Practice: Minerals and Energy

(a) 82 varieties occurring and 57 under commercial production, in the Economic Review 2025-26 (Government of Rajasthan). Rajasthan is the richest state in India for variety of minerals.

Why not the others: every other number here is also a government figure, taken in a different year on a slightly different definition. The Indian Bureau of Mines put commercial production at about 50 minerals in 2020-21; the Rajasthan Mineral Policy 2024 counts 58 under extraction and targets 70 by 2046-47. None of them is wrong and the count has been rising — which is why a bare count with no year attached is only half an answer.

(c) Lead and zinc ores, selenite and wollastonite, in the Indian Minerals Yearbook 2022 (Part I, 61st edition). The Economic Review 2025-26 gives a longer list — calcite, silver, natural gypsum, zinc ores, selenite and wollastonite — and the three names common to both are zinc ores, selenite and wollastonite. Those three are the safe core.

Why not the others: (a) copper is the standard trap. Khetri makes copper the mineral most associated with Rajasthan and the state is a major producer, but Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand produce it too — sole producer and major producer are different claims. (d) Rajasthan produces no potash and no gold at all, whatever its share of the resource; silver is on the state's list, but the Bureau's own text calls it "almost the entire production" rather than the whole of it.

(b) Potash, at 94 per cent — Indian Bureau of Mines, shares of India's total resources as on 1 April 2020, reproduced by the state as Figure 5.8 of the Economic Review 2025-26.

Why not the others: lead and zinc ore is 89 per cent, wollastonite and silver ore 88 per cent, gypsum 82 per cent, ochre 81 per cent. Lead-zinc is the answer most candidates give, and it is second. Potash tops the list and almost nobody knows it.

(d) Diatomite — a soft, high-silica sedimentary rock formed from the fossilised cell walls of diatoms, also called diatomaceous earth.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap, and it is set by a government document. The Economic Review 2025-26 reproduces the Bureau's table as its Figure 5.8 with every percentage identical, but prints the 72 per cent entry as "dolomite". The Bureau is the originating source, so the figure belongs to diatomite — and material copied from the Review carries the wrong mineral. They are not near-relations that got muddled: one is fossil algae with high porosity and low density, the other is calcium magnesium carbonate used as a flux in steelmaking. Note separately that dolomite is a genuine Rajasthan mineral — Ajmer, Alwar, Bhilwara, Chittorgarh, Sikar and Udaipur. It is the percentage that has been misfiled, not the mineral invented. (b) bentonite is 75 per cent and (c) fuller's earth 74 per cent, both real neighbours in the same table.

(a) Potash and gold. The policy puts the potash resource at 20.5 billion tonnes with production nil, and gold at 126 million tonnes with production nil.

Why not the others: these two are the cleanest way to fix the resource-versus-production distinction in memory — the share of the ground is enormous and the share of output is zero. (c) silver is produced, and Rajasthan accounts for almost all of India's. Wollastonite is one of the three minerals Rajasthan is actually the sole producer of, so it cannot be a nil-production entry.

(b) Only till 2004-05, on the Indian Bureau of Mines' own record.

Why not the others: this is a superlative with an expiry date — true of the past, false of the present, and it is the reason a "sole producer" list has to be dated before it is learnt. Garnet itself remains a Rajasthan mineral, occurring in Ajmer, Bhilwara, Jhunjhunu, Sikar and Tonk.

(c). Both halves are true and they are two different statements — a resource share from the Bureau's table, and a production monopoly from its sole-producer line.

Why not the others: (a) is the commonest form of this error: 94 per cent is the share of the resource in the ground, and production is nil. (b) and (d) both make copper a monopoly, which it is not — the 54 per cent resource share is real, the sole-producer claim attached to it is not.

(d) — the department's own words. 58.8 million tonnes at 1.9 per cent Pb and 13.4 per cent Zn. The open-cast clause explains the economics: an orebody of that grade that can be mined from the surface is why one deposit in Bhilwara underpins India's entire zinc industry.

Why not the others: (b) is Jhamarkotra (Udaipur), 74 Mt at 16–38 per cent P₂O₅, and (a) is Chowkri–Chapoli (Sikar), 70 Mt at 15 per cent CaF₂. Each wrong option is a real deposit from the same departmental list, moved onto the wrong name.

(b) Sirohi. Deri — 1 Mt at 1.98 per cent Cu, 5.4 per cent Pb, 7.52 per cent Zn · Basantgarh–Goliya 3.5 Mt · Pipela 1.2 Mt.

Why not the others: three Sirohi entries in a row is not an accident — Sirohi is the state's base-metal district after the Bhilwara belt. (a) Udaipur carries Jhamarkotra, Nathara-ki-Pal, Anjani and Jagat–Relpatliya on the same departmental list, which is what makes it the plausible wrong answer.

(a) Ajmer and Bhilwara only.

Why not the others: the other two short lists in the same table are what is being borrowed here — (b) pyrite is Sikar only, and (c) flux-grade limestone is Jodhpur and Nagaur only. A mineral confined to one or two districts is a gift, and these three are the ones to hold first. Mixing them up costs the same mark as not knowing them.

(c). Dariba in Alwar is copper, alongside the Khetri belt in Jhunjhunu; Rajpura–Dariba in Rajsamand is lead–zinc, alongside Zawar (Udaipur) and Rampura–Agucha (Bhilwara).

Why not the others: same name, different district, different metal — exactly the kind of pair an examiner builds an option on, and (b) is the swap he would actually make.

(d) Bikaner, Barmer, Nagaur, Jaisalmer and Jalore.

Why not the others: (a) is the near-miss worth understanding. Pali appears in lignite occurrence tables elsewhere but is absent from the department's own five-district list, so on a question asking for lignite districts these five are the defensible answer. (b) Jodhpur and (c) Churu are gypsum districts, not lignite ones. The state's lignite resource is put at 6.4 billion tonnes against production of 10.3 million tonnes by the Mineral Policy 2024, on a different basis from the department's 5,720 Mt.

(c) Barsinghsar, which sits on the lignite field of the same name.

Why not the others: (a) Palana and (b) Gurha are genuine Bikaner lignite localities — Palana is the state's oldest and best-known field — and (d) Kapurdi is in Barmer. Barsinghsar is the field most often missing from notes that stop at Palana, Kapurdi and Kasnau, which is precisely why it is worth adding to the standard list.

(d) Talwara.

Why not the others: the three that are iron ore share a geography — Morija–Banol (Jaipur), Dabla–Singhana (Jhunjhunu) and Neemla–Rajpura (Dausa) are all in the north-eastern Aravalli, which matches the Bureau of Mines' haematite districts of Alwar, Dausa, Jaipur, Jhunjhunu, Sikar and Udaipur. Talwara is not in that belt, and that is how the odd one out is found without knowing what Talwara does produce — which this page does not assert, because no primary source settles it.

(b) 3,395 major · 13,428 minor · 16,058 quarry licences (Economic Review 2025-26, published with the State Budget 2026-27).

Why not the others: the ratio is the memorable part — minor-mineral leases outnumber major-mineral leases about four to one, and quarry licences outnumber both. (a) inverts the two lease counts, which is the error to guard against, because the famous minerals are all major ones and the intuition runs the wrong way. Mining leases are now granted by e-auction, and in 2024-25 Rajasthan auctioned 34 major mineral blocks, the highest of any state in the country.

(a) A target of ₹12,980 crore, with ₹6,857.97 crore collected up to December 2025 (Economic Review 2025-26).

Why not the others: quote both numbers together or neither. The collection figure is nine months of a twelve-month target, so reading it as a shortfall is a mistake — the Review presents it as a part-year figure. (b) ₹9,393.38 crore and ₹5,927.84 crore are the District Mineral Foundation Trust's sanctions and expenditure, and (d) ₹1,922.17 crore and ₹1,726.03 crore are RSMML's budgeted 2025-26 and unaudited 2024-25 gross revenue. All four numbers sit within a few pages of one another.

(c) Masonry stone, granite, marble and sandstone, on the Rajasthan Mineral Policy 2024's own list.

Why not the others: (b) is the giveaway — potash, lead–zinc and wollastonite are not minor minerals at all, and they are exactly the famous names the resource tables train you to reach for. Minor minerals are where Rajasthan's mining actually happens by volume, and they are under-prepared because the resource tables do not show them. The full policy list also includes gypsum, ball clay, feldspar, silica sand, quartz, soapstone, china clay, ochres, dolomite, bajri and both burning and dimensional limestone.

(c) Udaipur, at Shastri Circle.

Why not the others: (a) Jaipur is precisely the inversion an option is built on. The mines department is one of the few state departments headquartered outside the capital. Its technical strength is 121 geo-scientists, 61 mining engineers, 9 scientists in the chemical laboratory and 13 engineers in the drilling wing, with remote sensing and geophysical survey wings and chemical, ceramic and ore-dressing laboratories.

(d). Rock phosphate at Jhamarkotra in Udaipur, limestone at Jodhpur, lignite at Jaipur and gypsum at Bikaner (Economic Review 2025-26, Table 5.7). The corporate office is at Udaipur.

Why not the others: (c) is the natural guess and the real trap — it swaps lignite and gypsum, because Bikaner is lignite country and Jaipur is not. These are profit-centre locations, not orefield locations. Note also the revenue shape up to December 2025: rock phosphate ₹911.48 crore against gypsum's ₹3.59 crore — a company known for four minerals earns from one. RSMML also owns 106.3 MW of wind and 5 MW of solar generation.

(a). This is the one target to memorise if only one is memorised — it gives an answer a base year, a figure and a trajectory in a single line.

Why not the others: (b) is a different target from the same list — the mineral concession area, 0.68 per cent at present to 1.0 per cent by 2029-30 and 2.0 per cent by 2046-47. The other four targets are minerals under extraction 58 to 70, 50 blocks auctioned with pre-embedded clearances by 2029-30, employment of 50 lakh rising to over 1 crore, and mining revenue threefold, reaching ₹1 lakh crore.

(b). The Centre auctions; the State collects. That division of powers is itself examinable, and it is what makes the critical-minerals programme a state fiscal story rather than only a central one.

Why not the others: (d) is the assumption to resist — centralising the auction did not centralise the revenue. Rajasthan is also among the six states — with Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra — in the first tranche of auction-based Exploration Licences, a regime covering 29 critical and deep-seated minerals in the Seventh Schedule.

(d) From 25 per cent to 50 per cent, phased (Budget 2026-27, Mines and Petroleum announcements). That lands on the M-Sand Policy 2024's own target of 50 per cent by 2028-29 — the budget is the procurement instrument delivering the policy target.

Why not the others: the M-Sand Policy's percentages are incentives, not procurement shares, and they are what the wrong options borrow — 50 per cent royalty exemption, 75 per cent state tax reimbursement for ten years, 100 per cent electricity duty exemption for seven years, 75 per cent stamp duty exemption. The implementation lever here is procurement, not persuasion, and the environmental logic is worth carrying: M-sand can be made from overburden dumps and from construction-and-demolition waste, so one instrument both reduces riverbed bajri extraction and consumes mining waste. Up to December 2025, 38 M-sand plots and 10 overburden-dump mining plots had been allotted.

(d) Lignite — brown coal, the lowest rank after peat.

Why not the others: the state has no bituminous or anthracite coal at all, so those options fail by definition rather than by fact. The demand drivers named by the Mineral Policy 2024 are thermal power and coal gasification.

(b) Ganga. The fields named by the Economic Review 2025-26 are Mangala (the largest discovery), Bhagyam, Aishwariya, Saraswati, Raageshwari and Kameshwari.

Why not the others: the Cairn discoveries were given Sanskrit names, which is precisely why a plausible-sounding Sanskrit name works as a distractor. Crude output runs at 57,000–59,000 barrels a day from 15 fields.

(c). The four basins cover about 1.50 lakh sq km across 14 districts (Economic Review 2025-26).

Why not the others: each is one of the other three basins — (a) Barmer–Sanchor, (b) Jaisalmer, (d) Vindhyan. Learn the four as a set of four district groups, because a question will offer one group under another's name.

(a) Balotra and Phalodi. Balotra appears in the Barmer–Sanchor basin and Phalodi in the Jaisalmer basin, listed separately from Barmer and Jodhpur.

Why not the others: Didwana-Kuchaman, Beawar and Kotputli-Behror are all real districts of the reorganised state, but they are not in the Review's basin table. Older material places the whole Barmer–Sanchor basin in Barmer district, which is the version to unlearn — and it matters twice over, because the refinery at Pachpadra moved into Balotra by the same change.

(a) — Economic Review 2025-26, which supplies the all-India comparator of 28.70 MMTPA itself.

Why not the others: the two halves are independent facts and each has to be checked separately — a share and a rank. Gas output is Barmer 1.90–2.20 MMSCM/day and Jaisalmer 0.71–0.75 MMSCM/day, about 2.60–2.95 MMSCM/day in total. Note also the direction of travel: crude production has declined every year since 2020-21, from 42.62 million barrels then to 24.88 million in 2024-25, and petroleum revenue has fallen with it — ₹1,533.74 crore up to December 2025, against ₹2,688.91 crore in the whole of 2024-25 and a peak of ₹4,889.17 crore in 2022-23.

(b). HRRL is a joint venture of HPCL (74 per cent) and the Government of Rajasthan (26 per cent), incorporated 18 September 2013 with work commencing 16 January 2018; a 9 MMTPA refinery-cum-petrochemical complex including 2.4 MMTPA of petrochemicals, at a revised cost of ₹79,459 crore approved by the Union Cabinet in April 2026, up from ₹43,129 crore.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) are the single most likely stale answers in this whole chapter. The Economic Review 2025-26's data closes at December 2025, when the refinery was about 90 per cent complete — and that stopped being true on 4 July 2026. (a) also carries the pre-2023 district: Pachpadra is now in Balotra. The refinery is India's first integrated with a petrochemical complex, makes BS-VI fuels, and processes 1.5 MMTPA of Rajasthan crude with 7.5 MMTPA imported, with flexibility up to 2.5 MMTPA of local crude.

(c) Jaisalmer (Economic Review 2025-26).

Why not the others: (a) Barmer is the oil district and Jaisalmer the gas district — that split is the quickest way to place a new block correctly. Jaisalmer also carries the Tanot gas locality, and heavy crude is being evacuated from Baghewala in the same district — about 2.04 lakh barrels up to December 2025, roughly 800 barrels a day.

(b) 31,556.43 MW up to December 2025 — a nine-month provisional figure.

Why not the others: (a) 27,283.83 MW is the same table's figure up to March 2025, and the jump between them is 15.7 per cent in nine months, almost entirely solar; growth ran at 5.55 per cent CAGR from 2020-21 to 2024-25. (c) and (d) are MNRE's location-based figures for Rajasthan's solar and total renewable capacity as on 31 July 2026, on a different basis altogether, and neither is the state's installed capacity.

(b). Solar 44,135.33 MW — first. Total renewable energy 50,335.34 MW — second, behind Gujarat's 52,610.17 MW. Wind 5,541.24 MW — fifth, the order being Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan. Rajasthan is also first in ground-mounted solar and third in rooftop, behind Gujarat.

Why not the others: two claims in wide circulation are inside these options. "Rajasthan is third in wind" does not survive the ministry's own table, and "Rajasthan leads India in renewable energy" is true only of solar. A question asking for India's largest renewable-energy state and one asking for its largest solar state have different answers. Rajasthan holds 26.81 per cent of India's solar capacity and 17.25 per cent of its total renewable capacity.

(c). Both are government figures and neither is wrong. The gap is power generated in Rajasthan and sold outside it — inter-state transmission-connected projects built on Rajasthan land for buyers elsewhere.

Why not the others: (b) is the assumption that makes this look like a contradiction, and the trap depends on it. Read which basis the question wants: "installed capacity in Rajasthan" is the MNRE figure; "Rajasthan's installed capacity" in a state power-supply table is the smaller one. (d) the state's wind capacity in the same Table 7.1 is 4,416.12 MW.

(a) 45.36 per cent — solar 9,898 MW and wind 4,416.12 MW of 31,556.43 MW (Economic Review 2025-26, Table 7.1). Very nearly half, and the most quotable single figure in the power section.

Why not the others: (b) 26.81 per cent is Rajasthan's share of India's solar capacity and (c) 17.25 per cent its share of India's total renewable capacity — both real percentages from the same chapter, and both about India rather than about Rajasthan's own mix. State-owned thermal is 7,830 MW, the largest single conventional block.

(a). Phase I 65 MW and Phase II 680 MW by RSDCL, Phase III 1,000 MW by SURAJ, with Phase IV accounting for the balance of 500 MW.

Why not the others: (b) 4,830 MW is the Budget 2026-27 announcement of new solar parks in Bikaner and Jaisalmer — a real figure attached to the wrong project, and worth setting against Bhadla deliberately, because the announced new capacity is more than double the state's flagship park. (d) 1,745 MW is the sum of the three named phases only; the Economic Review gives the 2,245 MW total and names developers for Phases I–III, so the 500 MW for Phase IV is arithmetic from the Review's own total rather than a figure it prints.

(d) 115 GW of renewable energy and 10 GW of storage by 2029-30, framed as Rajasthan's contribution to the national target of 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030, and covering solar, wind, biomass and green hydrogen integrated with battery storage for round-the-clock supply.

Why not the others: (b) borrows 142 GW, which is MNRE's estimate of Rajasthan's solar potential, not a policy target — and it is worth setting against the 44.1 GW actually installed: the state has built under a third of its own solar potential. The storage half is the part to understand: a desert state can build solar almost without limit, but solar stops at sunset, and 10 GW of storage is what converts nameplate capacity into power that can be sold at 8 pm.

(d). The 350 MW rise in the atomic allocation reflects Rawatbhata's newer units, and the NTPC gas allocation was surrendered because of high purchase cost, following a Ministry of Power guideline of 22 March 2021. Rajasthan's central-sector gas allocation is now nil.

Why not the others: each other option reverses the direction of one change or moves it onto the wrong source. Central-sector hydel stands at 851.86 MW and was not surrendered; the state's own gas capacity of 600.50 MW is a separate line and is unaffected.

(a) R explains A. The Mineral Policy 2024 puts the potash resource at 20.5 billion tonnes and production at nil, and gold is the same case at 126 million tonnes. Two minerals where the share of the ground is enormous and the share of output is zero.

(c) A is true and R false. The department's five districts are Bikaner, Barmer, Nagaur, Jaisalmer and Jalore, and Pali is absent — but Pali does appear in lignite occurrence tables elsewhere. On a question asking for lignite districts, the department's five are the defensible answer, which is a different claim from saying Pali has no lignite at all.

(b) Both are true, and neither causes the other. A department and a public sector company both happen to sit in Udaipur, which is a useful memory pair and not an explanation. The examinable half is simply that neither is in Jaipur.

(d) R is true and A false. Gujarat leads total renewable energy at 52,610.17 MW against Rajasthan's 50,335.34 MW on the same file. The solar lead is real; the renewables lead is not — and the ranking does not turn on large hydro either, since Rajasthan stays second with large hydro excluded.

(d) R is true and A false. It is an interim moratorium on new leases, not a closure of working mines — the states were directed to enforce strict environmental compliance on operating mines instead. The uniform Aravalli definition adopted alongside it is "100 metres above local relief", a criterion in force in Rajasthan since 9 January 2006. Set the moratorium against the Mineral Policy 2024's plan to expand concession area and auction 50 pre-cleared blocks — that tension is the strongest available Mains point on the sector.

(a). Lead–zinc 58.8 Mt · rock phosphate 74 Mt · fluorite 70 Mt · iron ore 54.2 Mt at 60 per cent Fe. Option (b) swaps the two northern districts and (c) the two southern ones — both are swaps an examiner would actually make, because each pair is adjacent in the department's own table.

(b). Got–Manglodh is in Nagaur, the centre of Rajasthan's gypsum; Kherwara is in Udaipur, an asbestos district; Kalakhuta is in Banswara, the manganese district; Janakpura is in Ajmer, which heads the garnet list. Learn each by its district and the pairing survives even when the locality name is unfamiliar. Option (d) swaps asbestos and manganese, which is the swap the two southern districts invite.

(c). Tanot is the recoverable one, and not for geology — it is far better known for its temple and the 1965 war than for gas, so its district is already fixed in memory from another subject. Work outward from there. Kapurdi and Jalipa are Barmer's lignite fields; Matasukh sits with Merta and Kasnau in Nagaur; Kesardesar joins Palana, Barsinghsar and Gurha in Bikaner.

(d). RRECL wearing two hats is the detail to hold — nodal agency for renewable generation under MNRE, and designated agency for energy efficiency under BEE. Generation and conservation sit in the same body. Option (a) reverses the parent and its vehicle, which is the swap to guard against: RSDCL is an SPV of RRECL, not the other way round.