Haryana Mixed Quiz: Set 5

The agricultural university of Haryana was set up at Hisar soon after the state was formed and was later named after Chaudhary Charan Singh.

Haryana was carved out of the Hindi speaking districts of the former state of Punjab on that day, and the date is observed every year as Haryana Day.

The Murrah is the buffalo of Rohtak, Jind, Hisar and Bhiwani, jet black and heavy bodied with short, tightly curled horns, and it yields more milk and richer milk than any other buffalo breed of India.

In the Gerber test a measured quantity of milk is mixed with sulphuric acid and amyl alcohol in a butyrometer and spun in a centrifuge; the acid digests everything but the fat, which rises into the graduated neck of the tube and is read off directly as a percentage.

The National Dairy Research Institute, a deemed university under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, has its main campus at Karnal and works on dairy cattle and buffalo breeding, milk processing and dairy technology.

The low, broken, rocky ridges of Gurugram, Nuh, Faridabad, Rewari and Mahendragarh are the worn northern end of the Aravalli, the oldest fold mountain system of India, which continues into Delhi as the Ridge.

The breed takes its name from the region and is the classic dual purpose cattle of the state: white or light grey, with a long narrow face, a small hump and strong legs, giving a useful quantity of milk and bullocks once prized for ploughing and carting.

Bhindawas lies in Jhajjar district and is a man-made wetland fed by drainage and canal water. It is the largest wetland in Haryana, is an important wintering ground for waterbirds, and in 2021 it was listed as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention along with Sultanpur.

The Murrah is a jet black buffalo with short tightly curled horns, bred in Rohtak, Jind, Hisar and the neighbouring districts.

In the national division of the country into agro-climatic regions, the Trans-Gangetic Plains region covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar tract of Rajasthan.

The buffalo research institute was set up at Hisar because the town sits in the Murrah tract and already had the agricultural university and a very large government livestock farm, so breeding stock and expertise were at hand.

Bir Shikargah Wildlife Sanctuary lies in the Shivalik tract of Panchkula district. The name itself explains its origin: a bir is an enclosed woodlot and shikargah means a hunting ground, so the area was a hunting preserve of the princely period that was later turned into a protected area.

The barrage stands on the Yamuna in Yamunanagar district, where the river enters the plains, and it feeds the Western Yamuna Canal of Haryana on one bank and the Eastern Yamuna Canal of Uttar Pradesh on the other.

The dwarf wheat varieties Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64 were bred in Mexico at the research programme where Norman Borlaug worked, and seed of these varieties was imported into India in the mid nineteen sixties.

The National Dairy Research Institute at Karnal is the premier dairy research body of the country, working on milk production, processing and animal reproduction, and the first cloned buffalo calf of India was produced in its laboratories.

The corrected lactometer reading, written CLR, is the figure read on the neck of a lactometer floating in milk, and the specific gravity is obtained from it by the simple relation one plus the reading divided by one thousand.

This is the drier half of Haryana, where rainfall is low, summers are hot and the soil is light, and cotton suits those conditions better than paddy does.

Vita is the brand under which it sells milk, ghee, butter, paneer, curd and sweets, and the milk behind the brand is gathered on the three tier Anand pattern: village societies collect it, district unions pool it and the federation processes and markets it through plants at Jind, Rohtak, Ambala…

Decades of the paddy and wheat rotation have pushed the water table down sharply in central Haryana, and many blocks are classed as over exploited.

Hisardale was bred at Hisar in Haryana to get finer wool from animals that could still live in the hot dry plains, so the hardy local Nali ewes of the Bikaner side were crossed with Merino rams, the standard fine wool breed of the world.