Current Affairs Quiz 8 August 2026

The Quit India resolution was adopted on 8 August 1942 at Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay, later renamed August Kranti Maidan, with Gandhi’s call to “Do or Die” (Karo ya Maro). Gandhi and the senior Congress leadership were arrested in a pre-dawn operation on 9 August 1942, termed Operation Zero Hour, with Gandhi held at the Aga Khan Palace, Poona, and others at Ahmednagar Fort.
With the top leadership removed, underground leaders sustained the movement: Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan on 9 August; Jayaprakash Narayan escaped Hazaribagh jail in November 1942 and ran the Azad Dasta network; Usha Mehta ran the clandestine Congress Radio, first broadcasting on 27 August 1942 until her arrest on 12 November. In Bihar, police firing on students marching to hoist the flag at the Patna Secretariat on 11 August 1942 killed seven, commemorated today at Patna’s Shaheed Smarak.
Historian Francis Hutchins, in Spontaneous Revolution (1971), argued the movement’s decentralised, largely leaderless character after the arrests is its defining feature, a reading some nationalist accounts contest by emphasising continued Congress direction.

The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement was signed on 7 August 2026 at Al-Safa Palace, Mecca, by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif, after the Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence. Its reported core clause mirrors NATO’s Article 5 language, that an attack on one signatory is an attack on all, but unlike NATO it has no published integrated command structure, standing forces or permanent secretariat.
The pact followed Saudi Arabia facing repeated attacks from Iran and Iran-aligned groups since the US and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026, and widens a bilateral Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of September 2025 to include Turkiye. Pakistan’s status as a nuclear-armed, non-NPT state has led analysts to describe the pact as extending an implicit “nuclear umbrella” to Saudi Arabia, though officials have not confirmed this in writing.
India’s MEA responded by saying it is studying the pact’s implications for national and regional security.

The 11th BRICS Culture Ministers’ Meeting concluded on 8 August 2026 at the Kushabhau Thakre Convention Centre, Bhopal, chaired by India under its 2026 BRICS Chairship and led by Union Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. It drew 14 countries, 10 BRICS members plus 4 partner countries (Belarus, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Thailand), with 55 delegates.
It concluded a three-part Bhopal culture calendar: the 3rd Culture Working Group Meeting (5-6 August), the BRICS Cultural Festival (6-7 August), and this ministerial. India separately announced a pilot Voluntary Artist Registry for BRICS artists.
Delegates visited Sanchi on 8 August, with Bhimbetka rock shelters scheduled for 9 August.

The guidelines create three distance bands: a total ban within 1 km of the LoC, LAC or IB; MHA security clearance required from 1 to 50 km; and the additional MoD NOC specifically within 1 to 20 km of the IB. Civil infrastructure is height-capped at 3 metres (1-8 km), 5 metres (8-20 km) and 15 metres (20-50 km) from the border, worker housing must sit at least 5 km away, and anti-drone systems operated by the CISF are mandatory, with developers barred from employing personnel from Pakistan, Bangladesh or China without prior approval. The restriction falls hardest on the Rajasthan-Gujarat stretch of the IB with Pakistan, where roughly 55 GW of combined wind and solar capacity is planned across the Bikaner-Barmer-Jaisalmer belt and Gujarat’s Kutch district, including the 726 sq km, 30 GW Khavda Renewable Energy Park.

PM Modi inaugurated Param Pragya at IIT Delhi’s Sonipat campus on 8 August 2026, at the institute’s 57th Convocation, where he conferred degrees on over 3,000 graduating students including 587 PhD scholars. NSM’s cumulative target is 64 petaflops of indigenous HPC capacity by 2030; prior systems in the PARAM lineage include Param Siddhi-AI (5.267 petaflops peak, ranked 63rd on the November 2020 TOP500 list) and Param Rudra, dedicated as three systems in Pune, Delhi and Kolkata in September 2024.
The IndiaAI Mission’s compute pillar has expanded from an initial target of 10,000 GPUs to over 38,000 deployed, with 20,000 more in the pipeline, offered at a subsidised rate of approximately Rs 65 per GPU-hour. No source discloses Param Pragya’s specific GPU count or petaflop rating.

E-Eye was developed at IIT Guwahati by Professor Tapas K Mandal (Chemical Engineering) and Professor Harshal B Nemade (Electronics and Electrical Engineering), detecting arsenic, lead, iron, chromium, fluoride and E. coli in water, food, soil and biological samples, validated across more than 2,700 samples, at a device cost of approximately Rs 3,500 and a per-sample cost of about Rs 2, published in the IEEE Sensors Journal. India’s groundwater contamination is severe and widespread: arsenic affects 230 districts across 25 states, exposing roughly 80 million people above the 10 microgram per litre threshold, worst in the Ganga-Brahmaputra plain; fluoride affects 469 districts across 27 states, exposing over 120 million people above 1.5 mg per litre, with over 66 million people, including 6 million children, suffering fluorosis.
Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, community-level Field Test Kits (FTKs) provide indicative screening by trained village volunteers, with adverse results requiring confirmatory testing at certified sub-district, district or state laboratories.

Standard Chartered received in-principle approval from the IFSCA on 6 August 2026 to distribute capital market and wealth management products, including its Signature CIO Funds, from GIFT City’s IFSC, becoming a notable expansion beyond the wholesale and institutional banking activity that has so far dominated GIFT City’s growth; the bank has operated there since 2020 as the first foreign lender to do so, serving over 600 corporate and institutional clients. GIFT City, at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, houses India’s first International Financial Services Centre, and by 2026 hosted over 1,000 registered entities with cumulative banking-sector assets reported to have crossed USD 100 billion.
Resident individuals typically access outbound or IFSC investment products through the RBI’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme.

Bengaluru City Police launched Operation Mukta on 8 August 2026, deploying over 500 personnel across 30-plus locations in the Whitefield police division from 5 AM, checking identity documents at migrant worker sites; around 40 individuals were detained for verification, with 4 confirmed as Bangladeshi nationals coordinated with the FRRO for deportation. A civil liberties coalition alleged illegal detention and assault of migrant workers during the operation.
The Bureau of Immigration functions as a civil administrative body under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and where an FRRO is absent, the District Superintendent of Police acts as the Foreigners Registration Officer. Under Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, an Aadhaar number or authentication does not confer or prove citizenship or domicile; Aadhaar eligibility is residency-based, requiring 182 or more days in India in the preceding year, unlike Voter ID enrolment, which requires citizenship as a precondition.

The draft Bill, issued by the Department of Food and Public Distribution with public comments invited in 2026, proposes replacing the current flat 35 kg per household per month Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) entitlement with 7 kg per person per month, capped at 35 kg per household. Right to Food activists have demanded 14 kg per person instead.
Under the National Food Security Act, 2013, AAY is the poorest-of-the-poor category, historically a flat household entitlement designed as an administratively simple floor protecting small, vulnerable households (elderly, widowed, disabled) regardless of size, distinct from Priority Households, who already receive 5 kg per person per month. NFSA overall covers up to 75 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population, roughly 813.5 million intended beneficiaries on a 2011 Census basis.

Bitchat is a peer-to-peer, Bluetooth-mesh-network-based messaging app created by Jack Dorsey, designed to relay messages device-to-device without internet connectivity or centralised servers, which is exactly what makes it attractive during civil unrest when authorities might otherwise restrict mobile data, and also what makes it technically harder to block through conventional server-level takedown. Rahul Sagar’s Hindustan Times piece of 8 August 2026 defends the blocking as a legitimate exercise of state authority to curb a technology being used to evade law enforcement during unrest, arguing that labelling this “authoritarian” misrepresents lawful action by an elected government.
Digital-rights organisations including the Internet Freedom Foundation and SFLC.in have argued that the 79(3)(b) and Rule 3(1)(d) route achieves a 69A-style outcome without 69A’s procedural safeguard.

The RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is the ideological parent organisation of the Sangh Parivar, of which the BJP is the political arm; the RSS itself does not contest elections but is widely understood to shape the BJP’s ideological direction and cadre. Shekhar Gupta, founder and editor-in-chief of ThePrint, wrote the piece for Business Standard, published 8 August 2026, reading Bhagwat’s Gen Z outreach against the backdrop of ongoing 2026 youth protests connected to examination integrity and broader institutional-trust grievances.
The counter-argument the piece must engage is that treating every institutional statement as purely tactical risks being unfalsifiable, and dismissive of the possibility that organisations genuinely update positions across generational shifts.

Balendu Prakash, born in Meerut, died of cardiac arrest on 7 August 2026 at age 67. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and served as honorary physician to President K.R. Narayanan.
He established the Padaav Speciality Ayurvedic Treatment Center in Dehradun in 1988, later relocated to Rudrapur, Uttarakhand, treating chronic conditions including allergic rhinitis, migraine, hepatitis and acute promyelocytic leukemia, and conducted pioneering research proposing micronutrient deficiency as a cause of pancreatitis. He published roughly 30 international papers and held 2 international patents.
Down To Earth’s tribute, by Vibha Varshney, published 8 August 2026, describes Rasa Shastra as one of Ayurveda’s eight specialities, though classical enumerations of the eight Ashtanga Ayurveda branches vary across sources on exactly how the eighth branch is named.

The article, by Palla Trinadha Rao, a practicing lawyer and tribal rights activist, published in Down To Earth on 8 August 2026, draws on a July 2026 gathering of 30 tribal youth leaders in Polavaram district, Andhra Pradesh. It cites wage inequality for equal agricultural labour, exploitation by intermediaries in minor forest produce collection, healthcare access barriers in remote locations, and mobility restrictions limiting women’s independent access to markets and government offices.
The Fifth Schedule provides special constitutional provisions for Scheduled Areas; the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) extends Panchayati Raj to these areas with Gram Sabhas given enhanced powers, including over minor forest produce and land alienation, specifically to protect tribal community autonomy from external administrative imposition. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 separately recognises individual and community forest rights of tribal and forest-dwelling communities.

The piece, reported to draw on Prof. G. Venkat Raman of IIM Indore and published in The Hindu on 8 August 2026, frames the Trump administration’s approach as “flexible realism,” replacing the earlier China-convergence logic with a more transactional evaluation of partners based on reciprocal economic benefit, technological capability and strategic contribution, evidenced by tariff actions and tighter technology restrictions affecting India. “Multi-alignment,” sometimes called multi-vector diplomacy, is distinct from Cold War-era non-alignment and has been articulated by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar as India engaging multiple major powers simultaneously on its own terms rather than avoiding alignment altogether.
The counter-argument the piece must engage is that multi-alignment carries its own costs, since simultaneously deepening ties with the US, managing China and courting Europe, Japan and the Global South can create contradictory commitments that reduce credibility with any single partner.