Match the following forest circles with their share in percentage to total forest area of Maharashtra.
(Forest circles of Maharashtra)
(a) Gadchiroli
(b) Nagpur
(c) Dhule
(d) Thane
(Percentage to tota

Question

Match the following forest circles with their share in percentage to total forest area of Maharashtra.
(Forest circles of Maharashtra)
(a) Gadchiroli
(b) Nagpur
(c) Dhule
(d) Thane
(Percentage to total forest area Economic survey of Maharashtra (2024))
(i) 12.5
(ii) 20.8
(iii) 9.5
(iv) 10.4

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1): Gadchiroli 20.8 per cent, Nagpur 12.5, Dhule 10.4 and Thane 9.5, the shares reported in the Economic Survey of Maharashtra for 2024, which the stem itself cites as its source. A candidate who has not memorised four percentages can still answer this, and the route matters more than the figures. Only one of the four values is much larger than the rest, and only one of the four circles is an obvious candidate for it: Gadchiroli. The district is the most heavily forested part of Maharashtra, lying in the far east of Vidarbha where the teak-bearing dry deciduous forest runs unbroken across the Chhattisgarh border, and its circle taking a fifth of the state's entire forest area is exactly what the map predicts. Assign the largest share to Gadchiroli and only one printed option survives — option (1) is the only one containing (a)-(ii), the other three sending Gadchiroli to 10.4, to 9.5 and to 12.5 respectively. That single ordinal judgment, largest forest circle gets largest share, decides the whole item without a percentage being recalled. There is a second structural clue worth noticing once the item is solved. The left-hand column is printed in descending order of share — Gadchiroli, then Nagpur, then Dhule, then Thane, that is 20.8, 12.5, 10.4, 9.5 — so the correct mapping assigns the four values in strictly decreasing order down the column. That is not a rule to rely on blindly, because a setter can print the column in any order, but where it holds it converts a numerical matching item into an ordering one. Note also the arithmetic: these four circles together account for a little over half the state's forest area, so several other circles carry the remainder.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Keeps Nagpur at 12.5, which is right, and then rotates the other three, giving Gadchiroli 10.4, Dhule 9.5 and Thane the largest share at 20.8. The last of those is what retires it. Thane circle covers the northern Konkan, a densely settled and heavily urbanised belt on a narrow coastal strip; it cannot plausibly hold a fifth of Maharashtra's entire forest area when Gadchiroli, the least populated and most thickly wooded district in the state, is standing in the same column. Testing the largest value against the most obviously forested unit is the single check that disposes of this option and of two others.  (c) Gives Gadchiroli the smallest share of the four, 9.5, and the largest to Nagpur. Nagpur circle is genuinely a major forest region — the eastern Vidarbha belt as a whole carries the bulk of Maharashtra's forest — so the option is not absurd, and a candidate who knows only that 'Vidarbha has the forests' may accept it. What separates the two is that Nagpur is a large urban and administrative centre whose surrounding districts are substantially cultivated, while Gadchiroli is the state's least disturbed forest tract. Ranking within a region, and not merely identifying the region, is what this option is testing.  (d) Assigns the largest share, 20.8, to Dhule, and gives Gadchiroli 12.5 and Nagpur 9.5. Dhule lies in the north-western part of the state, in the Khandesh plain and the Satpura foothills, and while it carries genuine forest it is not remotely the state's largest forest circle. The option also demotes both of the eastern Vidarbha circles below a north-western one, which inverts the basic pattern of Maharashtra's forest map: forest cover rises sharply towards the east and along the Sahyadri crest, and falls across the cultivated interior plateau. One glance at that pattern is enough.

Concept: Maharashtra's forests are distributed in two arcs with a cultivated interior between them. The eastern arc, in Vidarbha, is much the larger: Gadchiroli, Chandrapur, Gondia and Bhandara carry teak-bearing dry deciduous forest that continues into Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, and this belt holds most of the state's timber, most of its tiger habitat and most of its tribal population. The western arc runs along the Sahyadri crest and down its seaward face, where higher rainfall produces moist deciduous and patches of semi-evergreen forest, and where the Western Ghats are recognised as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Between them the Deccan plateau districts, long cultivated and comparatively dry, carry relatively little. The forest department administers this territory through territorial forest circles, which are administrative units rather than ecological ones, and the Economic Survey of Maharashtra reports their shares of the state's forest area each year — which is the table this question is quarried from. It is worth keeping two measures distinct: recorded forest area, which is a legal and administrative category, and forest cover as measured from satellite imagery in the Forest Survey of India's biennial report, which counts trees on the ground regardless of legal status.

State PCS 2026 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q18 — Geography PYQ with Answer