Which of the following centres in Bihar is proposed to develop under Vishnupad Yojana for promotion of tourism in Union Budget 2024 ?

Question

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Correct — C, Gaya. The Union Budget 2024-25, presented on 23 July 2024, devoted a run of paragraphs to Bihar tourism, and paragraph 89 of the speech reads: "Vishnupad Temple at Gaya and Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar are of immense spiritual significance. Comprehensive development of Vishnupad Temple Corridor and Mahabodhi Temple Corridor will be supported, modelled on the successful Kashi Vishwanath Temple Corridor, to transform them into world class pilgrim and tourist destinations." The Vishnupad temple stands in Gaya on the bank of the Phalgu, dedicated to Vishnu and built around a forty-centimetre footprint incised into a block of basalt; it is the centre of the Shraddha and Pind Daan rites for which pilgrims come to Gaya, and it was rebuilt in 1787 by Rani Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore. Note the trap in the stem's own wording: the Budget announced a Vishnupad Temple Corridor, not a 'Vishnupad Yojana'. There is no scheme of that name, and a candidate hunting for one in the scheme lists will find nothing — the answer has to come from knowing where the temple is. The other three places all appear in the same tourism section of the speech, which is exactly why they were chosen as distractors, but each under its own separate announcement.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Named in the very next paragraph of the same speech, but for its own package: the Budget noted Rajgir's significance for Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, singling out the ancient Munisuvrata temple of the 20th Tirthankara in the Jain complex and the Saptharishi hot springs that form the sacred Brahmakund, and promised a comprehensive development initiative there. That is a separate proposal from the Vishnupad corridor.  (b) Also in the same section, again under its own head: the Budget said the government would support the development of Nalanda as a tourist centre and revive Nalanda University to its former stature. Nalanda's announcement is about a university and a ruin field; the Vishnupad corridor is about a living temple at Gaya, roughly ninety kilometres away.  (d) The weakest of the four, and revealing about how the option set was built. Vaishali appears in the Budget only in the infrastructure list — as one of the expressway spurs, alongside Bodhgaya, Rajgir and Darbhanga, inside the ₹26,000 crore road package — and not in the temple-corridor proposal at all.

Concept: The 'corridor' model that the Budget invokes is a specific piece of policy, not a generic phrase. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor at Varanasi cleared and rebuilt the congested approach between the temple and the Ganga ghats, adding pilgrim facilities, and is the template the Union government has since applied elsewhere. Applying it to Gaya joins two things the state wants: a religious tourism economy and public infrastructure. The Vishnupad announcement sits inside a much larger Bihar package in the same speech — the Purvodaya plan for the all-round development of the eastern region covering Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh; an industrial node at Gaya on the Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor, offered as a model of 'Vikas bhi Virasat bhi'; ₹26,000 crore of road projects; ₹21,400 crore of power projects including a new 2400 MW plant at Pirpainti; and ₹11,500 crore for flood mitigation including the Kosi-Mechi intra-state link.

State PCS 2024 Q68 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q68 — Economy PYQ with Answer