Karmanasa river originates in -

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Kaimur District. The Karmanasa (Karamnasa) rises at about 350 metres on the northern face of the Kaimur Range, near Sarodag in Kaimur district of Bihar. The Commission put the reasoning in a single line when it rejected objections to this item: 'River Karmanasa originates in Kaimur Hills and not in the plains.' That is the whole physics of the question — a river needs relief to be born, and of the four districts offered only Kaimur sits on upland. From Sarodag the river descends the Kaimur escarpment by a succession of leaps, including the Karkatgarh, Devdari and Chhanpathar falls, then turns north-west across the plains south of Mirzapur, becomes the boundary between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and finally joins the Ganga near Chausa in Buxar district, opposite Bara village in Ghazipur district of Uttar Pradesh. Its total length is 192 km, of which 116 km lie inside Uttar Pradesh and the remaining 76 km form the interstate boundary; with its tributaries — the Durgavati, Chandraprabha, Karunuti, Nadi, Goriya and Khajuri — it drains 11,709 sq km. Along that boundary stretch it has Sonbhadra, Chandauli, Varanasi and Ghazipur on its left bank and Kaimur and Buxar on its right. The name means 'destroyer of religious merit', which is why tradition treats crossing it as inauspicious; the legend traces the stream to the saliva of King Trishanku, left hanging head-down in mid-air after Vishvamitra's rival creation was stopped by Indra.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Vaishali lies north of the Ganga in the Tirhut division, with its headquarters at Hajipur, on flat alluvium built by the Gandak and its distributaries. Nothing rises there. The Karmanasa is a south-bank stream in the extreme south-west corner of Bihar, on the other side of the Ganga and roughly 200 km away. Vaishali is examined for the Licchavi republic and for Mahavira, not for river sources.  (c) Patna is the obvious guess for anyone matching a Bihar question to the only Bihar district they can place on a map. But Patna district is pure Gangetic alluvium with no relief to speak of. Rivers converge on Patna — the Ganga, the Son at Maner, the Punpun, the Gandak opposite at Sonepur — they do not begin there. A flat floodplain district can be a confluence, never a source.  (d) The give-away, once you notice it: Bihar has 38 districts and Bikram is not among them. Bikram is a town and community development block inside Patna district, on the road towards Arrah. An option that names a unit which does not exist can never be the answer, so this one can be struck out before any geography is recalled — a useful habit in a paper that carries a one-third negative mark.

Concept: Bihar's drainage is split in two by the Ganga, and the split is the key to almost every river question the state sets. The north-bank tributaries — Ghaghara, Gandak, Burhi Gandak, Bagmati, Kamla Balan, Kosi and Mahananda — rise in Nepal and the Himalaya, carry snowmelt as well as monsoon rain, run in shifting braided channels over deep alluvium and give north Bihar its flood problem. The south-bank tributaries — Karmanasa, Son, Punpun, Phalgu, Sakri, Kiul and Chandan — rise on the Vindhyan and Chota Nagpur uplands, are wholly rain-fed and seasonal, and cut entrenched beds in rock before spilling on to the plain. The Karmanasa is the westernmost of that southern set inside Bihar. Its source range, the Kaimur, is the eastern portion of the Vindhya Range: roughly 483 km long, running from around Katangi in Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh to around Sasaram in Rohtas district of Bihar, never more than a few hundred metres above the surrounding plains and up to about 80 km wide. Along it runs a descending staircase of plateaus — Panna, then Bhander, then Rewa, ending in the Rohtas Plateau of Bihar — with a well-marked fall line where every north-flowing stream drops off the scarp. That fall line is why the Kaimur country is full of waterfalls between 15 m and 180 m high, the Devdari fall, about 58 m, being placed on the Karmanasa by some accounts and on the Chandraprabha by the Chandauli district administration; the Chhanpathar fall is about 30 m. A river treated as polluting is also a river people do not settle across, and the Karmanasa duly served as a political frontier: it marked the western boundary of the Sena dynasty of Bengal, and the Grand Trunk Road still crosses it at the state border. Two small dams, the Latif Shah bund and the Nuagarh dam, hold it today, and its valley carries one of India's important early-iron sites, Raja Nal Ka Tila in northern Sonbhadra, where excavation yielded iron artefacts dated to roughly 1200–1300 BCE.

State PCS 2025 Q117 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q117 — Geography PYQ with Answer