UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 138 of 150

Correct — D, Only 1. Say that to yourself before you fill the bubble, because on this booklet 'Only 1' has been moved to option (d); the slot most candidates reach for out of habit, option (a), reads '1 and 2' here. Now the pairs. Pair 1 is the mismatch. Nokrek Biosphere Reserve is in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, not in Manipur — it was notified in 1988, Nokrek Peak is the highest point of the Garo Hills, and the reserve is best known for the Citrus gene sanctuary protecting Citrus indica, the wild Indian orange from which cultivated citrus is believed to descend. Manipur, for its part, has no notified biosphere reserve at all; its celebrated protected area is Keibul Lamjao National Park on Loktak Lake, the floating park of the sangai deer, which is a different thing entirely. Pair 2 is correct: Manas Biosphere Reserve was notified in 1989 and lies in Assam, on the Bhutan border, taking its name from the Manas river; Manas National Park at its core is a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site and one of the nine original tiger reserves of Project Tiger. Pair 3 is also correct as the question puts it: Agasthyamalai Biosphere Reserve, notified in 2001, covers the southernmost Western Ghats and its Kerala component — the Neyyar, Peppara and Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuaries — is the larger part of it. The reserve does extend across the state line into Tamil Nadu through the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, so 'Kerala' is incomplete rather than wrong, and Kerala is in any case the only one of the two states offered anywhere in this question. Exactly one pair is therefore wrong, and it is the first: option (d).

• (a)1 and 2 — Pair 1 is correctly identified as wrong, but Manas is genuinely in Assam, so this option wrongly condemns it. Manas Biosphere Reserve was notified in 1989 in the western Assam districts along the Himalayan foothills, contiguous across the international boundary with Bhutan's Royal Manas National Park. This option is also the paper's structural trap: on the layout most candidates have memorised, (a) is where 'Only 1' would sit, and a student who works out that just the first pair is wrong and then marks the remembered position lands here.
• (b)2 and 3 — Both of these pairs are correct, so this option gets the question exactly backwards — it acquits the one wrong pair and condemns the two right ones. Manas is in Assam and Agasthyamalai's Kerala sanctuaries are its core. This is the option marked by a candidate who reads the stem as 'which pairs ARE correctly matched' and forgets the NOT.
• (c)Only 3 — This rests on a real piece of knowledge misapplied. Agasthyamalai Biosphere Reserve does straddle two states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, so a well-read candidate may feel that pairing it with Kerala alone is an error. It is not: Kerala genuinely contains the reserve's Neyyar, Peppara and Shendurney sanctuaries, and the pairing is incomplete rather than false. UPPSC's own key treats it as correctly matched, and the question offers no option that would let Tamil Nadu be named instead. Meanwhile this choice lets the clear error in pair 1 pass unnoticed.

A biosphere reserve is a large, zoned conservation unit under UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme, designed to protect an ecosystem while allowing the traditional human communities inside it to continue living and working there. Each has a strictly protected core, a buffer where limited research and regulated use are allowed, and a transition area of settlement and sustainable economic activity. India began notifying them in 1986 with the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve and now has eighteen, of which a majority — Nokrek since 2009, Agasthyamalai since 2016 — are also on UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves. A biosphere reserve is a distinct designation, not a synonym for a national park or a tiger reserve, though it usually contains one.

Pair questions are decided one line at a time, and the discipline that pays is to fix each reserve to a landform rather than to a bare state name — Nokrek to the Garo Hills, Manas to the Manas river on the Bhutan border, Agasthyamalai to the peak of Agastyarkoodam in the southernmost Western Ghats. Landforms do not migrate between states in memory the way state names do. Two north-eastern traps recur constantly. Nokrek is regularly shifted to Manipur, Nagaland or Arunachal Pradesh because all the names sound alike to an outsider, when Manipur in fact has no biosphere reserve and is instead associated with Keibul Lamjao and Loktak Lake. And a reserve that spans two states — Agasthyamalai across Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as Nilgiri does across three — is not made 'wrong' by an option naming only one of them; treat such a pairing as incomplete and look for a harder error elsewhere before rejecting it. Then read the code. This booklet has put 'Only 1' at option (d), and the mark is lost far more often at that step than at the geography.

• Nokrek Biosphere Reserve is in the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, notified in 1988 and added to UNESCO's World Network in 2009; it protects Citrus indica, the wild Indian orange, in a dedicated citrus gene sanctuary
• Manipur has no notified biosphere reserve; its best-known protected area is Keibul Lamjao National Park on Loktak Lake, the world's only floating national park, home to the sangai or brow-antlered deer
• Manas Biosphere Reserve, notified in 1989, is in Assam on the Bhutan border; Manas National Park within it is a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site and one of the original nine tiger reserves of Project Tiger, and it shelters the golden langur, pygmy hog and Bengal florican
• Manas is a case where the two UNESCO lists diverge — the national park is a World Heritage Site, but the biosphere reserve is not on UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves
• Agasthyamalai Biosphere Reserve, notified in 2001, spans Kerala and Tamil Nadu: Neyyar, Peppara and Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuaries in Kerala together with the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu
• Every biosphere reserve is zoned into a core, a buffer and a transition area — the feature that distinguishes it from a national park, where permanent human settlement is generally excluded
• India has eighteen notified biosphere reserves; the first was the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in 1986

• The option layout. 'Only 1' sits at (d) on this booklet, so a candidate who correctly finds a single wrong pair and then marks (a) out of habit loses the mark
• Rejecting a two-state reserve because only one state is named. Agasthyamalai spans Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but pairing it with Kerala is incomplete, not incorrect
• Shuffling the north-eastern reserves. Nokrek belongs to Meghalaya's Garo Hills; Manipur has no biosphere reserve at all
• Missing the NOT in the stem — the answer names the mismatched pairs, not the matched ones

Biosphere reserves are among the most reliably repeated pair-matching topics in both examinations. UPPSC asked a four-item biosphere-to-state match in 2021 that also turned on Nokrek; UPSC has asked the same reserve against the Garo Hills in 2013, run a full match-list in 2004, tested what lies inside Agasthyamalai in 2019, and repeatedly asked which listed site is not a biosphere reserve at all.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Nokrek Biosphere Reserve, noted for its gene sanctuary of the wild Indian orange (Citrus indica), is located in

  • (a)the Barail Range, Assam
  • (b)the Garo Hills, Meghalaya
  • (c)the Naga Hills, Nagaland
  • (d)the Patkai Range, Manipur

  Answer(b) the Garo Hills, Meghalaya — Nokrek was notified in 1988 and joined UNESCO's World Network in 2009; Nokrek Peak is the highest point of the Garo Hills.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Consider the following pairs : Protected area : State 1. Keibul Lamjao National Park : Manipur 2. Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve : Tamil Nadu 3. Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary : Karnataka Which of the above pairs are correctly matched ?

  • (a)1 and 2 only
  • (b)2 and 3 only
  • (c)1 and 3 only
  • (d)1, 2 and 3

  Answer(a) 1 and 2 only — Keibul Lamjao lies on Loktak Lake in Manipur and Kalakad-Mundanthurai is in Tamil Nadu, both parts of the Agasthyamalai landscape in the latter case. Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary is in Kerala, not Karnataka.