Which of the following is proposed as third new district of Goa by Chief Minister of Goa ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), Kushavati. Goa has had two districts since it became a State, North Goa and South Goa, and at the end of 2025 the Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, announced that a third district would be carved out of South Goa and named Kushavati, after the ancient river that runs through the region. The proposed district is to be made up of four talukas presently in South Goa — Dharbandora, Quepem, Sanguem and Canacona — with the town of Quepem as its headquarters, and administration was to continue from South Goa until the new district's own offices were ready. The option list is the whole point of this question, and it is unusually well built. Three of the four choices — Cana Cona, Dharbandora and Sanguem — are talukas that will go into the new district. They are its constituents, not its name. The fourth taluka, Quepem, which is to be the headquarters, is not offered at all. So a candidate who has read only that 'the new Goa district will include Sanguem and Canacona' has exactly the wrong information to answer with, and will pick a component in place of the name. The name itself is the discriminator, and it comes from a different category altogether: Kushavati is a river, not a taluka. That is a common convention in Indian district naming — new districts are frequently named after a river, a hill or a historical site rather than after their largest town, precisely so that no constituent taluka appears to have been favoured over the others. If you recognise that the question is asking for a name and that three of the four options are places inside the unit being named, the reasoning finishes itself. One point of administrative law is worth attaching here, because it is often examined alongside: creating a new district inside a State is a decision of the State government under State law. It needs no Act of Parliament and no constitutional amendment, unlike the creation of a new State, which Parliament does under Articles 2 and 3.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Canacona is one of the four South Goa talukas being placed in the new district, not the district's name. It lies at Goa's southern end, adjoining Karnataka, and is best known for its beaches and for the Cotigao wildlife sanctuary. Picking it means naming the whole after one of its parts.  (c) Dharbandora is likewise a constituent taluka of the proposed district — one of Goa's more recently constituted talukas, in the interior of South Goa. It is a plausible-looking answer for a candidate who remembers the news item as a list of unfamiliar Goan place names and picks the least familiar of them, but the announcement named the district after a river, not after any taluka.  (d) Sanguem is the largest of the talukas going into the new district by area, and it is the taluka through which the Kushavati river itself flows — the prehistoric rock engravings at Usgalimal stand on that river's bank in Sanguem. That makes it the most tempting wrong answer of the three, because it is genuinely connected to the name. But the district is named for the river, not for the taluka the river passes through.

Concept: Goa is India's smallest State by area. It was under Portuguese rule until December 1961, then administered as the Union Territory of Goa, Daman and Diu, and became a full State in 1987 with Panaji as its capital, Daman and Diu remaining a separate Union Territory. Its administrative division has been unusually stable: two districts, North Goa with its headquarters at Panaji and South Goa with its headquarters at Margao, subdivided into talukas. A third district would be the first change to that structure since statehood. The proposal takes four talukas out of South Goa — Dharbandora, Quepem, Sanguem and Canacona — which are the State's interior and southern talukas, less urbanised and less served than the coastal belt, and the stated intention was that the new district would also be treated as an aspirational district for the purpose of central funding.

State PCS 2026 Q91 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q91 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer