Current Affairs Quiz 3 August 2026

The three by-elections whose results were declared on 3 August 2026 illustrate different vacancy causes. Datia in Madhya Pradesh fell vacant when sitting Congress MLA Rajendra Bharti was disqualified after conviction and a three-year sentence in a 2015 bank fraud case, operating under Section 8(3) of the Act, which disqualifies a person sentenced to two years or more for the sentence period plus a further six years.
Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2013) struck down Section 8(4), which had allowed sitting legislators to continue pending appeal, making disqualification immediate on conviction.

The July 2026 HSBC India Manufacturing PMI, compiled by S&P Global from a panel of about 400 manufacturers, came in at 53.5 against a flash estimate of 53.9 and June’s 54.2, the weakest since August 2021. Softer domestic demand dragged on output, new orders and hiring, while export orders strengthened, with demand reported from Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, Thailand and the UAE. Input cost inflation eased to a five-month low.
The PMI is a survey-based leading indicator; the Index of Industrial Production is a volume-based lagging one released with roughly a six-week lag.

MDR is the fee a merchant pays to accept a digital payment, shared among the acquiring bank, the issuing bank and the payment network, and it is the revenue that funds fraud systems, dispute resolution, settlement rails and merchant acquisition. Since 2020 those costs have been met through budgetary incentive schemes and bank cross-subsidy rather than through merchant fees.
NPCI, which operates UPI and RuPay, is a not-for-profit company incorporated under Section 8 of the Companies Act; payment systems are regulated by the RBI under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007.

The United States and Japan confirmed on 3 August 2026 a coordinated intervention to support the yen, conducted the previous Friday and announced by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama. It was the first coordinated US-Japan yen-buying operation since 1998.
The yen strengthened over 1 per cent to about 155.20 per dollar, from a 40-year low near 164 in July. Coordination matters because it signals that both governments regard the level as unacceptable, raising the perceived risk of positioning against it; states coordinate rarely, and doing so discloses that unilateral action has stopped working.

Under the NAMASTE Scheme, launched in 2023, 89,915 sewer and septic tank workers have been profiled and validated, 87,037 PPE kits distributed and 753 safety device sets supplied to Emergency Response Sanitation Units. The 2018 survey had identified 44,217 manual scavengers.
NAMASTE marks a shift from identifying and rehabilitating a prohibited occupation toward mechanising and making safer a continuing, lawful but hazardous one. The constitutional anchors are Articles 17, 21 and 23, and Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India (2014) directed Rs 10 lakh compensation for families of those who died in sewerage work since 1993, a figure the Supreme Court raised to Rs 30 lakh in Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (2023).

The Centre proposed consent-based, anonymised urine drug screening for incoming students, beginning in 2026-27 with IITs, IIMs and one Central University under the NCB Vision Document on Narcotics Control 2026-29, with the Department of Higher Education as nodal agency; later phases target about 170 centrally funded institutions and roughly 10 lakh students. The deeper difficulty is consent under power asymmetry: consent is meaningful only where refusal is costless, and the institution seeking it also controls admission, hostel allotment and academic progression.
Section 64A of the NDPS Act, 1985 grants immunity from prosecution to an addict charged under Section 27 or with a small-quantity offence who volunteers for treatment at a government-maintained or recognised centre, an immunity withdrawable if the treatment is not completed. It is narrower than a general amnesty.

At Shipki La, sixteen traders from Namgia, Chuppan, Nako and Chango made a 72-hour crossing, moving goods by pickup to the pass and onward by mule. Shipki La lies on the route by which the Sutlej enters India and formed part of the historic trade route to Tibet; Nathu La was reopened for trade in 2006; Lipulekh also lies on the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage route, and the Government of India’s position is that the territory is Indian and that objections raised regarding the route are rejected.

The other two results declared on 3 August 2026 were Datia in Madhya Pradesh, won by the Congress’s Ghanshyam Singh with 66,757 votes against the BJP’s Ashutosh Tiwari on 60,741, a margin of 6,016; and Manjalpur in Gujarat, retained by the BJP’s Satish Govindbhai Patel with 55,481 against the Congress’s Bhikha Rabari on 24,851, a margin of 30,630. Datia recorded much the highest turnout of the three at 71.44 per cent.
Some outlets published a Bankipur margin of 18,953, taken from an incomplete count; the Election Commission final totals give 19,324.

The relevant framework is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, which established a neighbourhood-school norm, alongside Article 21A, which makes free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen a fundamental right. NEP 2020 proposes the school-complex model, grouping schools to share resources such as subject teachers, laboratories and libraries, which is the policy answer offered to consolidation’s critics.
The distance-to-school effect falls hardest on girls and on SC and ST enrolment, which is the measurable test of whether consolidation is efficiency or retreat.

The National Judicial Appointments Commission and the 99th Constitutional Amendment, which would have replaced the collegium, were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015 as violating the basic structure through their effect on judicial independence. The Memorandum of Procedure governing appointments has remained unfinalised since that judgment, leaving the process operating on convention rather than on an agreed written framework.
Note that Justice Bhuyan’s statement was a public remark at an event, not a judicial order.

The proposal was made by US Special Envoy Sergio Gor to Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman in Dhaka on 1 August 2026. Bangladesh has not joined; this was an invitation only.
The initiative is explicitly framed around reducing dependence on Chinese dominance across the technology supply chain, which is why its geographic expansion is read in strategic rather than purely commercial terms.

Smallpox remains the only human disease to have been eradicated, declared by the World Health Organization in 1980 following a global vaccination campaign. The study also found that variola evolutionary rates were steady until the sixteenth century, slowed for about two hundred years during colonial expansion, and accelerated again with nineteenth-century vaccination, which illustrates how human intervention shapes pathogen evolution.

His major works include Saket, which retells the Ramayana from the perspective of Urmila, Lakshmana’s wife, a deliberate shift of focus to a neglected figure; along with Yashodhara, Panchavati and Jayadrath Vadh. He received the Padma Bhushan.
Khari Boli is the dialect base from which both modern standard Hindi and Urdu developed, so his choice of it as a poetic medium aligned literary Hindi with the emerging standard spoken language rather than with the older Braj literary tradition.