Cross border oil pipeline inaugurated by P.M. Modi in September 2019 connects which of the following cities ?

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Correct — A, Motihari and Amlekhganj. On 10 September 2019 — three months before this paper was set — Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nepal's Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli jointly inaugurated the Motihari-Amlekhganj petroleum products pipeline by video conference. It runs about 69 kilometres from the Indian Oil Corporation's terminal at Motihari in East Champaran district of Bihar to the Nepal Oil Corporation's depot at Amlekhganj, a fuel-depot town in Nepal's Terai, with a designed capacity of 2 million metric tonnes a year. It is South Asia's first cross-border petroleum products pipeline, and it replaced a road-tanker supply arrangement that had been running since 1973; Nepal Oil Corporation expected savings of roughly 2 billion Nepalese rupees a year in transport costs. The project was first proposed in 1996, an IOC-NOC agreement followed in 2004 and the execution agreement was signed in August 2015, after which work was slowed by the 2015 Nepal earthquake before being completed ahead of schedule.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Nepali end is right but the Indian end is wrong. Darbhanga is a city in the Mithila region of north Bihar with no role in this project; the Indian terminal of the pipeline is Indian Oil's installation at Motihari in East Champaran district, which is far closer to the Nepal border.  (c) The Indian end is right but the Nepali end is wrong. The pipeline terminates at Amlekhganj in the Terai plains, where Nepal Oil Corporation's depot is located; it does not run up into the hills to Kathmandu. Extending the line deeper into Nepal was envisaged as a later phase, but the line inaugurated in September 2019 ended at Amlekhganj.  (d) Option (a) states the pair exactly, so 'None of these' cannot be right. In a current-affairs question of this kind, 'None of these' is a fallback that only works if every named pairing is defective.

Concept: Nepal is landlocked and has no oil refinery of its own, so every litre of petrol, diesel and kerosene it consumes is imported from India, historically by road tanker through the Terai border points. A dedicated pipeline changes that logistics chain: it removes thousands of tanker journeys, cuts transit loss and pilferage, lowers freight cost and insulates supply from the road blockades and landslides that periodically disrupt the border. That is why the Motihari-Amlekhganj line is treated as a landmark of India's 'Neighbourhood First' policy rather than as a routine engineering project — it is the first petroleum products pipeline anywhere in South Asia to cross an international border.

State PCS 2019 Q149 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q149 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer