITES, and India's national aquatic animal, a status conferred at the first meeting of the National Ganga River Basin Authority chaired by the Prime Minister on 5 October 2009.

State PCS 2024 Q15 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q15 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer