Coal is found at which of the following place in Chandrapur district ?
(a) Bandar
(b) Ghoggus
(c) Telwasa
(d) Wani
Answer options :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), (a), (b) and (c): Bandar, Ghoggus and Telwasa. The item that decides the question is the one left out, (d) Wani. Wani is a well-known coal town — it is called the black diamond town for exactly that reason, and Western Coalfields Limited even names two of its mining areas after it — but Wani taluka lies in Yavatmal district, not in Chandrapur. Since the stem asks specifically about places in Chandrapur district, every option containing Wani is out, which removes option (4) at a stroke. That leaves three candidates, and the other two are ruled out by the same kind of check. Option (2) claims that Bandar alone carries coal, and option (3) that Ghoggus alone does; both collapse as soon as more than one of the three named places is shown to be a coal locality of the district. Ghoggus — Ghugus, a mining village in Chandrapur tehsil about twenty kilometres from Chandrapur town — has long-worked collieries yielding a good grade of non-coking coal. Telwasa is the site of an opencast mine operated by Western Coalfields Limited in Bhadravati tehsil of the same district. With both of those established, neither single-place option can stand, and option (1) is the only choice left; the paper's option list itself therefore requires Bandar to be read as the third Chandrapur coal locality. All three sit within the Wardha Valley coalfield, which lies mainly in Chandrapur district and is the source of most of Maharashtra's coal. The wider point the question is testing is that Maharashtra's coal is not spread across the state at all: it is confined to the Wardha valley belt of eastern Vidarbha, and knowing which district a named colliery falls in is exactly the kind of local geography MPSC expects a Maharashtra candidate to hold.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This restricts the district's coal to Bandar alone, which cannot be right because Ghugus and Telwasa are both established coal-mining localities within Chandrapur district — Ghugus a long-worked colliery village in Chandrapur tehsil, Telwasa an opencast working of Western Coalfields Limited in Bhadravati tehsil. An 'only one' option on a question of this shape is almost always testing whether the candidate can name a second instance, and here two further instances are available. The option is attractive only to someone who recognises one name on the list and none of the others.  (c) This restricts the answer to Ghoggus alone. Ghugus is genuinely a coal locality of Chandrapur district, so the option starts from a true fact, which makes it more dangerous than option (2) — a candidate who has heard of Ghugus and of nothing else on the list will feel confirmed by it. But Telwasa is equally a coal working in the same district, in Bhadravati tehsil, so the district's coal is not confined to Ghugus and the exclusive claim fails. Recognising one correct name is not the same as verifying that the others are wrong.  (d) This is the trap option, because it pairs two genuine Chandrapur localities, Ghoggus and Telwasa, with Wani — and Wani is the name a candidate is most likely to associate with coal, since it is a major mining town and lends its name to two of Western Coalfields Limited's administrative areas. The catch is district: Wani taluka belongs to Yavatmal district, not Chandrapur. The stem is specific about the district, so a coal town in the neighbouring district is a wrong answer no matter how important it is, and this option is set precisely to punish a candidate who checks the commodity but not the administrative boundary.

Concept: Maharashtra's coal is confined to the eastern edge of the state, in the Vidarbha districts, and it belongs to the Gondwana coal measures that supply almost all of India's mineable coal. The principal field is the Wardha Valley coalfield, which lies mainly in Chandrapur district and extends into the neighbouring districts of Yavatmal and Wardha, with a separate smaller field, the Kamptee coalfield, in Nagpur district. Chandrapur is accordingly the state's coal district in the way that Dhanbad is Jharkhand's: mining is worked there by Western Coalfields Limited, a subsidiary of Coal India, through a set of administrative areas each named after a locality, and the coal supports a heavy concentration of thermal power generation and cement manufacture in and around the district. Gondwana coal of this kind is mostly non-coking and of moderate grade, which is why it is used principally for power generation rather than for metallurgy, and the location of the state's large coal-fired power stations in eastern Vidarbha follows directly from the location of the field — it is cheaper to move electricity than to move low-grade coal.

State PCS 2024 Q30 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q30 — Geography PYQ with Answer