India's Neighbours and Borders: Lengths, Lines and PYQs

The correct answer is C, seven. India has a land boundary with Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Option D, nine, is the commonest trap, because nine is the number of neighbours in all when Sri Lanka and the Maldives are added, and those two are maritime neighbours separated by water, not land. Option A is wrong, and option B, five, is the figure students reach when they forget Afghanistan and one of the smaller frontiers; the Afghan border is only about 106 kilometres long and lies in the Pakistan-occupied part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, which is why it slips out of memory. Learn the seven in order of length: Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan, Afghanistan. The same chapter supplies the companion figures: a land frontier of about 15,200 kilometres and a coastline of about 7,516 kilometres counting the island groups.

The correct answer is B, Bhutan. Of the four countries offered here Bhutan is by far the smallest, a landlocked Himalayan kingdom whose border with India runs about 699 kilometres along Sikkim, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Option C is wrong because Nepal, though also landlocked and small, is several times larger than Bhutan in area. Options A and D are wrong because Myanmar and Pakistan are both large countries, Pakistan being the bigger of the two. Note the wider fact behind this question: among all nine of India's neighbours the smallest in area is the Maldives, an island republic, and the largest is China; so an examiner who includes the Maldives in the options changes the answer, and the list of options must be read carefully.

The correct answer is D, Assam. Nepal touches five Indian states, namely Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim, so options A, B and C are all genuine Nepal border states and only Assam is not. Assam has international borders of its own, with Bhutan in the north and Bangladesh in the south-west, which is exactly why it is offered here and why the question catches so many students. The geography is worth picturing: the Nepal frontier runs along the Himalayan foothills from Uttarakhand eastward to Sikkim, and between Nepal and Assam lies the narrow Siliguri Corridor of West Bengal, the Chicken's Neck, which separates the two and carries all traffic to the North-East. A useful cross-check is that Bihar also borders Nepal, so a version of this question listing Bihar, Sikkim and Uttarakhand against Assam has the same answer.

The correct answer is A, China, which was never a British territory and is therefore not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, so it does not take part in the Commonwealth Games. Options B, C and D are wrong because Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were all part of British India or British Ceylon and are Commonwealth members whose teams compete at the Games. Among India's other neighbours, the Maldives joined the Commonwealth, left and later rejoined, while Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Afghanistan are not members. The point to carry away is that Commonwealth membership follows the old British connection, so China and Nepal, which were never British possessions, stand outside it. Among the neighbours that do compete, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have both hosted or contested the Games for decades, and the Commonwealth itself now admits a few states with no British past, such as Rwanda and Mozambique.

The correct answer is C, Bangladesh, with a boundary of about 4,096 kilometres, the longest India has with any country; it runs along West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Option A is wrong because the border with China, about 3,488 kilometres, is the second longest and is the one most often marked by students who confuse length with importance in the news. Option B is wrong because the Pakistan border measures about 3,323 kilometres and comes third. Option D is wrong because the Nepal border, about 1,751 kilometres, is well behind the first three. A related fact is asked in the same breath: among Indian states, West Bengal has the longest international border, and most of it faces Bangladesh. The Bangladesh frontier is also the most densely settled of India's borders, running through fields and villages rather than mountains, which is why fencing and enclave settlement have been such long-running issues on it.

The correct answer is B, Afghanistan, with which India's land boundary is only about 106 kilometres long, lying in the part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir that is under Pakistan's control, near the Wakhan Corridor. Option A is wrong because the Bhutan border, about 699 kilometres, is the shortest among the borders India actually administers and is therefore the favourite distractor in this question. Option C is wrong because the Myanmar border runs about 1,643 kilometres along Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. Option D is wrong because the Nepal border is about 1,751 kilometres. Read the question carefully: if it asks for the shortest border India guards on the ground, the expected answer is Bhutan. The Afghan stretch matters for one more reason: it exists only because the Durand Line of 1893 pushed the Wakhan Corridor between British India and Russian Central Asia, and India does not control that stretch today.

The correct answer is B, India and Pakistan. The line was drawn in 1947 by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who chaired the boundary commissions that divided Punjab and Bengal, so the same line also forms the India-Bangladesh boundary, Bangladesh having been East Pakistan until 1971. Option A is wrong because the India-China boundary in the east is the McMahon Line of 1914, and the working line today is the Line of Actual Control. Option C is wrong because the India-Myanmar boundary carries no such famous name. Option D is wrong because the Pakistan-Afghanistan boundary is the Durand Line of 1893, named after Sir Mortimer Durand. In Jammu and Kashmir the India-Pakistan line is called the Line of Control, a name it took after the Simla Agreement of 1972.

The correct answer is C, India and China, in the eastern sector along Arunachal Pradesh. The line was drawn at the Simla Convention of 1914 by Sir Henry McMahon, then the Foreign Secretary of British India, in an agreement with Tibet; China has never accepted it, which is the root of the dispute in that sector. Option A is wrong because the India-Nepal boundary was fixed by the Treaty of Sugauli of 1816 and is an open border today. Option B is wrong because the India-Bhutan boundary has no such named line and has been settled peacefully over decades. Option D is wrong because the India-Bangladesh boundary descends from the Radcliffe Line of 1947 and was finally settled by the Land Boundary Agreement ratified in 2015.

The correct answer is B, the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar, the shallow waters between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, with the chain of sandbanks called Adam's Bridge or Rama Setu running between Rameswaram and Talaimannar. Option A is wrong because the Ten Degree Channel separates the Andaman group from the Nicobar group. Option C is wrong because the Eight Degree Channel separates the Minicoy island of Lakshadweep from the Maldives, and the Nine Degree Channel separates Minicoy from the rest of Lakshadweep. Option D is wrong because the Duncan Passage lies between South Andaman and Little Andaman. These water bodies are asked as a set almost every year, so learn the four channels together with the islands they separate. Kachchatheevu, the small island in the Palk Strait, and the fishing rights around it are the practical reason these waters keep returning to the news.

The correct answer is B, the Andaman and the Nicobar groups, which lie on either side of the Ten Degree Channel in the Bay of Bengal, the name coming from the ten degree north parallel along which it runs. Option A is wrong because Lakshadweep and the Maldives are separated by the Eight Degree Channel. Option C is wrong because Minicoy is separated from the rest of Lakshadweep by the Nine Degree Channel. Option D is wrong because Great Nicobar is separated from Sumatra in Indonesia by the Great Channel, and Indira Point on Great Nicobar is the southernmost point of India. Remember also the Coco Channel, which separates the northern Andamans from the Coco Islands of Myanmar. The parallels give the names, so the order from north to south is easy to fix: Ten Degree between Andaman and Nicobar, Nine Degree at Minicoy and Eight Degree below it towards the Maldives.

The correct answer is C, five. The states along the Bangladesh frontier are West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, with West Bengal carrying the longest stretch. Option A and option B are the figures reached by leaving out Mizoram, whose border with Bangladesh is short, or Assam, whose frontier lies in the south-west of the state. Option D, six, is what students mark when they wrongly add Manipur or Nagaland, both of which face Myanmar and not Bangladesh. The pattern is worth learning as a set of counts: five states for Bangladesh, five for Nepal, four for Myanmar, four for Bhutan, and for China five units counting Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. It is also worth remembering that Tripura is almost surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides, which is why its border is long in proportion to the size of the state.

The correct answer is C, Pakistan. Sir Creek is a tidal creek in the marshland of the Rann of Kutch, where India and Pakistan read the boundary resolution of 1914 differently, one side placing the boundary in the middle of the channel and the other on its eastern bank; the stretch matters because it affects the maritime boundary and fishing rights beyond it. Option A is wrong because the disputes with China lie in Aksai Chin and along the McMahon Line. Option B is wrong because the enclave and boundary questions with Bangladesh were settled by the Land Boundary Agreement ratified in 2015. Option D is wrong because the India-Myanmar boundary has been demarcated and is not in dispute in this sense. Remember also that the creek opens into the Arabian Sea, so the unsettled stretch is only about ninety-six kilometres long but decides a far larger area of sea.