Observe the following statements :
(a) Jhelum is a tributary of River Indus and flows through Lake Wular.
(b) Sutlej is a southern tributary of River Indus.

Question

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Correct — option (3). Both printed statements hold, and each has to be tested on its own before the option row is chosen. Statement (a) makes two claims about the Jhelum and both are sound. The Jhelum rises at the Verinag spring at the foot of the Pir Panjal in the south-east of the Kashmir valley, flows north-westward past Srinagar, and passes through Wular Lake in the north of the valley, which is fed and drained by it and is a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention; it then cuts through the Pir Panjal in a gorge, enters the plains and joins the Chenab, whose combined waters reach the Indus. The Jhelum is therefore a tributary of the Indus in the ordinary sense in which every river of the Punjab is, and it does flow through Wular. Statement (b) makes the parallel claim for the Sutlej. The Sutlej rises in Tibet near Rakas Lake, close to the source region of the Indus itself, crosses into Himachal Pradesh at the Shipki La in an antecedent gorge, runs through the Punjab plain and, after receiving the Beas, joins the Chenab; the united stream, the Panjnad, meets the Indus far downstream. On the map of the whole system, the Sutlej and the other Punjab rivers approach the trunk from its southern and eastern, that is its left-bank, side, while the Shyok, Gilgit, Kabul, Kurram and Gomal come in from the north and west, so describing the Sutlej as a southern tributary of the Indus places it correctly within the system. Since neither statement contains an error, the row that accepts both is right and option (3) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option accepts the Jhelum statement and rejects the Sutlej statement, and the difficulty is that the two stand or fall together. Both rivers reach the Indus in exactly the same way — not directly, but through the Chenab and the united Panjnad — so a reading strict enough to deny the Sutlej the name of tributary would deny it to the Jhelum as well, and the candidate who chooses this row is applying two different standards to two identical cases. In the accepted usage of Indian geography all five rivers of the Punjab, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, are counted among the tributaries of the Indus, which is why the system carries the name it does and why the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 divides them as the eastern and western rivers of a single basin. Consistency between the two statements is the test to apply here.  (b) This option rejects the Jhelum statement, and the doubt that leads to it usually settles on the lake. Candidates remember Dal Lake as the famous water body of Srinagar and are unsure whether the Jhelum merely passes near Wular or actually flows through it. It flows through it: the Jhelum enters Wular in the north of the Kashmir valley and leaves it again, so the lake acts as a natural reservoir on the river's course and absorbs a part of its flood water, which is one reason the shrinking of the lake is treated as a flood-management problem for Srinagar. The other half of the statement, that the Jhelum is a tributary of the Indus, is not in doubt at all. With both halves sound, statement (a) cannot be the one to reject, and this row fails.  (d) This is the row that rejects both statements, and it is chosen by a candidate who has decided that a river joining the Chenab cannot be called a tributary of the Indus and has applied that decision to the Jhelum and the Sutlej alike. The reasoning is at least consistent, but it is not the usage the subject follows. A tributary need not meet the main stream directly; the Punjab rivers are tributaries of the Indus through the Panjnad in the same way that the Beas is a tributary of the Sutlej and the Chambal of the Yamuna, and standard treatments list the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej among the Indus tributaries without qualification. There is also nothing else in either statement to reject, so a row that discards both must be wrong.

Concept: The Indus system is best held as a trunk with two sets of tributaries. The Indus itself rises in Tibet near Lake Mansarovar, flows north-westwards through Ladakh between the Ladakh and Zaskar ranges, turns south-west after the Nanga Parbat massif and runs the length of Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. From the north and west it receives the Shyok, Nubra, Shigar, Gilgit and Hunza in the mountains and the Kabul, Kurram, Tochi and Gomal below them. From the east and south it receives the five rivers that give the Punjab its name. The Jhelum rises at Verinag, drains the Kashmir valley through Srinagar and Wular Lake and joins the Chenab; the Chenab, formed by the Chandra and Bhaga at Tandi in Himachal Pradesh, receives it and later the Ravi; the Beas, rising at the Rohtang Pass, joins the Sutlej at Harike; and the Sutlej, rising near Rakas Lake in Tibet and entering India at the Shipki La, joins the Chenab to form the Panjnad, which meets the Indus at Mithankot. Three of these rivers, the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi, are antecedent, having cut their gorges through the Himalaya as the mountains rose. The division of the basin under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 follows this geography: the eastern rivers, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, were allotted to India and the western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, to Pakistan, with limited non-consumptive uses reserved to India on the latter.

State PCS 2022 Q7 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q7 — Geography PYQ with Answer