With reference to the “Pirul Lao – Paise Pao” campaign, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. This is related to reduce forest fires and to provide a source of income to villagers.
2.

Question

With reference to the “Pirul Lao – Paise Pao” campaign, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. This is related to reduce forest fires and to provide a source of income to villagers.
2. The Chief Minister of Uttarakhand launched this campaign.
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Correct — D, Both 1 and 2. 'Pirul' is the local name in the Uttarakhand hills for the fallen needles of the chir pine, and the campaign's rhyming slogan — bring the pine needles, take the money — states its own logic. Statement 1 is therefore correct on both halves. Pine needles are resinous and burn easily, and the thick dry mat they form on the forest floor is the fuel that carries Uttarakhand's spring fires through chir forests; paying villagers to lift that mat removes fuel from the forest and puts cash into hill households at the same time. The rate announced was Rs 50 per kilogram, backed by a corpus of about Rs 50 crore, with the collection routed through the state Pollution Control Board and the payment credited online into the collector's own bank account so that the money does not leak on the way. Statement 2 is correct too: this was a Chief Minister's campaign, launched by Uttarakhand's Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on 8 May 2024, from Rudraprayag — that is, in the middle of the fire season, which is when the pine litter matters most. Both statements standing, the key marks (d). One point of spelling, since the paper is a booklet reproduction: the campaign is 'Pirul Lao – Paise Pao', and a typed version in circulation misspells it 'Piral'. The booklet's spelling is the correct one.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Drops statement 1, which is the campaign's whole design. It is not an income scheme that happens to involve forests, nor a fire-control scheme that happens to pay people — the two objectives are deliberately joined, because the pine needles that villagers are paid to collect are exactly the fuel load that feeds forest fires.  (b) Rejects both statements when both are correct. The campaign's purpose (cutting forest fires while giving hill villagers an income) and its author (the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Pushkar Singh Dhami, in May 2024) are both accurately stated in the question.  (c) Accepts the purpose but denies the launcher. 'Pirul Lao – Paise Pao' was launched by the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand from Rudraprayag on 8 May 2024; it is a state government campaign, not a central scheme and not a forest-department circular.

Concept: Chir pine, Pinus roxburghii, dominates a wide belt of the Uttarakhand Himalaya at roughly 1,000 to 2,000 metres, and it sheds long, resinous needles that build a dense, slow-rotting mat on the forest floor. That mat is the reason the state's fire season, running through the dry months before the monsoon, spreads so readily: the needles ignite easily and carry flame along the ground. They also suppress the undergrowth and seedlings that would otherwise regenerate the forest, which is part of why the spread of chir pine into ground once held by banj oak worries ecologists. 'Pirul Lao – Paise Pao' treats that litter as a resource rather than a nuisance — pine needles can be pressed into briquettes and pellets, fed to small gasifiers for power, composted or worked into handicrafts — and pays villagers to remove it.

State PCS 2024 Q86 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q86 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer