In which of the following places the Dutch established their trading centers in India?

The answer is D, because every place in all three sets had a Dutch factory or settlement at some point in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, founded 1602) built a network of trading posts on both coasts and in the Gangetic plain to capture the pepper, spice and textile trade.

• Set A: Nagapattinam on the Coromandel coast was a Dutch base. Chinsurah (Chinsura) on the Hooghly became a major Dutch settlement from 1653. Machilipatnam on the Andhra coast had a Dutch factory from the early 1600s.
• Set B: Surat (1616) was among the earliest Dutch factories on the west coast. Bharuch (Broach) and Agra also hosted Dutch factories.
• Set C: Cochin was taken from the Portuguese in 1663. Ahmedabad and Patna both had Dutch factories in the 17th century.

The core concept is the factory system, where a factory was a trading post, not necessarily a fortified town. For Mains, the Anglo-Dutch rivalry explains why the Dutch lost their Bengal trade after the Battle of Bedara (1759) and why the English gained control of the eastern trade.

Trap: Aspirants recognise one set (say, Surat or Chinsurah) and mark that option without checking the other two. Each set is individually correct, so only D covers all of them.