Which of the following pairs is/are correctly matched ?
(Coal Producing Area) - (State)
1. Maolong - Arunachal Pradesh
2. Raniganj - West Bengal
3. Ramgarh - Jharkhand
4. Talcher - Odisha
Select the c

Question

Which of the following pairs is/are correctly matched ?
(Coal Producing Area) - (State)
1. Maolong - Arunachal Pradesh
2. Raniganj - West Bengal
3. Ramgarh - Jharkhand
4. Talcher - Odisha
Select the correct answer from the code given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 2, 3 and 4. Three of the four pairs hold. Raniganj is in Paschim Bardhaman district of West Bengal, on the western bank of the Damodar — this is where Indian commercial coal mining began in 1774 under John Sumner and Suetonius Grant Heatly of the East India Company. Ramgarh Coalfield lies in Ramgarh district of Jharkhand, in the same Damodar basin, and has been worked by Central Coalfields Limited since 1975. Talcher is in Angul district of Odisha, in the Mahanadi valley, and is mined by Mahanadi Coalfields Limited. Only pair 1 fails, and it fails on the State: Arunachal Pradesh's coal is the Namchik–Namphuk field of Changlang district, not 'Maolong' — Maolong (Mawlong) belongs to the Tertiary coal belt of the North-East's other coal state, Meghalaya. Drop pair 1 and you are left with 2, 3 and 4.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) It keeps the one pair that is wrong (Maolong is not an Arunachal Pradesh coalfield) and throws away two that are right — Ramgarh–Jharkhand and Talcher–Odisha are both standard, uncontested pairs.  (b) Right about Raniganj and Ramgarh, but it still carries the faulty Maolong–Arunachal Pradesh pair and drops Talcher–Odisha, which is correct: Talcher sits in the Mahanadi valley in Angul district of Odisha.  (d) The exact inversion of the truth. Pair 1 is the single pair that is NOT correctly matched, while the three it rejects are all sound.

Concept: About 99% of India's coal is Gondwana coal, laid down some 250 million years ago and preserved in a chain of ancient rift basins that today carry major rivers. That is why Indian coalfields are catalogued by river valley — Damodar (Raniganj, Jharia, Bokaro, Karanpura, Ramgarh, Giridih), Mahanadi (Talcher, Ib valley), Son (Singrauli), Godavari (Singareni). The North-East is the exception: its coal is much younger Tertiary coal, occurring in thin, high-sulphur seams in Meghalaya, Assam, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, and it is mined on a far smaller scale.

State PCS 2025 Q1 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q1 — Geography PYQ with Answer