The headquarters of which of the following is located in Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand?
- (a)Archaeological Survey of India
- (b)Survey of India
- (c)Botanical Survey of India
- (d)Geological Survey of India
Correct — B, Survey of India.
The office of the Surveyor General of India stands at Hathibarkala Estate, Dehradun. Founded in 1767, it is the country's national mapping agency and the oldest scientific department of the Government of India, and it works under the Department of Science and Technology.
The idea to carry away is simple: store a city with every national "Survey" body. The four named in this question sit in three different cities, and the word they share in their names is where the difficulty comes from.
- (a)Archaeological Survey of India — The ASI is headquartered in New Delhi and works under the Ministry of Culture, so it does not answer a question about Dehradun.
It is the right answer to the survey founded in 1861, with Alexander Cunningham as its first Director General, that maintains India's centrally protected monuments.
- (c)Botanical Survey of India — The BSI is headquartered in Kolkata, at the CGO Complex in Salt Lake, under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
Dehradun does hold its Northern Regional Centre, and that is exactly the confusion this option trades on — a regional centre is not the headquarters.
BSI is the right answer to the survey established in 1890 that documents the plant resources of the country from its Kolkata headquarters.
- (d)Geological Survey of India — The GSI is headquartered in Kolkata and works under the Ministry of Mines, which puts its head office in the same city as the Botanical Survey of India rather than in Uttarakhand.
It is the right answer to the national agency for geoscientific mapping and mineral resource assessment, with its head office in Kolkata.
A headquarters question is a location-recall question about an institution, and it is decided by one fact: the city of the body's head office.
The four national "Survey" organisations named in this question share a name pattern but are separate bodies with separate parent ministries and separate head offices. Nothing about the name predicts the city, so each has to be learnt as a pair.
Dehradun carries an unusual density of central scientific institutions, built up from the colonial survey and forestry establishments and retained after 1947.
That density is what makes an option set like this workable: several national bodies genuinely do sit in the town, so plausibility alone settles nothing and the specific head office has to be known.
- The office of the Surveyor General of India is at Hathibarkala Estate, Dehradun.
- The Survey of India was founded in 1767 and functions under the Department of Science and Technology.
- The Archaeological Survey of India is headquartered in New Delhi and functions under the Ministry of Culture.
- Alexander Cunningham was the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1861.
- The Botanical Survey of India, established in 1890, is headquartered in Kolkata under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
- The Botanical Survey of India's Northern Regional Centre is located at Dehradun.
- The Geological Survey of India is headquartered in Kolkata and functions under the Ministry of Mines.
- Dehradun also hosts the Forest Research Institute, the Wildlife Institute of India, the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology and the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing.
Three cities across the four Surveys named in the options; Dehradun belongs to the Survey of India.
- A regional centre is not a headquarters: the Botanical Survey of India has an office in Dehradun while its head office stays in Kolkata.
- Several central institutes really are in Dehradun, so reasoning from the town's institutional reputation gives no way to separate the options; the question turns on the named body's own head office.
- The near-identical names invite transferring one Survey's city to another, and two of the four here share Kolkata.
- Founding year and parent ministry are separate facts from location — knowing that the Survey of India dates to 1767 does not by itself fix where its office is.
This item runs the recall backwards. It fixes Dehradun and asks which organisation belongs there, so four similarly named Surveys have to be separated by their head offices.
Two of the cited questions go the other way, naming the body and asking for its city — the Animal Welfare Board of India in UPSC 2009, the South-Eastern Railway in NDA GAT 2021.
UPSC 2005 does it a third way: an ISO headquarters claim sits inside a statement set, to be judged rather than chosen. A matched-pair item could also carry this fact.
UPSC_2009_GS1_Q912009Same device — straight recall of the headquarters city of an Indian national body, keyed there to Chennai. What differs is the direction and the subject: that item names the organisation and asks for the city, while the UKPSC item fixes Dehradun and asks which organisation belongs to it, and the body in question is a statutory welfare board rather than a scientific survey.
UPSC_2005_GS1_Q742005Same underlying fact — an organisation's headquarters — but presented as a statement to be judged rather than an option to be chosen, with the claim that the International Organization for Standardization is based in Rome treated as incorrect by the key. What differs is the format and the scope: a multi-statement item on an international body, against a single-fact item on national organisations here.
NDA_GAT_2021_I_Q1342021Same fact type — the head office of an Indian national organisation, answered by a city. What differs is where the difficulty sits: there the organisation's regional name pulls away from its actual headquarters city, whereas here four similarly named Surveys have to be told apart by city.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following institutions has its headquarters in Dehradun?
- (a)Zoological Survey of India
- (b)Wildlife Institute of India
- (c)Indian Institute of Forest Management
- (d)National Institute of Oceanography
Answerb — The Wildlife Institute of India is located at Chandrabani, Dehradun, and functions under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.The Zoological Survey of India is headquartered in Kolkata, the Indian Institute of Forest Management is at Bhopal, and the National Institute of Oceanography is at Dona Paula in Goa.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Survey of India functions under which one of the following?
- (a)Ministry of Earth Sciences
- (b)Department of Science and Technology
- (c)Ministry of Defence
- (d)Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
Answerb — The Survey of India, the national mapping agency with its office at Dehradun, works under the Department of Science and Technology.The Ministry of Earth Sciences is the parent of the India Meteorological Department, the Border Roads Organisation comes under the Ministry of Defence, and the Botanical and Zoological Surveys of India sit under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following pairs of organisation and the city of its headquarters is correctly matched?
- (a)Geological Survey of India — Dehradun
- (b)Archaeological Survey of India — Kolkata
- (c)Botanical Survey of India — Kolkata
- (d)Survey of India — New Delhi
Answerc — The Botanical Survey of India is headquartered in Kolkata, which makes this pairing correct.The Geological Survey of India is also in Kolkata rather than Dehradun, the Archaeological Survey of India is in New Delhi rather than Kolkata, and the Survey of India is in Dehradun rather than New Delhi.