Paper II

Story hook

In 1991, geographer R.L. Singh stood on a hilltop in Banaras and counted the city's neighbourhoods. He listed twenty-seven Mohallas, eighty-two ghats, four cantonment-era civil lines and a Diesel Locomotive Works township from 1961 — all visible in a single panorama. Singh argued, in his Festschrift volume that year, that the Indian city is not one settlement but a palimpsest of five layers: the pre-Islamic temple-town core, the Mughal walled mohalla, the British civil lines + cantonment, the post-Independence industrial township, and the post-1991 IT/SEZ peripheral cluster. To understand Indian settlement geography, Singh wrote, you must learn to read five superimposed maps at once.

Three decades later, the panorama from the same hilltop has added a sixth layer — the Smart City retrofit zone and the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor (inaugurated December 13, 2021), which demolished 314 properties to create a 5-lakh sq ft pilgrimage plaza. In August 2024, while the Kashi-Tamil Sangamam drew lakhs of pilgrims, Varanasi recorded its highest ever single-day Ganga water level at 73.95 m and 80,000 people had to be evacuated from low-lying mohallas. The settlement that Singh mapped is now simultaneously a UNESCO Creative City, a Smart City beneficiary, a religious tourism mega-economy, and a recurring flood victim — sometimes in the same week.

For Paper II's settlements unit, this is the framing the examiner rewards. Indian settlements are not just rural-versus- urban; they are historical accretions layered on ecological vulnerabilities layered on policy interventions — and a 250-mark answer needs to traverse all three.

Why this matters for UPSC

UPSC Optional Geography Paper II's settlements unit is the third syllabus module — "Types and patterns of rural settlements; environmental issues in rural settlements; hierarchy of urban settlements; urban morphology: social and economic problems of urban settlements; urbanisation; urban environmental issues." In the past ten years, this unit has been directly tested in seven cycles (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023). The 2022 question "Discuss the problems of squatter settlements in Indian metropolitan cities" was a 20-marker, and the 2018 "rural-urban fringe" question carried 15 marks. Examiners reward candidates who can cite specific Indian cities, use Christaller central-place theory and Burgess concentric-zone models with Indian modifications, and link settlements to Smart Cities Mission outcomes and Census 2011 town classification.