UPPSC PYQwith Solutions & UP Current Affairs

Explanation

Only 2, 3 and 4. Three of the four pairs hold. Raniganj is in Paschim Bardhaman district of West Bengal, on the western bank of the Damodar | this is where Indian commercial coal mining began in 1774 under John Sumner and Suetonius Grant Heatly of the East India Company. Ramgarh Coalfield lies in Ramgarh district of Jharkhand, in the same Damodar basin, and has been worked by Central Coalfields Limited since 1975. Talcher is in Angul district of Odisha, in the Mahanadi valley, and is mined by Mahanadi Coalfields Limited. Only pair 1 fails, and it fails on the State: Arunachal Pradesh's coal is the Namchik-Namphuk field of Changlang district, not 'Maolong' | Maolong (Mawlong) belongs to the Tertiary coal belt of the North-East's other coal state, Meghalaya. Drop pair 1 and you are left with 2, 3 and 4. Why the other options are wrong | (a) It keeps the one pair that is wrong (Maolong is not an Arunachal Pradesh coalfield) and throws away two that are right | Ramgarh-Jharkhand and Talcher-Odisha are both standard, uncontested pairs. (b) Right about Raniganj and Ramgarh, but it still carries the faulty Maolong-Arunachal Pradesh pair and drops Talcher-Odisha, which is correct: Talcher sits in the Mahanadi valley in Angul district of Odisha. (d) The exact inversion of the truth. Pair 1 is the single pair that is NOT correctly matched, while the three it rejects are all sound. Concept: About 99% of India's coal is Gondwana coal, laid down some 250 million years ago and preserved in a chain of ancient rift basins that today carry major rivers. That is why Indian coalfields are catalogued by river valley | Damodar (Raniganj, Jharia, Bokaro, Karanpura, Ramgarh, Giridih), Mahanadi (Talcher, Ib valley), Son (Singrauli), Godavari (Singareni). The North-East is the exception: its coal is much younger Tertiary coal, occurring in thin, high-sulphur seams in Meghalaya, Assam, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, and it is mined on a far smaller scale.

Explanation

2, 3 and 4. The Treaty of Sugauli closed the Anglo-Nepalese (Gurkha) War of 1814-16. It was drawn up at Sugauli in Champaran on 2 December 1815 and signed and ratified on 4 March 1816, which is why the question dates it to 1816. Under it Nepal surrendered its entire western expansion: the whole Tarai, the lowlands between the Kali and the Rapti, and all the hill territory west of the Kali (Mahakali) river | that is, Kumaon and Garhwal and the hill tract running on towards the Sutlej. Ranikhet and Nainital lie in Kumaon and Shimla in the hills the Gorkhas had to give up, so all three sites passed into the East India Company's sphere. Kathmandu did not. Nepal kept its capital and its independence; the single concession it made there was to accept a permanent British Resident. Hence 2, 3 and 4. Why the other options are wrong | (a) It puts Kathmandu on the list. Nepal was never annexed and never ceded its capital | the treaty explicitly left its government intact, subject only to a British Resident being stationed there. That single word 'Resident' is what this option confuses with conquest. (c) The most tempting wrong answer: it correctly rejects Kathmandu but stops the cession at Kumaon (Ranikhet, Nainital). The treaty's western surrender did not stop there | it covered the hill country beyond Garhwal from which the Gorkhas were expelled, including the Shimla hills, which is why the official key keeps Shimla in. (d) It names the one site that was certainly NOT obtained and rejects the three that were. Kathmandu remained Nepal's capital throughout, and Nepal was never a British possession. Concept: Gorkha Nepal expanded hard in the decades after 1768, taking Kumaon in 1790 and Garhwal in 1804 and pushing west towards the Sutlej and east into Sikkim. That expansion ran into the East India Company's northern frontier and produced the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-16, in which Ochterlony's campaign eventually broke Gorkha resistance in the western hills. The Treaty of Sugauli then fixed a settlement that has lasted: Nepal stayed sovereign but lost its conquests and accepted a British Resident, while the ceded Himalayan foothills became the base for colonial cantonments and hill stations.