Transport in India: Railways, Highways, Ports and Waterways

The correct answer is B, Bori Bunder in Bombay and Thane. The train ran on 16 April 1853 over about 34 kilometres, pulled by three locomotives named Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, and the day is counted as the birth of the Indian Railways. Option A is wrong because the Howrah to Hooghly line opened in 1854, the year after, and was the first passenger railway in eastern India; the closeness of the two dates is exactly why it is offered. Option C is wrong because the first line in the Madras Presidency, from Royapuram to Wallajah Road, opened in 1856, which makes it the third of the presidency beginnings. Option D is wrong because the line in the upper Ganga plain came later still, as the railway was pushed inland from the ports to carry cotton, jute and troops. Remember the order: Bombay 1853, Calcutta 1854, Madras 1856.

The correct answer is C, NH-44, which runs from Srinagar to Kanyakumari over about 3,745 kilometres through Jammu, Delhi, Agra, Gwalior, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Madurai, and was formed by merging several older highways at the time of renumbering. Option A is wrong because NH-19 is the Delhi to Kolkata highway along the old Grand Trunk Road, long but far shorter than NH-44. Option B is wrong because NH-27 is the long east-west highway from Porbandar in Gujarat to Silchar in Assam, which carries the East-West corridor and is the second longest. Option D is wrong because NH-48 runs from Delhi to Chennai through Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Bengaluru and forms much of the Golden Quadrilateral, but it too is shorter. Fix the pair NH-44 for north to south and NH-27 for west to east.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata, now named Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, which stands on the Hooghly about 130 kilometres inland from the sea and is the only major port of India that is not on the coast. Because the river silts up, the port needs continuous dredging and large ships are handled at the Haldia dock complex downstream. Option A is wrong because Paradip in Odisha is an artificial deep-water harbour on the coast, built for the export of iron ore. Option C is wrong because Kandla, renamed Deendayal Port, is a tidal port in the Gulf of Kutch serving the north-western hinterland, and a tidal port is not the same as a river port. Option D is wrong because Cochin in Kerala is a natural harbour on a lagoon opening to the Arabian Sea, famous for being carved out by Robert Bristow's dredging in the 1920s.

The correct answer is B, Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, which is the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway and has one of the longest railway platforms in the country. Option A is wrong because Guwahati, more exactly Maligaon in Guwahati, is the headquarters of the Northeast Frontier Railway, the zone that serves Assam and the rest of the north-east; the similarity of the two names is the whole point of the question, so keep North Eastern at Gorakhpur and Northeast Frontier at Maligaon. Option C is wrong because Kolkata is the headquarters of the Eastern Railway, of the South Eastern Railway and of the Metro Railway. Option D is wrong because Patna is a divisional headquarters only; the East Central Railway, which covers Bihar, has its headquarters at Hajipur, also in Bihar, which is another pair worth remembering.

The correct answer is C, the Ganga, Bhagirathi and Hooghly, from Haldia in West Bengal to Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, about 1,620 kilometres, declared the first national waterway in 1986 and being deepened under the Jal Marg Vikas Project with terminals at Varanasi, Sahibganj and Haldia. Option A is wrong because the Brahmaputra from Dhubri to Sadiya, about 891 kilometres, is National Waterway 2, the second to be declared. Option B is wrong because the Godavari and Krishna stretches in Andhra Pradesh form National Waterway 4, declared much later and far less developed. Option D is wrong because the Brahmani and Mahanadi delta rivers of Odisha form National Waterway 5. The order of the first three, Ganga, Brahmaputra and then the West Coast Canal of Kerala, is the part examiners test.

The correct answer is A, Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, a land-locked natural harbour sheltered by the Dolphin's Nose headland and the deepest of India's major ports, which is why it handles iron ore, crude oil and coal in large ships and houses a major naval base. Option B is wrong because Chennai is an artificial harbour, one of the oldest on the east coast, built up with breakwaters because the shore there has no natural shelter. Option C is wrong because Mormugao in Goa, at the mouth of the Zuari, is a natural harbour but shallower, and it is remembered chiefly as the port of the iron ore export trade. Option D is wrong because New Mangalore in Karnataka is a modern artificial port developed in the 1970s, known for the export of iron ore concentrates from Kudremukh and for cashew and coffee.

The correct answer is B, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. The Golden Quadrilateral, the first phase of the National Highways Development Project, is a 5,846 kilometre ring of four and six lane highways joining the four metropolitan cities, and its purpose was to cut the time and cost of moving goods between the ports and the interior. Option A is wrong because Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Mumbai lie on one side of the quadrilateral only, the Delhi to Mumbai arm. Option C is wrong because Srinagar to Kanyakumari through Delhi and Nagpur is the North-South corridor, a different component of the same project. Option D is wrong because Silchar to Porbandar is the East-West corridor, which crosses the country from Assam to Gujarat. Remember the three together: the Quadrilateral of four metros, North-South and East-West.

The correct answer is C, 1.676 metres, the Indian broad gauge, which carries almost all the traffic of the network and is the gauge to which the older lines have been converted under Project Unigauge. Option A is wrong because 1.000 metre is the metre gauge, once widespread in Rajasthan, Gujarat and the north-east and now reduced to a few stretches. Option B is wrong because 1.435 metres is the standard gauge used in most of the world and, in India, in metro rail systems, which is why it looks plausible. Option D is wrong because 0.762 metre is one of the two narrow gauges, the other being 0.610 metre, surviving mainly on the hill lines such as the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway and the Kalka-Shimla Railway. The four figures should be learnt as a set, since a question may ask for any of them.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata, where the first underground metro service in India opened in 1984 between Esplanade and Bhowanipore on the north to south line, and the Metro Railway of Kolkata is the only metro system that is run as a zone of the Indian Railways. Option A is wrong because the Delhi Metro, which is much larger, began running only in 2002 on the Shahdara to Tis Hazari section and is run by a joint venture of the Centre and the Delhi Government. Option C is wrong because the Chennai Metro opened in 2015, although Chennai had suburban electric trains much earlier. Option D is wrong because the Mumbai Metro opened in 2014; Mumbai's suburban railway, which dates from the nineteenth century, is a suburban system and not a metro, and the distinction is what the question is testing.

The correct answer is B, Jawaharlal Nehru Port, which takes its other name from the twin villages of Nhava and Sheva across the harbour from Mumbai. It was opened in 1989 to take the container traffic that the old Mumbai docks could not handle and it carries the largest share of India's container trade, with the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor built to feed it. Option A is wrong because Mumbai Port is the older port on the eastern waterfront of the island city, which handles general and bulk cargo. Option C is wrong because Kandla, renamed Deendayal Port, is in the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat and was developed after Partition to replace Karachi for the north-western hinterland. Option D is wrong because Mormugao is in Goa at the mouth of the Zuari and is associated with the iron ore trade, not with containers.