SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 13 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 17 of 99

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 10 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.

Who asked James Rennel to prepare the map of Hindustan?

(a)Lord Dalhousie
(b)Robert Clive
(c)Lord Ripen
(d)Warren Hastings

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Robert Clive set the survey in motion. After Plassey and Buxar the East India Company held revenue rights it could not exercise over land it could not locate, and mapping was the answer.

James Rennell was appointed Surveyor General of Bengal in 1767, during Clive's second governorship, and spent the next decade surveying the province's rivers, roads and district lines.

The stem asks who set Rennell the task, not who was in office when the map appeared: option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Lord Dalhousie — Dalhousie was Governor-General from 1848, some eighty years later. His name attaches to the Doctrine of Lapse and to railways and the telegraph, not to the Company's first surveys.
(c)
Lord Ripen — The paper's spelling of Lord Ripon, Viceroy in the early 1880s and remembered for the resolution on local self-government. He belongs to a different century of Company and Crown rule.
(d)
Warren Hastings — Hastings governed after Clive, and Rennell's mapping ran on into his time, which is what makes this tempting. The commissioning came earlier, before Hastings took charge in Bengal.

Concept

Mapping was an instrument of rule. Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764 left the Company with the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa from 1765 — and a revenue administration cannot tax what it cannot locate.

James Rennell was made Surveyor General of Bengal in 1767 and surveyed for about a decade before injury and ill health sent him home.

His work produced the Bengal Atlas and then a map of Hindoostan with an accompanying memoir. He is called the father of Indian geography, and his maps were the standard European reference on India long afterwards.

The near-miss is genuine: Rennell's memoir on the map of Hindoostan appeared in the 1780s, when Warren Hastings was Governor-General, so that name is honestly attached to the published work.

The stem asks who commissioned the survey, and the key follows the standard textbook line that Clive did.

Key facts

James Rennell was appointed Surveyor General of Bengal in 1767.
Robert Clive held a second term as Governor of Bengal from 1765 to 1767.
Rennell is known as the father of Indian geography.
His survey work produced the Bengal Atlas and a map of Hindoostan with a memoir.

Study next

The Great Trigonometrical Survey and the Survey of IndiaCompany rule in Bengal after the grant of the Diwani in 1765Colonial surveys as instruments of revenue administration

Common traps

Choosing Warren Hastings because his period carries the published map.
Reading 'Lord Ripen' as somebody other than Lord Ripon.

SSC puts Company-era administration in a who-did-it shape — at 9 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.23 the Subsidiary Alliance is put to Lord Wellesley in the same form.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.