Current Affairs Quiz 2 August 2026

FACT: IMD’s four-tier system runs green (no warning), yellow (be updated, 64.5 to 115.5 mm in 24 hours), orange (be prepared, 115.6 to 204.4 mm) and red (take action, above 204.4 mm). An orange alert was issued for twelve Kerala districts on 2 August 2026.
ANALYSIS: The tiers are defined by the action expected of authorities and the public, not merely by rainfall volume, which is why the same rainfall figure can carry different alert levels depending on terrain vulnerability and antecedent soil saturation.

FACT: The Kasturirangan Committee, formally the High Level Working Group constituted in August 2012, which reported in April 2013, recommended restricting the Ecologically Sensitive Area to roughly 37 per cent of the Western Ghats, about 59,940 sq km, covering the natural landscape and excluding cultivated and habitation areas. This contrasts with the Gadgil Committee (Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, 2011), which recommended classifying the entire Ghats as ecologically sensitive in three graded zones.
ANALYSIS: Neither has been implemented as recommended, and successive draft ESA notifications have lapsed without inter-state consensus, leaving slope construction and quarrying in landslide-prone terrain under a regulatory regime that has been under revision for over a decade.

FACT: Commercial LPG is linked to the Saudi Contract Price (CP) for propane and butane, plus exchange rate, freight and taxes, and is revised on the 1st of each month. Aviation turbine fuel, by contrast, tracks international jet fuel benchmarks using the preceding fortnight’s average and is revised on the 1st and 16th.
ANALYSIS: This is why commercial LPG could fall by Rs 192 a cylinder on the same day ATF rose by Rs 5 a litre; the two track different benchmarks on different averaging windows, so a softening LPG benchmark and a firming jet fuel benchmark produce exactly that divergence.

FACT: Crude oil, natural gas, petrol, diesel and aviation turbine fuel remain outside GST, continuing to attract central excise duty and state VAT. ANALYSIS: The practical consequence is that businesses consuming these fuels cannot claim input tax credit on the tax paid, which is why aviation turbine fuel constitutes a substantially larger share of operating costs for Indian carriers than for airlines in most comparable markets, and why bringing ATF under GST is a standing sector demand and GST Council agenda item.

FACT: India finished fourth with 39 medals, comprising 13 gold, 17 silver and 9 bronze, from 122 athletes across 10 sports, with boxing delivering 10 medals including 7 golds, the gold tally a record for any nation in boxing at a single Commonwealth Games. ANALYSIS: The lower total compared with 61 medals at Birmingham 2022 and 101 at Delhi 2010 is not a like-for-like decline, because Glasgow 2026 was a deliberately scaled-down four-venue edition staged after Victoria withdrew as host in 2023, and the programme excluded shooting, wrestling, hockey, squash and table tennis, all disciplines in which India has historically been strong.

FACT: Census 2027 is India’s first digital census, conducted through a mobile application with a self-enumeration option; the first census since 2011, because the 2021 Census was deferred; and the first to enumerate caste beyond Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes since 1931. ANALYSIS: The sixteen-year gap since the last census is unprecedented in independent India and means that welfare targeting, constituency planning and beneficiary counts under statutes such as the National Food Security Act have been running on increasingly stale population data.

FACT: The Constituent Assembly adopted the Tiranga on 22 July 1947, replacing the charkha at the centre of the 1931 Congress flag with the Ashoka Chakra, the 24-spoked wheel from the Lion Capital at Sarnath. ANALYSIS: The substitution matters symbolically: the charkha was tied to a particular political movement and its economic programme, whereas the Ashoka Chakra, the wheel of dharma, supplied a symbol of law, righteousness and motion that predated and outlasted any single movement, which suited a sovereign state rather than a national movement.

FACT: The Nasha Mukt Yuva for Viksit Bharat Sankalp Abhiyan is run through MY Bharat under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, as a 100-week campaign with weekly Sunday activities, and is distinct from the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, which is run by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. ANALYSIS: The two operate on different logics: NMBA focuses on awareness, identification of vulnerable districts and treatment linkage across the general population, while the new campaign is a youth-specific Jan Bhagidari mobilisation aimed at shifting peer-group social norms.

FACT: Varsha Ashok Aglawe became the 54th Director General of the Geological Survey of India and the first woman to head the organisation in its 176-year history, succeeding Asit Saha. ANALYSIS: A palaeontologist and palynologist who joined GSI in 1992, she has reaffirmed a commitment to critical mineral exploration and mineral security, which places her appointment directly within India’s National Critical Mineral Mission agenda.

FACT: The Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry was constituted on 16 December 1992, ten days after the Babri Masjid demolition, and submitted its 1,029-page report on 30 June 2009 after more than forty extensions, making it the longest-running commission of inquiry in Indian history. ANALYSIS: The case is the standard illustration of the structural weaknesses of the commission-of-inquiry mechanism: indefinite extensions, findings that arrive long after their political moment has passed, and recommendations that are not binding on the government that commissioned them.

FACT: SBSTTA is the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice under the Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit; its 28th meeting concluded in Nairobi on 1 August 2026 with only partial consensus, countries agreeing the draft Action Plan on synthetic biology was a sound basis but splitting on how to proceed. ANALYSIS: Outcomes feed into CBD COP17 at Yerevan, Armenia, on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its 23 targets, including the well-known 30x30 commitment to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030.

FACT: Roma Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the night of 2-3 August 1944, when roughly 2,900 Roma, mostly women, children and the elderly, were murdered in the liquidation of the “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with some accounts putting the figure closer to 4,300; the Roma have documented linguistic and genetic origins in north-west India. ANALYSIS: Up to 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed across Nazi-occupied Europe, an event known in Romani as the Porajmos, and its comparatively low profile relative to other victim groups is itself a case study in how historical memory is distributed.