SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 3 · General Awareness · Question 3 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which of the following is the main cause of land degradation in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh?

(a)Deforestation due to mining
(b)Overgrazing
(c)Intensive use of manure
(d)Over-irrigation

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh sit on India's mineral belt, and it is mining that strips the forest cover there.

The sequence is mechanical: trees are cleared for the pit, topsoil is dumped as overburden, and the abandoned pits and dumps no longer support vegetation.

NCERT's Class 10 geography chapter on resources names deforestation due to mining as the cause of severe land degradation in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, and this stem is lifted from that line.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Overgrazing — Overgrazing is the named cause in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra — dry states carrying large livestock numbers, not the forested mining belt.
(c)
Intensive use of manure — Manure is organic matter that improves soil structure. Excess chemical fertiliser and pesticide can degrade soil, but the stem's word is manure, and it is not this region's problem.
(d)
Over-irrigation — Over-irrigation brings waterlogging and rising salinity and alkalinity, which is the named problem of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — canal country, not coal country.

Concept

Land degradation is taught as a set of region-cause pairs, and the pairing is what SSC tests.

Mining belts lose land to deforestation and overburden. Dry pastoral states lose it to overgrazing. Canal-irrigated plains lose it to waterlogging and salinity.

The remedies follow the cause: afforestation and proper discharge of mining waste in the first case, control of grazing and stock in the second, better drainage and water management in the third.

The stem asks for the main cause, not the only one. Industrial effluent and mineral processing dust also degrade land in this belt, but the answer SSC wants is the one its textbook source names.

Key facts

Deforestation due to mining is the named cause of land degradation in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.
Overgrazing is the named cause in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Over-irrigation causes waterlogging, salinity and alkalinity in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
Mineral processing such as limestone grinding raises dust that settles on soil and slows water infiltration.

Study next

Soil types of India and the erosion each is prone toChotanagpur plateau minerals — coal, iron ore, bauxite and micaConservation measures — afforestation, shelter belts and control of grazing

Common traps

Choosing over-irrigation, which is right for Punjab and Haryana but wrong for this belt.
Reading manure as chemical fertiliser, which is a different input with different effects.

SSC lifts these region-cause pairs straight from the textbook and swaps the state, so learn the pairs rather than one sentence.

The same chapter is asked elsewhere in the corpus — the black-soil plateau at 9 Sep 2024, 09:00, GA Q.14 and the Green Revolution's soil degradation at 17 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q.20.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.