Which of the following archaeological sites related to Indus Valley civilization are situated in present day Uttar Pradesh ?
1. Mandi
2. Rakhigarhi
3. Hulas
Select the correct answer from the code giv

Question

Which of the following archaeological sites related to Indus Valley civilization are situated in present day Uttar Pradesh ?
1. Mandi
2. Rakhigarhi
3. Hulas
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 1 and 3. Two of the three named sites lie in Uttar Pradesh and one does not. Mandi is a Harappan-period site in Muzaffarnagar district of western Uttar Pradesh; it became famous in 2000 when a very large hoard of gold and silver ornaments of the Harappan period was recovered there. Hulas is a Late Harappan settlement in Saharanpur district, also in western Uttar Pradesh, excavated in the 1970s-80s and known for evidence of cereal and pulse cultivation. Rakhigarhi, by contrast, is not in Uttar Pradesh at all — it sits in Hisar district of HARYANA, on the dried Ghaggar plain, and is the largest Harappan site so far identified inside India. So statements 1 and 3 are the Uttar Pradesh sites, which is exactly option (b). The whole question turns on knowing that Rakhigarhi is Haryana's site, not UP's.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This pairs Mandi (correctly, Muzaffarnagar, UP) with Rakhigarhi, which is in Hisar district of Haryana and not in Uttar Pradesh. It also drops Hulas, which genuinely is a UP site in Saharanpur district. Rakhigarhi is the classic distractor here because it is the biggest and most talked-about Harappan site in India and is often listed alongside the western-UP sites in the same paragraph of a textbook.  (c) Hulas (Saharanpur, UP) is indeed a UP site, so this option is not wrong so much as incomplete. It discards Mandi, which is equally in Uttar Pradesh — Muzaffarnagar district, in the same upper-Doab cluster. A single-site answer cannot be right when two of the three listed sites are in the State.  (d) Mandi is correctly a UP site, but this option leaves out Hulas, which is also in Uttar Pradesh (Saharanpur district). Like option (c), it is a half-answer: it identifies one of the two UP sites and misses the other.

Concept: The Indus (Harappan) Civilization spread far beyond Sindh and Punjab. Its eastern frontier ran into the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, so a small but real cluster of Harappan and Late Harappan settlements lies in western Uttar Pradesh — mainly in Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Baghpat districts. Alamgirpur in Meerut district, on the Hindon river, is conventionally taught as the eastern-most Harappan site. Because these UP sites belong mostly to the Late Harappan phase, they are small farming settlements rather than the great planned cities, which is why students remember the city names (Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, Lothal) and forget the UP ones.

State PCS 2025 Q101 — History PYQ with Answer

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