Find the correct pair :
Dams/Projects
(a) Tehri Dam
(b) Dulhasti Project
(c) Shivasamudra Dam
(d) Rana Pratap Sagar Project
Rivers
(i) Kaveri
(ii) Bhagirathi
(iii) Chambal
(iv) Chenab
States
(I) Jammu

Question

Find the correct pair :
Dams/Projects
(a) Tehri Dam
(b) Dulhasti Project
(c) Shivasamudra Dam
(d) Rana Pratap Sagar Project
Rivers
(i) Kaveri
(ii) Bhagirathi
(iii) Chambal
(iv) Chenab
States
(I) Jammu & Kashmir
(II) Rajasthan
(III) Uttarakhand
(IV) Karnataka

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1). This question is built differently from the other matching items in the paper. Three lists are printed side by side — four dams or projects labelled (a) to (d), four rivers labelled (i) to (iv) and four states labelled (I) to (IV) — but each option offers a single triple rather than a complete four-row grid, and the instruction is to find the one pair, or rather the one combination, that is correct. So the task is not to match all twelve items but to test four triples and keep the one that survives. Option (1) offers Shivasamudra Dam with the Kaveri in Karnataka, and all three parts hold. Shivanasamudra is the island in the Kaveri in Mandya district of Karnataka around which the river divides and falls in the two cascades known as Gaganachukki and Bharachukki, and the hydroelectric station built at the falls and commissioned in 1902 was among the first in Asia, its power being carried more than a hundred kilometres to the Kolar Gold Fields. River and state therefore belong to the dam, and the triple is sound. The correct arrangement of the whole question, which is worth working out because it explains the other three options, is Tehri on the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand, Dulhasti on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir, Shivasamudra on the Kaveri in Karnataka, and Rana Pratap Sagar on the Chambal in Rajasthan. Note the trap in how the wrong options are built: in each of them the river and the state genuinely belong together, and only the dam has been changed. Checking the river against the state will therefore tell you nothing, and the test has to be made against the dam.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This triple offers Tehri Dam with the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir, and the river and state are indeed a genuine pair — but they are Dulhasti's pair, not Tehri's. The Tehri Dam stands on the Bhagirathi at Tehri in Uttarakhand, is the tallest dam in India at about two hundred and sixty metres, and impounds the river that joins the Alaknanda at Devprayag to become the Ganga. The option works precisely because its second and third elements are consistent with each other, so a candidate who checks only whether the Chenab flows in Jammu and Kashmir will find nothing wrong and will mark it. The rule this teaches is that in a three-column item the element to test is the one that fixes the other two — here the dam — and that internal consistency between two elements of a triple is not evidence that the third belongs with them.  (c) This triple offers Rana Pratap Sagar with the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand, again pairing a river and a state that do belong together while attaching them to the wrong project. The Bhagirathi and Uttarakhand are Tehri's. Rana Pratap Sagar is on the Chambal at Rawatbhata in Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan and belongs to the Chambal Valley Project, the joint undertaking of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh whose other works are the Gandhi Sagar dam upstream and the Jawahar Sagar dam and Kota barrage downstream. The Chambal itself rises in the Vindhyan hills of Madhya Pradesh and flows north-east to join the Yamuna, so it never comes near Uttarakhand. A candidate who has learnt the Chambal Valley Project as a group will reject this triple on the name alone.  (d) This triple offers the Dulhasti Project with the Chambal in Rajasthan, and it repeats the pattern of the other two wrong options: the river and the state are a true pair, but they belong to Rana Pratap Sagar. Dulhasti is a hydroelectric project on the Chenab in Kishtwar district of Jammu and Kashmir, built by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and rated at three hundred and ninety megawatts, and it belongs with the other Chenab valley schemes such as Salal and Baglihar rather than with the Chambal works of Rajasthan. Dulhasti is the least familiar of the four names in the first column, and unfamiliarity is what the option relies on: a candidate who cannot place the project will judge the triple by whether the Chambal is a Rajasthan river, which it partly is, and will be caught.

Concept: River valley projects are best learnt as triples of dam, river and state, because that is the unit in which they are examined, and a small number of them recur constantly. On the Himalayan rivers, Tehri stands on the Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand and is the tallest dam in the country; Bhakra Nangal is on the Sutlej between Himachal Pradesh and Punjab; Salal, Baglihar and Dulhasti are on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir; and Pong and Pandoh are on the Beas. In the peninsula, Shivanasamudra on the Kaveri in Karnataka carries the country's earliest hydroelectric station, of 1902, and Krishnarajasagar is on the same river upstream; Nagarjunasagar and Srisailam are on the Krishna; Hirakud is on the Mahanadi in Odisha and is among the longest dams in the world; Sardar Sarovar is on the Narmada in Gujarat; and Koyna, Jayakwadi on the Godavari and Ujani on the Bhima are the principal works in Maharashtra. In central India the Chambal Valley Project links Gandhi Sagar, Rana Pratap Sagar, Jawahar Sagar and the Kota barrage across Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Learning them as triples has a second advantage: it makes visible the multipurpose character of the projects, since almost all of them combine irrigation, power generation, flood moderation and water supply, which is the theme the descriptive questions are set on.

State PCS 2022 Q13 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q13 — Geography PYQ with Answer