Which districts in Bihar will benefit from the Kosi Mechi Link Project?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj, Katihar. On 28 March 2025 the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the inclusion of the Kosi–Mechi Intra-State Link Project of Bihar under the Ministry of Jal Shakti's Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana – Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme, and the Government's own release names the beneficiary districts in exactly these words: additional annual irrigation in the Kharif season over 2,10,516 hectares in Araria, Purnea, Kishanganj and Katihar districts of Bihar. The approval carried an estimated project cost of Rs 6,282.32 crore including Rs 3,652.56 crore of central assistance to Bihar, with completion targeted by March 2029, and it made Kosi–Mechi the tenth project taken into the AIBP list under PMKSY 2.0. The engineering explains the district list better than any memorised set can. The project does not dig a new canal from scratch: it remodels the existing Eastern Kosi Main Canal up to RD 41.30 km and then extends it beyond its present tail all the way to the river Mechi at RD 117.50 km, so that two rivers which both flow through Bihar are joined inside Bihar. That extended canal is designed to divert about 2,050 million cubic metres of the Kosi's surplus monsoon water eastward into the Mahananda basin command, and the remodelling simultaneously restores the shortfall supply to the 1.57 lakh hectares that the Eastern Kosi Main Canal already commands. A canal running from the Kosi to the Mechi can only water the country lying between them — which is the four-district Purnia division, the Kosi–Seemanchal belt of north-east Bihar. Read the option list against the map and the point closes itself: the Kosi joins the Ganga near Kursela in Katihar district, and the Mechi ends by joining the Mahananda inside Kishanganj district, so two of the four names in option (c) are fixed by the two rivers in the question's own title. When candidates objected to this item, the Commission dismissed the objection in one line and confirmed that C stands.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) These are central, southern and western Bihar, on the wrong side of the state entirely. Patna and Nalanda sit on the Ganga's south bank in the Magadh–Patna belt, Gaya lies in the drought-prone Falgu country of south Bihar whose canal water comes from the Sone system, and Siwan is in Saran division, west of the Gandak. Not one of them lies between the Kosi and the Mechi; the option is tempting only because it lists the districts a candidate has heard of most often.  (b) The intelligent wrong answer, and the one a flood-aware candidate falls for. These are north-central Bihar — the Tirhut and Mithila plains drained by the Burhi Gandak, Bagmati and Kamla-Balan, with Begusarai on the Ganga's north bank. They flood as badly as Seemanchal does, so they feel like the natural beneficiaries of any Kosi scheme. But they lie WEST of the Kosi, upstream and outside the Eastern Kosi Main Canal's command; a canal carrying Kosi water eastward to the Mechi flows away from them, not towards them.  (d) Only one of the three district sets is right, so the compound option fails. Sets (a) and (b) name districts in wholly different drainage belts — the Sone and Punpun catchments of south Bihar and the Burhi Gandak–Bagmati belt of north-central Bihar — and neither shares a single district with the four the Cabinet release actually names. BPSC's fourth option is live only when the earlier options are independent claims that could all hold at once, which mutually exclusive district lists cannot.

Concept: India's river-linking idea is administered as a National Perspective Plan framed in 1980 and executed through the National Water Development Agency, set up in 1982 and now under the Ministry of Jal Shakti. It began with two components — Himalayan Rivers Development and Peninsular Rivers Development — and an intra-State component was added in 2005; NWDA has prepared reports on 14 Himalayan links, 16 peninsular links and 37 intra-State links. The distinction between those categories is the whole point of this question. Kosi–Mechi appears in the Himalayan list of inter-links, but because both the Kosi and the Mechi flow through Bihar it is being built as an INTRA-State project, cleared by one state government and one central programme rather than by an inter-state water-sharing agreement — which is exactly why it moved while celebrated inter-state links did not. The money comes through a different channel again: the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana, launched in 2015-16 and re-approved for 2021-26 with an outlay of Rs 93,068.56 crore including Rs 37,454 crore of central assistance. Its Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme component exists to finish ongoing major and medium irrigation projects rather than to start new ones, and had completed 63 projects and created 26.11 lakh hectares of additional irrigation potential since April 2016 when the Kosi–Mechi approval was announced. So three separate frameworks meet in this one project — a 1980 perspective plan, a 2005 intra-State category and a 2015-16 irrigation scheme.

State PCS 2025 Q12 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q12 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer