Which is the largest river Island in the world?

Question

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Correct — B, Majuli Island. Majuli is the great river island of the Brahmaputra in upper Assam, bounded by the Brahmaputra to its south and east, the Subansiri to its west and an anabranch of the Brahmaputra to its north. Guinness World Records recognises it as the world's largest INLAND river island, and that one qualifier is worth carrying: Encyclopaedia Britannica awards the plain title of largest river island to Bananal Island on Brazil's Araguaia, and Ilha do Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon is also routinely cited as bigger. The two claims coexist precisely because the Guinness citation is worded 'inland'. For this question the distinction never bites, because nothing else on the option list is in contention on scale: Majuli measured about 880 sq km in 2024, against Agatti's 3.226 sq km, Bhavani Island's 133 acres (54 hectares) and Srirangam's narrow strip in the Kaveri delta. Note also that Majuli is shrinking: it was roughly 1,300 sq km in the 1790s and 1,255 sq km in the early twentieth century, so about 420 sq km has gone to Brahmaputra bank erosion — roughly a third of the loss in the second half of the twentieth century alone, with more than 35 villages washed away since 1991. In 2016 it became the first island in India to be constituted as a district, and it has been on the UNESCO tentative list under the Cultural category since March 2004 as the heartland of Assam's neo-Vaishnavite satra tradition.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Srirangam is a genuine river island — the strip at Tiruchirappalli enclosed by the Kaveri to the south and its distributary the Kollidam to the north. Its fame is religious, not geographical: it holds the Ranganathaswamy temple, which UNESCO calls the biggest functioning Hindu temple in the world at about 631,000 sq m. Fame, not size, makes it the tempting pick.  (c) Bhavani Island is a real river island, in the Krishna at Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh — but at 133 acres (54 hectares, about 0.54 sq km) it is roughly one-sixteen-hundredth of Majuli. It is heavily developed as an APTDC tourist island, with Shilparamam, a ropeway and theme parks, which gives it a public profile far out of proportion to its area.  (d) Agatti is not a river island at all. It is a 3.226 sq km coral island sitting on the Agatti atoll in Lakshadweep, 459 km west of Kochi, and it carries Agatti Airport — the only airport in the Union Territory. The word 'Island' plus a familiar Indian name is the entire trap; an Arabian Sea atoll has no river anywhere near it.

Concept: A river island (a fluvial or mid-channel island) is built, not carved. Where a river slows and drops more sediment than it can carry, it deposits a bar in mid-channel, splits around it, and the bar grows until it stabilises under vegetation. The Brahmaputra is the classic factory for these: it carries one of the highest sediment loads of any river on Earth and runs in a wide braided channel across the Assam valley, throwing up sand-and-silt islands that Assam calls chars and chaporis. Because they are unconsolidated deposits rather than bedrock, they are created and destroyed by the same process — every flood season adds land on one bank and eats it on the other. That is why Majuli's area is a moving number rather than a fixed one. A coral island like Agatti is the opposite kind of object: biogenic limestone accumulated by reef organisms on a submarine platform in the open sea, with no river involved at all.

State PCS 2025 Q106 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q106 — Geography PYQ with Answer