Which of the following group of cities are connected by Golden Quadrilateral National Highway System ?

Question

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Correct — option (2), Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Agra. The Golden Quadrilateral is the 5,846 kilometre highway ring that joins the four metropolitan corners of India, launched in January 1999 as the first phase of the National Highways Development Project and declared complete in January 2012. Its four legs are Delhi to Kolkata, Kolkata to Chennai, Chennai to Mumbai and Mumbai to Delhi, and the cities in this choice can each be placed on one of them. Kolkata and Chennai are two of the four corners, so they are on the ring by definition. Agra lies on the Delhi to Kolkata leg, the 1,453 kilometre stretch that also passes Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Asansol. Bengaluru lies on the Chennai to Mumbai leg, the 1,290 kilometre stretch that runs by Krishnagiri and Vellore, through Bengaluru and Chitradurga, then Belagavi, Kolhapur and Pune. So all four names in this choice sit on the quadrilateral, and no other choice can say the same. The point the question is really testing is the difference between the Golden Quadrilateral and the corridors that were built beside it. Phase II of the same programme built the North-South corridor from Srinagar to Kanyakumari and the East-West corridor from Silchar to Porbandar, and those two run through a different set of large cities. A candidate who has stored one mental image of a national highway network, without separating the ring from the two crossing corridors, will find that every choice here contains at least one name they associate with a major highway, and will have nothing left to decide with. The correct image is geometric: a closed loop touching Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, with a vertical corridor and a horizontal corridor crossing through the middle of the country and passing through cities such as Hyderabad, Nagpur, Ambala and Jalandhar that the loop itself never reaches.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Two of these four are on the ring and two are not. Delhi is one of the four corners, and Jaipur lies on the Delhi to Mumbai leg along with Kishangarh, Chittaurgarh, Bhilwara, Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Ankleshwar. But Jalandhar and Ambala lie north-west of Delhi on the road towards Amritsar, which belongs to the North-South corridor and not to the quadrilateral; the ring has no leg running north of Delhi at all, because Delhi is its northern corner. The choice is built to catch a candidate who thinks of the Golden Quadrilateral as a general label for the busiest national highways rather than as a specific closed loop with four named vertices.  (c) Allahabad, now Prayagraj, and Agra are both on the Delhi to Kolkata leg, so this choice starts convincingly. Lucknow and Gorakhpur are not. Both lie north of the alignment that runs Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and on into Bihar and Bengal, and they are served by other national highways rather than by the quadrilateral. A candidate scanning the option set quickly will see two Uttar Pradesh cities they know to be on major highways and accept the whole set. The defence is to test every single name against a mental map of the four legs, because the examiner has deliberately built each wrong choice out of a mixture of cities that are on the ring and cities that are not.  (d) This is the sharpest distractor in the set, because three of its four cities really are on the Golden Quadrilateral and only one is not. Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada both lie on the Kolkata to Chennai leg, alongside Bhubaneswar, Baleshwar, Rajahmundry and Nellore, and Belagavi, printed here as Belgaum, lies on the Chennai to Mumbai leg between Chitradurga and Kolhapur. Hyderabad does not: it sits inland on the North-South corridor, well away from the coastal alignment that carries the quadrilateral between Kolkata and Chennai. One wrong name is enough to defeat the whole choice, which is exactly why an option of this construction has to be read to the end. The paper prints the first and third names as Vishakhapatanam and Hydrabad; the usual spellings are Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad.

Concept: The National Highways Development Project, launched in 1998 and 1999, was the largest road programme India had attempted. Phase I was the Golden Quadrilateral, a four-lane and in places six-lane ring of 5,846 kilometres joining Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, begun in January 1999 and completed in January 2012. Phase II built the two corridors that cross the country and cross each other: the North-South corridor from Srinagar to Kanyakumari with a spur to Kochi, and the East-West corridor from Silchar to Porbandar, together about 7,300 kilometres. Later phases added four-laning of other national highways, expressways, port connectivity and ring roads. The executing agency is the National Highways Authority of India, constituted under an Act of 1988 and made operational in 1995, and much of the construction was financed through a cess on petrol and diesel and delivered on build-operate-transfer contracts. The programme's economic logic was that national highways carry a very large share of India's road freight on a very small share of its road length, so upgrading the trunk network relieves the whole system.

State PCS 2021 Q17 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q17 — Geography PYQ with Answer