The Rourkela steel plant is located in which state?

The correct answer is D, the assertion is false but the reason is true. Ahmedabad is a very large cotton textile centre and is called the Manchester of India, but it is not the largest in the country; that place belongs to Mumbai, the old Cottonopolis, which grew first because of its port, its mills and its capital, and Maharashtra remains ahead of Gujarat in the industry. The reason, however, is a correct statement in itself: Ahmedabad lies in the black soil tract of Gujarat where cotton is grown in quantity, so raw material has never been a constraint there. Options A and B both treat the assertion as true, which it is not. Option C reverses the position by calling the reason false, although Gujarat is indeed a leading cotton-growing state.

The correct answer is D, agglomeration economies. When industries gather at one urban centre, each of them can use the roads, railways, power lines, water supply, banks, insurance offices, skilled workers, component suppliers and repair workshops that the others have brought into being, and the saving in cost that follows from this sharing is called an agglomeration economy. It is the main reason industry forms clusters rather than spreading evenly. Option A is wrong because rural economies is not a term for industrial clustering at all. Option B is wrong because amalgamation means the merger of two firms into one, which is a matter of ownership and not of location. Option C is wrong because urban economies describes the economic life of towns in general, a much wider idea than the specific saving this question asks about.

The correct answer is B, an agricultural rural hinterland. An industrial city does not stand alone: the country around it supplies food for its workers, agricultural raw material such as cotton, cane, oilseed and jute for its mills, and labour from the villages, while the city in turn sells manufactured goods and services back to that countryside. The land around a city is rural by definition, and in India it is largely agricultural, so the phrase is agricultural rural hinterland. Option A contradicts itself, since a hinterland cannot be both urban and the countryside surrounding an urban centre. Options C and D are wrong because a coastal or seaport hinterland describes the inland area served by a port, which applies only to coastal cities and not to industrially developed centres generally.

The correct answer is C, the erstwhile Soviet Union. Of the three integrated plants taken up in the Second Five Year Plan, Bhilai in what is now Chhattisgarh was built with Soviet help, and the later plant at Bokaro in Jharkhand came up with Soviet help as well, so the two Soviet plants are Bhilai and Bokaro. Option A is wrong because German collaboration built Rourkela in Odisha, the plant most often confused with Bhilai in this question. Option B is wrong because British collaboration built Durgapur in West Bengal. Option D is wrong because no integrated public sector steel plant of that period was built with Japanese help; Japan's role in Indian industry came later and mainly through the automobile sector. Remember the trio as Rourkela with Germany, Durgapur with Britain and Bhilai with the Soviet Union.

The correct answer is C, Sakchi, now Jamshedpur. The Tata Iron and Steel Company set up its works there in 1907, choosing the site because iron ore, coal, manganese and limestone all lay within a short distance in the Chota Nagpur region, water was available from the Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers, and the railway ran to the port of Kolkata. Option A is wrong because the Visvesvaraya Iron and Steel Works at Bhadravati in Karnataka came later and is known for using hydel power instead of coking coal. Option B is wrong because the Indian Iron and Steel Company's plant at Burnpur in West Bengal also belongs to a later stage. Option D is wrong because Durgapur is a public sector plant of the Second Five Year Plan, built with British collaboration after independence.