Observe the statements regarding mineral oil production.
(a) Nunmati oil refinery established with the help of Rumania.
(b) Nunmati oil refinery is located in Assam.
(c) The raw mineral oil is supplie

Question

Observe the statements regarding mineral oil production.
(a) Nunmati oil refinery established with the help of Rumania.
(b) Nunmati oil refinery is located in Assam.
(c) The raw mineral oil is supplied to Koyali oil refinery from Ankleshwar.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), which says all three statements are correct. Take them one at a time. Statement (a): the refinery the English column spells 'Nunmati' is the Guwahati Refinery, and it was built with the technical assistance of Romania, printed here as 'Rumania'. It was commissioned on 1 January 1962 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and it holds a first that is worth memorising — it was India's first public sector refinery, the Digboi refinery of 1901 having been a private one. Statement (b): that refinery stands at Noonmati in Guwahati, in Assam, and processes crude piped down from the Upper Assam fields; its installed capacity is about one million tonnes a year and it is run by Indian Oil. So (b) is correct as well. Statement (c): the Koyali refinery is the Gujarat Refinery of Indian Oil, at Koyali in Vadodara district. When it was commissioned in October 1965 it was designed expressly to run on crude from ONGC's Gujarat fields — Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam — so raw mineral oil does reach Koyali from Ankleshwar, and (c) is correct too. With every statement standing, the only row that can be right is the one that accepts all three, and that is option (3). Note what separates it from option (4): the two rows name the same three statements, and the whole difference is the single word 'incorrect' at the end of the fourth. Reading an option to its last word is the discipline this question tests as much as the refinery facts themselves.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This row accepts statements (a) and (b) but drops (c), which would require the Koyali link to be false. It is not. The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, in Vadodara district, was commissioned in October 1965 and was designed to process crude from ONGC's Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam oilfields in Gujarat; Ankleshwar, discovered in 1960, was the first of them and is the field the statement names. The refinery has since grown far beyond what those fields can feed and now runs largely on crude brought in from the coast, but the statement is about supply from Ankleshwar and that supply is real. A candidate picks this row by verifying the two Assam statements, finding them sound, and stopping — which is the error the two-statement rows in this question are built to catch.  (b) This row accepts statements (b) and (c) but drops (a), which would require the Romanian connection to be false. It is not. The Guwahati refinery at Noonmati was set up with Romanian technical assistance and commissioned on 1 January 1962, and the collaboration is the fact by which the refinery is usually identified in an examination — India's early public sector refineries were each built with a different partner, Guwahati with Romania, Barauni in 1964 with the Soviet Union and limited Romanian participation, and Koyali in 1965 with Soviet assistance. Mixing those partners up is the standard error, and a candidate who half-remembers Koyali as the Soviet one may wrongly transfer the doubt onto the Guwahati statement and land here.  (d) This row says all three statements are incorrect, and it is the one place in this question where the word 'incorrect' appears. Every statement in fact stands: Guwahati was built with Romanian help, it is at Noonmati in Assam, and Koyali was designed around crude from Ankleshwar and the other Gujarat fields. The row is worth a moment's study anyway, because it is printed immediately below the row that says the same three statements are correct, and the two differ by one word. The stem of this question is not a negative one — it simply asks the reader to observe the statements — so the negation lives inside this option and nowhere else. A candidate who scans options rather than reads them can select this row while believing they have selected its neighbour.

Concept: India's refining industry began at Digboi in Assam in 1901, next to the field where oil was first struck in 1889, and that refinery was private. The public sector chapter opens in the 1960s, when the state built refineries with foreign technical partners because the technology and much of the finance had to be imported. Guwahati, at Noonmati, came first — commissioned on 1 January 1962 with Romanian assistance and inaugurated by Nehru, it was India's first public sector refinery, with a capacity of about one million tonnes a year. Barauni in Bihar followed in July 1964, built in collaboration with the Soviet Union with limited Romanian participation. The Gujarat Refinery at Koyali, near Vadodara, was commissioned in October 1965 with Soviet assistance at a cost of about Rs 26 crore, after Nehru laid its foundation stone in May 1963. Each of these was located on a logic that examiners like to test: Guwahati and Barauni were placed to use Assam crude, Guwahati at the field and Barauni at the far end of a pipeline, while Koyali was placed on the Gujarat fields discovered around 1960 — Ankleshwar, Kalol and Nawagam. Refineries built later, at the coast, are market-and-import oriented instead, which is why Jamnagar, Vadinar, Mangalore and Paradip sit where they do.

State PCS 2021 Q22 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q22 — Geography PYQ with Answer