UP Minerals, Industries and ODOP: Districts and Products

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state of India and one of its largest manufacturing states, yet it is poor in minerals. The reason is geological: almost the whole state is a thick sheet of alluvium laid down by the Ganga and its tributaries, and alluvium carries no ores. Minerals are found only where older rock comes to the surface, that is in the southern districts that belong to the Vindhyan ranges and the Bundelkhand plateau. Industry, by contrast, has grown wherever the plains gave something to process, from sugarcane and hides to the skills of a single town, so the industrial map of the state is a map of crafts and crops rather than of mines.

The mineral belt of the south

The mineral districts are Sonbhadra and Mirzapur in the Vindhyan belt and Jhansi, Lalitpur, Hamirpur, Mahoba, Banda and Chitrakoot in Bundelkhand. Everything examinable about minerals in Uttar Pradesh comes from this strip.

Sonbhadra, the energy district

Sonbhadra is called the energy capital of Uttar Pradesh, and often of India, because coal, water and limestone meet there. The Rihand dam on the Rihand river holds the reservoir named Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar, the largest artificial lake of India, and its water cools a row of thermal stations at Obra, Anpara, Rihand and Singrauli. Cheap power in turn drew heavy industry: the aluminium smelter at Renukoot, cement at Dalla and a chemical complex, all in the same district. A candidate should be able to place Sonbhadra on four lists at once, as the coal district, the power district, the aluminium district and the district that touches four states.

The older industrial towns

Sugar is the largest agro industry of the state, which leads India in both sugarcane and sugar, and its mills lie in the western districts of Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Saharanpur and Bijnor and in the Gorakhpur and Basti belt of the east. Kanpur grew on cotton mills and tanneries and is called the Manchester of North India; its leather cluster at Jajmau, with Unnao and Agra, makes the state the biggest leather exporter in the country. Firozabad makes glass bangles and glassware, Moradabad brass ware, Aligarh locks and hardware, Khurja in Bulandshahr pottery and ceramics, Bhadohi and Mirzapur hand knotted carpets, Varanasi Banarasi silk, Lucknow chikankari embroidery, Kannauj the traditional perfume called ittar, and Meerut sports goods and scissors. The Mathura refinery of the Indian Oil Corporation is the only oil refinery of the state, and the fertiliser plants stand at Phulpur, Aonla and Gorakhpur. Railway workshops are important public sector employers: the locomotive works at Varanasi and the coach factory at Rae Bareli.

One District One Product

The One District One Product scheme, usually written as ODOP, was launched by the Uttar Pradesh government in 2018 on Uttar Pradesh Day, 24 January. Its idea is that almost every district of the state already has a craft or a crop it is known for, and that a single product per district can be given design help, credit, common facilities, packaging and a place at trade fairs instead of spreading help thin. The scheme is run by the department that looks after micro, small and medium enterprises and export promotion, and the same one district one product approach was later taken up at the national level for food processing and for export promotion. These pairs are the most asked part of the chapter.

New industry and the corridors

Newer manufacturing has moved to the western edge of the state, where Noida and Greater Noida make electronics and mobile phones and Gautam Buddha Nagar has become the richest industrial district. The state has also planned a defence industrial corridor with nodes at Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Kanpur, Chitrakoot and Lucknow, so a question may ask for a node that is not on the list. Expressways and the freight corridor are the reason given in papers for this shift of industry towards the west, and the examiner's point is always the same pairing of a place with what it makes.