Match the following.
List - I
(Districts)
(a) Thane
(b) Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
(c) Pune
(d) Nandurbar
List - II
(2001-2011 decadal growth in population (%))
(i) 25.50
(ii) 30.4
(iii) 27.33
(iv) 35.

Question

Match the following.
List - I
(Districts)
(a) Thane
(b) Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
(c) Pune
(d) Nandurbar
List - II
(2001-2011 decadal growth in population (%))
(i) 25.50
(ii) 30.4
(iii) 27.33
(iv) 35.94

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), '(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i)'. The four figures in List-II are a strictly decreasing set — 35.94, 30.4, 27.33, 25.50 — so the question is not really about decimals at all. It asks the candidate to rank four districts by how fast their population grew between the Censuses of 2001 and 2011, and then to read the ranking off the list. The ranking is Thane first, Pune second, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar third and Nandurbar fourth, which assigns Thane item (iv), Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar item (iii), Pune item (ii) and Nandurbar item (i) — precisely option (2). The reasoning behind the ranking is migration. Thane recorded the fastest decadal growth of any district in Maharashtra in that decade, because it absorbed the outward spread of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region: Kalyan-Dombivli, Mira-Bhayandar, Vasai-Virar, Ulhasnagar and Navi Mumbai all lay within the undivided Thane district of 2011, and the housing that Mumbai City could no longer supply was built there. Pune comes next, pulled by its information technology and automobile industries and by the Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial belt. Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, then Aurangabad, is Marathwada's industrial and administrative anchor and grew fast for its region but not at metropolitan rates. Nandurbar, a predominantly tribal district in the far north-west, has no comparable in-migration; its growth comes from natural increase, and it is a district people leave rather than one they arrive in. One number is worth holding beside these: Maharashtra as a whole grew by 15.99 per cent in the same decade. Every one of the four districts here is well above the state average, so 'lowest of the four' does not mean slow — the state contains districts that actually lost population over the decade, Mumbai City, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg among them. Anchor on Thane taking the highest value and three of the four options fall immediately.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gives Thane the lowest figure of the four, 25.50, and hands the highest, 35.94, to Pune. That inverts the decade's most conspicuous demographic fact: the growth of Thane district was driven by the spillover of Mumbai's population into Kalyan-Dombivli, Mira-Bhayandar, Vasai-Virar and Navi Mumbai, all of which were inside the undivided Thane district at the 2011 Census. It also places Nandurbar, a district of net out-migration, above Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar.  (c) Puts Pune first at 35.94 and Thane second at 30.4 — the right two districts at the top but in the wrong order — and then compounds it by ranking Nandurbar above Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. This is the most attractive of the wrong options because a candidate who knows only that 'Pune and Thane grew fastest' will find it consistent with that memory. Separating the two requires the specific fact that Thane, not Pune, led every district in the state.  (d) Assigns the highest growth to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and the lowest to Pune, which reverses the metropolitan pull that drives the whole ranking, and makes Nandurbar the second-fastest growing of the four at 30.4. Nothing in the demography of the decade supports a Marathwada district outgrowing both Mumbai's suburban belt and the Pune-Pimpri industrial region, and a candidate who checks the single anchor — that Thane took the highest figure — rejects this option without needing to know any other pairing.

Concept: Decadal growth of population is the percentage change between two successive censuses, and it is made of exactly two things: natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and net migration, which is in-migrants minus out-migrants. A district's growth rate cannot be read as a statement about its fertility, because migration usually dominates at the district level even where it barely matters at the state level. That is why an industrial or metropolitan district can grow at twice the state rate while its own birth rate is falling, and why a poor district with high fertility can grow slowly, or even lose population, if enough working-age people leave. Maharashtra's 2001-2011 map shows both mechanisms at once: the fastest growth in the districts around Mumbai and Pune, where migration piles on top of natural increase; moderate growth in regional centres; and outright decline in Mumbai City, whose old wards were emptying as households moved outward, and in Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, the Konkan districts with the longest tradition of out-migration to Mumbai.

State PCS 2026 Q27 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q27 — Geography PYQ with Answer