Which of the following pairs (National Park – State/Union Territory) is not correctly matched ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Pin Valley – Jammu and Kashmir. Pin Valley National Park is in Himachal Pradesh, not in Jammu and Kashmir. It occupies the valley of the Pin river, a tributary of the Spiti, in the Lahaul and Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh, and was declared a national park in 1987. This is cold-desert country on the Tibetan side of the main Himalayan range — high, dry, treeless and snowbound for much of the year — and the park is protected chiefly as snow-leopard habitat, along with its prey species, the Siberian ibex and the blue sheep, and animals such as the Himalayan wolf and the red fox. Jammu and Kashmir's own national parks are a different set — Dachigam, above Srinagar, the last stronghold of the hangul or Kashmir stag, Kishtwar High Altitude, Kazinag and City Forest (Salim Ali). The park students most often confuse with Pin Valley is Hemis, the other great snow-leopard reserve — and Hemis is in Ladakh, which has been a separate Union Territory since 31 October 2019, so it does not belong to Jammu and Kashmir either. The remaining three pairs are all correct: Rajaji is in Uttarakhand, Bandipur in Karnataka and Simlipal in Odisha. Hence (b) is the pair that is not correctly matched.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Correctly matched, so it cannot be the answer. Rajaji National Park spreads across the Shivalik foothills in the Haridwar, Dehradun and Pauri Garhwal districts of Uttarakhand. It was created in 1983 by merging the Rajaji, Motichur and Chilla sanctuaries, is named after C. Rajagopalachari, and was declared a tiger reserve in 2015.  (c) Correctly matched. Bandipur lies in Chamarajanagar district in southern Karnataka, on the Mysuru–Ooty road, and was among the first nine reserves brought under Project Tiger in 1973. It forms part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve and is contiguous with Nagarhole in Karnataka, Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu and Wayanad in Kerala.  (d) Correctly matched. Simlipal is in Mayurbhanj district in northern Odisha; it too was among the original Project Tiger reserves of 1973, is a biosphere reserve, and is the only place in the world with a breeding population of melanistic — near-black — tigers.

Concept: The national parks that examiners return to are the ones that stand for a distinctive habitat or a flagship species, and Pin Valley stands for the Indian cold desert. The trans-Himalayan tracts of Spiti, Lahaul and Ladakh lie in the rain shadow of the great Himalayan wall: rainfall is a few centimetres a year, there are no trees, and the vegetation is a sparse cover of cushion plants and hardy shrubs on bare mountainsides. That is snow-leopard country, and India protects it through Pin Valley and the Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh, Hemis in Ladakh, Nanda Devi and Gangotri in Uttarakhand, and Kishtwar High Altitude in Jammu and Kashmir.

State PCS 2024 Q31 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q31 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer