What was the number of oil refineries in Madhya Pradesh in 2024?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, one. Madhya Pradesh has exactly one oil refinery: the Bina Refinery at Agasod, near Bina town in Sagar district. It was built by Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL), a joint venture of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) and Oman Oil Company, was commissioned in 2011, and has a capacity of 7.8 million tonnes per annum. BORL was merged into BPCL in 2022, so the plant is today a BPCL refinery. No second refinery existed in the state in 2024 — the announced expansion at Bina (an ethylene cracker and petrochemical complex) is an addition to the same site, not a new refinery.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Madhya Pradesh has no crude oil production of its own and only one refining site. Multi-refinery clusters are elsewhere — Gujarat and Assam — not in Madhya Pradesh.  (c) Far too many for a landlocked state that runs entirely on crude piped in from the coast. Four is the sort of count associated with Assam's refinery group (Digboi, Guwahati, Bongaigaon, Numaligarh), not with Madhya Pradesh.  (d) The tempting near-miss. Students count the Bina refinery plus its announced petrochemical/cracker expansion, or plus a proposed project, as a second unit. Expansion of an existing refinery does not create a new refinery — the state's count stayed at one.

Concept: A refinery is where crude oil is separated and processed into petrol, diesel, LPG, naphtha and other products. India's refineries cluster near the coast (imported crude lands there) or near domestic oilfields. Madhya Pradesh has neither a coastline nor oilfields, so its single refinery at Bina is a deliberate inland exception: crude is unloaded at the Vadinar terminal on the Gujarat coast and pushed to Bina through a dedicated long-distance crude pipeline. Bina was chosen to serve the fuel demand of central and northern India, cutting the freight cost of moving finished products inland.

State PCS 2025 Q72 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q72 — Madhya Pradesh GK PYQ with Answer