Amarkantak source place of Son river is situated at

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Maikal range. Amarkantak is a plateau town at about 1,048 metres in Anuppur district of Madhya Pradesh, and it sits on the Maikal Hills — the eastern arm of the Satpura system, running through Anuppur district in Madhya Pradesh and Kawardha district in Chhattisgarh, with elevations from roughly 340 to 942 metres and the Amarkantak plateau as its high ground. Amarkantak's own nickname is Maikal. The place matters because it is a triple watershed: the Narmada rises here at Narmada Kund and turns west to the Arabian Sea, the Son rises at Sonmuda close by and runs north and then east to the Ganga, and the Johila also begins here. Geographers describe the Amarkantak region as the meeting point of the Vindhya and Satpura ranges with the Maikal Hills as the fulcrum, which is why 'Maikal' is the precise answer and 'Satpura' would be the broader one. The Son itself is 784 km long and is the second-largest southern tributary of the Ganga after the Yamuna; it crosses Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand before running the length of southern Bihar and joining the Ganga near Maner in Patna district. Note the trap built into the option list: three of the four choices begin with the letters M-A, and the first of them, Makalu, is a Himalayan peak that has nothing to do with central India at all. Read the whole word.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A pure sound-alike, and the reason this question is not free. Makalu is the fifth-highest mountain on earth at 8,485 metres, in the Mahalangur Himalayas on the China–Nepal border, 19 km south-east of Mount Everest. It is a Himalayan peak, not a central Indian range, and it is some 1,500 km from Amarkantak. The two names differ by two letters and a candidate reading quickly under time pressure can take one for the other.  (c) The right mountain system but the wrong end of it. The Mahadeo Hills are the northern block of the Satpura Range, running east and west through Betul, Chhindwara and Seoni districts of Madhya Pradesh and separating the Narmada basin to the north from those of the Wainganga and Wardha, tributaries of the Godavari, to the south. They lie several hundred kilometres west of Amarkantak, and the Tapi rather than the Son is the river associated with that stretch of the Satpuras.  (d) The right river, at completely the wrong point on it. The Rajmahal Hills are in the Santhal Pargana division of Jharkhand, built of the Jurassic Rajmahal Traps that spill into West Bengal and Meghalaya, and they stand near the Ganga far downstream of everything this question is about. They are perhaps 900 km from Amarkantak, and the Son does not touch them — it has already joined the Ganga upstream, near Patna.

Concept: Central India's drainage is organised by two long, roughly parallel east–west ranges — the Vindhyas to the north and the Satpuras to the south — and by the trough between them, which the Narmada occupies. The Satpura system is not one ridge but a chain: the Rajpipla hills in the west, the Mahadeo hills in the centre around Betul, Chhindwara and Seoni, and the Maikal hills swinging north-east at the eastern end, where they effectively close the gap with the Vindhyas. Amarkantak sits at that junction, which is what makes it a triple watershed and gives it its religious standing as Tirthraj. The direction each river takes from there is decided by the structure. The Narmada runs west because it occupies a rift valley between the two ranges, which is also why it has an estuary rather than a delta. The Son runs the other way, north out of the highland and then east along the southern edge of the Ganga plain, collecting the Rihand, Kanhar, Gopad and North Koel from its right before it turns to meet the Ganga. That north-then-east course is what brings a Madhya Pradesh headwater into Bihar's water economy.

State PCS 2025 Q96 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q96 — Geography PYQ with Answer