Observe the following statements :
(a) Sagar cyclonic storm originated in May 2019 in Arabian Sea.
(b) Sagar cyclonic storm disrupted properties on South Konkan coast.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4). Both printed statements fail, and they fail for different reasons, which is why the choice that rejects the pair is the answer. Statement (a) attaches the storm to the wrong year. The cyclonic storm named Sagar formed on 16 May 2018, not in May 2019, and it developed in the Gulf of Aden, the arm of water between Yemen and northern Somalia at the far western end of the sea area the India Meteorological Department watches. A statement that is right about the sea and wrong about the year is not half correct in this format; it is incorrect, and statement (a) has to be rejected on the date alone. Statement (b) fails on geography, and it fails outright. Sagar travelled west-south-westwards along the entire length of the Gulf of Aden, that is to say away from India, and made landfall on the Somaliland coast near Lughaya on 19 May 2018 — the farthest west a landfall has been recorded anywhere in the North Indian Ocean. Its damage fell on Somaliland, Djibouti and Yemen, where flash floods took lives, livestock, crops and property in the coastal districts of Awdal and Woqooyi Galbeed; until Cyclone Gati in 2020 it was the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in Somalia. The storm never entered the eastern Arabian Sea, so it cannot have disrupted anything on the South Konkan coast. With statement (a) wrong on its date and statement (b) wrong on its whole track, neither can be accepted, and the only option that says so is option (4).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Statement (a) alone cannot be accepted, because the year printed in it is wrong. Sagar was a May 2018 storm — it formed on 16 May 2018 and dissipated over Ethiopia and Somaliland a few days later — so a candidate who nominates this option is accepting a sentence that misdates the event by a full year. The Arabian Sea half of the sentence is the part that makes the trap work: Sagar did form in waters the India Meteorological Department counts within its Arabian Sea area of responsibility, so the sentence sounds broadly familiar and the eye slides past the date. The habit worth building is to treat a compound statement as a chain: it is correct only if every link is correct, and a single wrong year, figure or district breaks it. Here the year breaks it, and the statement is simply incorrect.  (b) Statement (b) alone is wrong, and it is wrong about the one thing the statement is entirely made of. Sagar moved westward down the Gulf of Aden and struck the Horn of Africa; it did not travel east towards India, and no part of the Maharashtra or Goa coastline felt it. Candidates pick this option because the Konkan coast genuinely has been hit by Arabian Sea cyclones in recent years and the memory of that damage attaches itself to whichever cyclone name is put in front of them. The storms that actually did the damage were different ones: Nisarga, which made landfall near Alibag in Raigad district on 3 June 2020, and Tauktae, which tracked northwards past the Konkan in May 2021 before crossing the Gujarat coast. Attaching the right event to the wrong name is the commonest way this family of questions is lost.  (c) This option asks the candidate to accept both statements at once, and since each of them fails on its own it cannot stand. It is worth seeing why this option is offered at all: in a two-statement question the four choices exhaust the possibilities — only the first is true, only the second is true, both are true, neither is true — so the setter is forced to print an all-correct row whatever the facts happen to be. Its presence is therefore no evidence of anything. The way to handle the layout is to settle each statement independently, writing a tick or a cross beside it before looking at the options at all, and then to read off the row that matches the two marks. Here both marks are crosses, so this option is eliminated the moment the second statement is judged.

Concept: Tropical cyclones in the North Indian Ocean are tracked and named by the India Meteorological Department in its role as the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre for the basin, and the names are drawn from a list contributed by the member countries of the WMO and ESCAP panel that covers the region. Because a single list serves both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a name gives no clue at all to where a storm formed or where it went, which is exactly what a question of this kind exploits. Sagar belongs to the small class of storms that form in the far west of the basin. The Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast normally see very few cyclones, because the summer monsoon flow and the cold upwelling along the Somali coast suppress them; that rarity is why Sagar and, two years later, Gati were noted as records for landfall in Somalia. The Arabian Sea has nonetheless become more productive of severe storms in recent years, and the ones that matter to Maharashtra are those that recurve north-eastwards or run north along the Konkan, of which Nisarga in June 2020 and Tauktae in May 2021 are the recent examples. For a candidate the practical unit of knowledge is a four-part label for every named storm worth remembering: the year, the basin, the coast it struck and the damage it did.

State PCS 2022 Q1 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q1 — Geography PYQ with Answer