Where was the first successful textile mill established in India?

Correct — D. The word doing the work in this stem is successful.

An earlier cotton mill was set up at Fort Gloster near Calcutta in 1818 and failed. The first successful mill was established at Bombay in 1854 by Cowasji Nanabhai Davar, and it began production in 1856.

That mill started the city's cotton industry, so the answer is Bombay, present-day Mumbai — option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Jaipur — Jaipur has no part in the origins of India's mechanised textile industry, which grew where raw cotton, port access and merchant capital met.
• (b)
  Surat — Surat was the great early textile and trading port, and the English East India Company's first factory of 1613 stood there, but its trade was in handloom cloth rather than mill-made yarn.
• (c)
  Kolkata — Kolkata is the trap. The 1818 mill at Fort Gloster near Calcutta came first in time but did not succeed, and the region's mill success was in jute rather than cotton.

Modern factory industry in India began with cotton in the west and jute in the east.

Bombay had every advantage: raw cotton from the Deccan black-soil belt, a port for importing machinery and exporting yarn, and Parsi and Gujarati mercantile capital ready to invest.

Cowasji Nanabhai Davar's 1854 mill is the accepted starting point, and Bombay became the mill city of the later nineteenth century.

Jute, by contrast, was a Bengal industry run largely on British capital, its mills strung along the Hooghly.

Key facts

• The first successful cotton textile mill in India was set up at Bombay in 1854 by Cowasji Nanabhai Davar.
• An earlier cotton mill at Fort Gloster near Calcutta, started in 1818, did not succeed.
• India's first jute mill was established at Rishra on the Hooghly in 1855.

Common traps

• Choosing Kolkata because the 1818 Fort Gloster mill came first in time
• Reading past the word successful in the stem

No directly related past PYQ was found.