Bihar Quiz: Industries and Minerals of Bihar

Coal, iron ore, manganese, limestone and water lie close together there, so the country's iron and steel plants crowded into it: Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Burnpur and Durgapur on its edges and Rourkela just beyond.

The company was registered in that year at Sakchi, the village on the Subarnarekha that grew into Jamshedpur, and the site was chosen for the iron ore, coal and water around it.

Jharkhand was carved out of the southern districts of Bihar on that day, which is also the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, and the date is observed as the foundation day of the new state.

The refinery of the Indian Oil Corporation at Barauni was built with Soviet assistance in the nineteen sixties and became the nucleus of the only heavy industrial cluster in the state, with a thermal power station, a fertiliser plant and a large dairy around it.

Amjhor lies in Rohtas district in the Kaimur hills and holds the best known pyrite deposit of India.

The weavers of Bhagalpur have worked tussar silk for generations and the cloth is sold across the country as Bhagalpuri silk, which is why the city is called the silk city of Bihar.

Makhana is the puffed seed of the gorgon nut plant, grown in the shallow ponds of Darbhanga, Madhubani, Saharsa and Katihar, and almost all the makhana of the country comes from this part of Bihar.

Banjari lies in Rohtas district, where the Kaimur hills carry the limestone that the cement works uses, and the same district once held the large paper and chemical complex of Dalmianagar.

The factory at Madhepura builds high powered electric locomotives for Indian Railways and is the largest new industrial unit in the north east of the state.

The wet alluvium and the long warm monsoon of the north eastern districts, above all Katihar, Purnia and Araria, suit jute, and Bihar has long been the second largest producer of the fibre in the country after West Bengal.