Which of the following Wildlife Sanctuaries of U.P. was established in 1975 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Katarniaghat. Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary lies in the Terai of Bahraich district, on the Indo-Nepal border, and covers 400.6 sq km. The standard reference date for its notification is 1975, and that is the year the commission's paper is working from. One honest caution for a student: the year is not perfectly stable across sources — the widely used encyclopaedic entry states plainly that it was established in 1975, while some State forest listings put Katarniaghat at 1976. The key marks Katarniaghat, and no other option is close to the mid-1970s, so the item is safe even if you carry the 1975/1976 wobble in your notes. What is not in doubt is the rest of its profile: Katarniaghat was brought under Project Tiger in 1987 and, together with Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary and Dudhwa National Park, it forms the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary, 227 sq km in Lakhimpur Kheri district, is recorded as founded in 1972 — three years earlier than the date the question asks for. It is the sharpest distractor because Kishanpur is Katarniaghat's partner in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, so the two are always studied together and their dates get swapped.  (c) The National Chambal Sanctuary was first declared in 1978, with the portions in the three States it spans — Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — notified between December 1978 and December 1979. It is therefore later than 1975, and it is also not a purely UP sanctuary: it is a tri-State protected area along the Chambal, created for the gharial, the red-crowned roof turtle and the Ganges river dolphin.  (d) No wildlife sanctuary of this name appears in the standard lists of Uttar Pradesh's protected areas; the nearest name in UP is the Ranipur Sanctuary in the Banda–Chitrakoot area of Bundelkhand, which is a different place with a different history. Whatever the printed name is meant to be, it is not the sanctuary the official key marks.

Concept: Uttar Pradesh has one national park — Dudhwa, notified in January 1977 in Lakhimpur Kheri — and about twenty-five wildlife sanctuaries. The set that examiners come back to is the Terai cluster along the Nepal border, because it is the State's tiger landscape. Dudhwa National Park, Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary (Lakhimpur Kheri) and Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary (Bahraich) were combined into the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, Katarniaghat itself having come under Project Tiger in 1987. Away from the Terai, UP's other well-known protected areas are the National Chambal Sanctuary on the Agra–Etawah stretch of the Chambal, Chandraprabha Wildlife Sanctuary in Chandauli in the Vindhyan south, and Ranipur in Bundelkhand.

State PCS 2022 Q2 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q2 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer