In which district is the Hetwane major irrigation scheme located ?

Question

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Correct — option (4), Raigad. The Hetwane (Hetawane) scheme is a Konkan project: the dam stands near Pen, in the Raigad district of Maharashtra, and it was completed around the turn of the 2000s. It is an earthfill dam of moderate height across a short west-flowing stream, and it does two jobs at once, which is why it is worth remembering. It irrigates farmland in the Pen and Alibag tract, where the command is small by the standards of the Deccan schemes because the Konkan strip itself is narrow and broken; and it supplies drinking and industrial water to the fast-growing urban and industrial belt of Navi Mumbai and the neighbouring parts of Raigad, a demand that has grown steadily as the district has industrialised. That dual purpose is characteristic of Konkan reservoirs generally: the rivers here are short and steep, rising in the Sahyadri and reaching the Arabian Sea within a hundred kilometres or less, so their reservoirs are small relative to the Godavari or Krishna schemes but sit close to a heavily populated, water-hungry coast. Raigad itself is the district immediately south of Mumbai and Thane, with its headquarters at Alibag and Pen among its northern talukas; it is also the district of the Raigad fort, Shivaji's capital, from which the district took its present name, and of the port at Nhava Sheva in Uran. Locating Hetwane therefore involves nothing more than recognising it as a Konkan name and then choosing the Konkan district in the option list — which is precisely what the other three options are designed to prevent.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Sindhudurg is the correct region but the wrong district. It is the southernmost district of the Konkan, formed in 1981 out of the old Ratnagiri district and bordering Goa, and it shares Raigad's physical character of short, swift, west-flowing rivers and narrow valleys — which is what makes it a well-chosen distractor for a Konkan project. But it lies some three hundred kilometres down the coast from Pen, and its irrigation works serve the Malvan, Kudal and Sawantwadi tract in the far south, not the Pen and Alibag hinterland of Mumbai.  (b) Satara lies on the other side of the Sahyadri, in the upper Krishna basin of western Maharashtra, and its water story is a completely different one. The district's famous work is the Koyna dam in Patan taluka, built primarily for hydroelectric power with its reservoir Shivsagar, and its other schemes serve the Krishna and its tributaries flowing east across the Deccan. A candidate placing Hetwane here has not registered that a project of this kind belongs to a coastal district feeding a coastal command, not to a plateau district in an east-flowing basin.  (c) Beed is in Marathwada, well inland on the Deccan plateau within the Godavari basin, and is one of the most drought-prone districts of the state. Its irrigation depends on the Godavari valley schemes and on scarce, erratic rainfall, and it has no physical connection with the short Sahyadri-to-Arabian-Sea streams on which the Hetwane dam is built. It is included in the option list to test whether the candidate can place a project by region rather than merely recognise a district name, and it is the easiest of the three to eliminate once the scheme is identified as a Konkan one.

Concept: Maharashtra's irrigation geography divides along the Sahyadri. West of the crest lies the Konkan, where the rivers — the Ulhas, Amba, Kundalika, Savitri, Vashishthi and their neighbours — are short, steep and heavily fed by monsoon rain, so reservoirs fill quickly but command small, fragmented areas of level land, and their water is increasingly diverted to urban and industrial supply for the Mumbai-Navi Mumbai-Raigad belt. East of the crest lie the Godavari, Bhima and Krishna basins, where long east-flowing rivers cross a rain-shadow plateau; here the schemes are larger, the commands broader and the purpose overwhelmingly agricultural, and the political questions are about equity between upstream and downstream users and about inter-state allocation. The Hetwane project belongs squarely to the first group, and recognising which side of the Ghats a scheme sits on settles most questions about its size, purpose and command.

State PCS 2024 Q19 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q19 — Geography PYQ with Answer